New York Daily News, September 5, 2004
Opinion
The jihadists' dream is a return to empire
By ZEV CHAFETS
In the end, terrorists didn't strike the Republican National Convention in New York.
They didn't attack the Democratic National Convention in Boston, either, or the
Athens Olympics. Maybe they were deterred by the megabillion-dollar security
arrangements. Maybe they never planned to hit the summer's big events. Why should
they, when Beslan works just as well?
Beslan is a small town in southern Russia. Nobody special lives there. Nobody
special died there either when a team of terrorists from Chechnya seized the local
school. Some little kids were killed, and some parents. Eventually the Russian
government will finish counting body parts and tell us exactly how many.
When President Bush admitted to Matt Lauer last week that the war on terror may not
be winnable, it was this kind of random murder he had in mind. Bush was being
realistic.
You can protect iconic landmarks and signature events, kill Al Qaeda leaders, depose
dictators, garrison troops in the Middle East, trade condolences and intelligence with
your counterparts in Russia (or France, two of whose reporters were kidnapped in Iraq
last week by armed Muslims demanding that Paris alter its school dress code). But
no matter what precautions you take, you can never stop every fanatic.
If doing that is your definition of victory in this war, then victory is, indeed, impossible.
You're not supposed to say "impossible" in an election year, so Bush rushed to
Nashville to tell the American Legion convention that he can, too, win the war on terror
(the next day, John Kerry made the same empty claim). The problem is, you're not
supposed to say "Islam" either.
But America's enemy is not "terrorism." It is international Islamist imperialism.
Chechnya, Israel, Indian Kashmir, the Balkans, parts of Spain - these are all lands
claimed by Islam for reasons of history or theology. The Philippines, Nigeria, Thailand
and a dozen other far-flung places are new fronts in the same expansionist war.
It is simpleminded to imagine the jihadists intend to conquer America or, in this
generation, any other Western power. Their goal is to establish (they would say
reestablish) a sphere of dominance - financed by oil, armed with nuclear weapons,
governed under the laws of Islam - that includes as much of Ottoman Europe as
possible, most of Africa and a good part of Asia. America has to be fought because it
stands against this goal - a goal that unites Shiites and Sunnis, Wahhabis and
Baathists, Nasserites and fundamentalists.
Americans often wonder how the Muslim masses can be so indifferent to the savage
murder of Russian schoolchildren or the beheading of Nepalese workers; how they
can cheer for church-burners in Pakistan, bus bombers in Israel or suicide pilots in
Manhattan.
The answer lies in human nature. The Muslim world knows that it is engaged in what
it regards as a just war - and in war you kill your enemies, including the civilians. The
slaughtered schoolchildren of Beslan are merely collateral damage on the Chechnyan
front in the Great Islamic War of Restoration.
This is a war in which the U.S. can prevail. The Islamic imperialists are no more
formidable than their Soviet and Nazi predecessors. But it can't be won until it is
defined. That means honestly telling the American people who and what is at war with
them.
"Terrorism" is not the enemy, and getting through a political convention with Madison
Square Garden still standing is not victory.
Zchafets@yahoo.com
Originally published on September 5, 2004
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