OPINION:
Last week, we remembered the almost 3,000 victims of the al Qaeda terrorists who, on Sept. 11, 2001, hijacked passenger aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth jet crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania after a revolt by courageous passengers.
This week, let’s consider what came after.
On Sept. 20, in an address to a joint session of Congress, President George W. Bush declared what became known as the global war on terror.
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda’s founder and first general emir, must have found that curious. Was Mr. Bush objecting only to terrorism, the targeting of noncombatants for political purposes? Did he have nothing to say about the “grand jihad,” the religious war on the West, that was well underway?
Mr. Bush had to be aware that in 1996, bin Laden issued a formal “Declaration of Jihad Against Americans.” Two years later, he announced the formation of a “World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” (the latter term indicating Christians). He instructed Muslims that it was their duty to kill Americans, military and civilian, “in any country in which it is possible.”
The first battle in the global war on terror was with the Taliban, the Islamist movement that had ruled Afghanistan since 1996 and given sanctuary to al Qaeda. Though removed from power by December 2001, the Taliban fought on from Afghanistan’s hinterlands and sanctuaries inside Pakistan.
In 2003, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Saddam was a target of the global war on terror because he, like bin Laden, was a terrorist and an enemy of America. Yet he was pan-Arabist and socialist rather than pan-Islamist and theocratic. I won’t relitigate that war here except to say that, although it was clearly justifiable, it was not clearly strategic.
President Obama didn’t care for the global war on terror. Starting in 2009, his administration preferred to talk of “overseas contingency operations,” which included using drones to eliminate terrorists.
In 2011, he withdrew all U.S. military forces from Iraq, leading to the rise of the Islamic State group, aka ISIS, and gave free rein to Shiite militias affiliated with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a nation-state founded in 1979 and, like al Qaeda, committed to jihad against the West.
Also in 2011, American intelligence assessed with “high probability” that bin Laden was living in Pakistan, a country that the U.S. had officially designated a major non-NATO ally in 2004.
Despite that designation, Mr. Obama did not notify Pakistani leaders before ordering Navy SEALs to helicopter into the garrison city of Abbottabad to capture or kill bin Laden, with the latter outcome recognized as more likely.
In a speech to the National Defense University in 2013, Mr. Obama said such operations “cannot be the norm” and that “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror.’”
He added: “This war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”
Four years ago, perhaps attempting to take his predecessor’s guidance to its logical conclusion, President Biden allowed the Taliban to regain power in Afghanistan.
Today, jihadi and Islamist forces have more geographical reach and greater numbers than they did 24 years ago.
In 2002, the State Department designated 28 foreign terrorist organizations. In mid-2017, that number was 77.
Both al Qaeda — whose current leader, Saif al-Adel, is believed to be living in Iran — and the Islamic State group maintain affiliates in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. The Muslim Brotherhood has expanded its influence, not least in Western Europe and the U.S.
Among the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood are Turkey, a NATO member, and Qatar, a major non-NATO ally.
Does that not strike you as problematic?
One positive development: The Tehran regime was badly battered in the war it fought this year against Israel, a war that culminated when President Trump deployed B-2 bombers to strike the theocrats’ nuclear weapons facilities.
However, if you think Iran’s rulers are now willing to put aside their nuclear and jihadi ambitions, you should think again.
One negative development: Islamic revolutionaries of all stripes have been making common cause with a cohort on the left that finds the idea of a “global intifada” appealing.
Though this alliance appears to be broadening and metastasizing, it’s hardly new.
On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was a guest on a BBC radio program along with “activist” Bianca Jagger, who accused Mr. Bush of killing “thousands” of innocent Afghans and failing to pay “reparations.”
In 2005, at the venerable University Philosophical Society of Trinity College, Dublin, I participated in a debate over the resolution: “This house believes that George W. Bush is a danger to world stability.”
Patrick Cockburn, then a well-known British journalist, accused the U.S. of embarking on an “old-fashioned imperial war” and dismissed terrorism as “something people believe in like they believe in witchcraft. What does it mean?”
I did my best to rebut such arguments, but I can’t claim to have convinced much of the audience.
One week later, the University Philosophical Society debated “whether Militant Islamism is a legitimate form of resistance to American hegemony.”
Fast-forward to 2020, when the International Criminal Court — funded primarily by Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Italy — officially accused the U.S. of war crimes in Afghanistan.
It’s reassuring to believe that “all wars must end.” However, 24 years after the deadliest and most destructive attacks ever on American soil, the war on the West is not close to a conclusion, and steadfast defenders of the West are too few and far between.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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