David Warren : Geostrategies

In a book published this week, Dr. George Friedman, the founder of the lucid Stratfor, a private for-profit think-tank and intelligence-gathering organization which has been dubbed "the shadow CIA", proposes to explain what the war in Iraq, and the larger "war on terrorism", is really all about.

It sure wasn't about WMD hidden in Iraq — one of several public arguments for removing Saddam Hussein which, because it didn't work out, has been hailed by our media (which once bought into the argument but has since cashed out) as the only reason. Yet as both parties in the U.S. election maintain, the threat of nuclear or other mass-destructive weaponry in the hands of terrorists — and quite possibly terrorists trained and directed by a foreign state or states — is real, and must be dealt with. The arguments are only over how to prevent carnage on a scale seldom before seen.

In America's Secret War, Dr. Friedman argues that the enemy grew out of the Cold War, an artefact of Jimmy Carter's decision to use Saudi Arabian money and Pakistani expertise to create a guerrilla army that could harass the Soviets then occupying Afghanistan. "Al Qaeda", the product, mastered the art of covert operation, and as the Soviets collapsed, began turning it against the West, biting the hand that fed them. Their large ambition is the creation of a new, pan-Muslim caliphate, however, and they attack Western targets as a means of advancing an Islamist revolution at home.

The U.S. is fighting back, Dr. Friedman argues, with an equally indirect strategy. Despite dysfunctional intelligence services, and post-Cold War military forces re-designed under the Clinton administration for some other conflict, the Americans realize you cannot win a war by staying on defence.…

David Warren:

For according to me, we are facing a gathering Islamist ideological challenge that was not invented by Osama bin Laden. It has a Shia, Iranian version (that triumphed in 1979 with the fall of the Shah), and a Sunni, Arabian version; the two being capable of co-operation as well as mutual antipathy. Terrorism is only the weapon of convenience on both the "Hezbollah" (Shia) and "Hamas" (Sunni) sides.

Dr. Friedman and President Bush are fundamentally agreed that the war is being won. The very fact that no Islamist revolution has overthrown any Muslim regime on the latter's watch is, to both men, an indication the U.S. can prevail. I support them for their willingness to fight the war, but am not so sanguine about the outcome.

On the one hand, the Americans remain under extraordinary international pressure to retreat; on the other, the appeal of the Islamist ideology is still growing, and finding its voice through such mass media as Arab satellite television.

If, for instance, a President Kerry were to take the Americans out of Iraq, mission unaccomplished as in Vietnam, we would see a storm-tide of Islamist triumphalism, and the belief would quickly spread through the Muslim world that an aggressive, Jihadist, politico-religious Islamism is the wave of the future.

The same, of course, would happen if a President Bush did that. But everything we know about the man suggests he wouldn't.

One of my reasons to pray for his victory in the coming U.S. election is because he wouldn't. I don't think he fully grasps the dimensions of the conflict -- nobody does. But he knows they are large, he knows the difference between advancing and retreating, and that's really all he needs to know, for now. The rest we learn as we go along.

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