David Ignatius has a fascinating piece in The Washington Post on why the global jihadi movement is dying out. As he notes:
Looking at the gruesome images of beheadings and suicide bombings in Iraq, it’s easy to think that the Islamic holy warriors are winning. But a new book by a distinguished French Arabist named Gilles Kepel argues the opposite case. For all the mayhem the jihadists have caused, he contends, their movement is failing.
Rather than waging a successful jihad against the West, the followers of Osama bin Laden have created chaos and destruction in the house of Islam. This internal crisis is known in Arabic as fitna: “It has an opposite and negative connotation from jihad,” explains Kepel. “It signifies sedition, war in the heart of Islam, a centrifugal force that threatens the faithful with community fragmentation, disintegration and ruin.”
Indeed, this view is supported by the evidence. Look at who is dying in Iraq – not just American troops but large numbers of Iraqis – fellow Muslims. Indeed, the global jihad is no longer a struggle against the West, it is increasingly a struggle in which the Islamofascists are attacking other Muslims who desire peace and freedom for themselves. Osama bin Laden’s holy war against America has become a civil war for the heart of Islam – and the terrorists are losing.
Ed Morrissey notes the sputtering of the Palestinian intifada. Years of violent conflict against Israel has done nothing for the Palestinian people except bring pain and death. The leaders of Hamas are no longer safe even in Syria, and those who espouse violence are finding themselves dead before they have a chance to act. Far from Israeli losing the war on terrorism, Israel has sharply reduced the number of suicide attacks and is preventing Hamas and other groups from being able to plan and coordinate new attacks.
More broadly, Saudi Arabia is now fighting al-Qaeda rather than paying it off. Pervez Musharraf remains in charge of Pakistan and is working to actively fight the Qaeda terrorists in that country. The number of terror-sponsoring states in which groups like al-Qaeda can operate freely is at a new low. Syria and Iran remain problematic, but there are already serious pushes for internal reform in those countries that could threaten to unseat the existing regime.
Kepel’s arguments appear to match the facts on the ground. He is a critic of the invasion of Iraq, but at the same time realizes that yielding Iraq to the jihadis would be nothing short of disastrous. Kepel realizes that for all the breathless proclamations that the war against terrorism is an abject failure, it isn’t our side that is losing.
Kepel reminds us that this is a war of determination. We have to stand firm for freedom and democracy in the Arab world, and we have to stand on the side of the people of Iraq. They are as much the victims of terrorism as we are, if not more so. We are winning this war, but we cannot afford to give up and cede all the momentum that we’ve made in the last three years in a wave of preemptive defeatism. The Arab world deserves better than the autocracy and tyranny they live under now. This isn’t a war about oil or power or territory – this is a war pitting freedom against terrorism, and we must be willing to continue to do anything we can to support our allies and defeat our enemies.
