The West, 25 Years After 9/11, Has Failed To Defeat Islamic Terrorism

For those of us who are in public life, it is hard to believe it has already been a quarter-century since terrorist attacks destroyed two towers at New York City, damaged the Pentagon, and — thanks to the courageous resistance of passengers — forced the crashing of a plane in Pennsylvania that was bound for the United States Capitol building.The attack was an extraordinary achievement that our intelligence services clearly had not considered. People said there was a failure of imagination, but Tom Clancy had already written a novel, “Debt of Honor” in which a commercial jetliner had been flown into the Capitol during a joint session of Congress. The attacks on September 11, 2001 should not have come as a great shock, but for its disastrous results.Nineteen Islamist hijackers killed 2,977 citizens.During the initial period of shock and outrage, national leaders made broad commitments to defeat our enemies. President George W. Bush talked about an axis of evil in his 2002 State of the Union address identifying it with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.After a quarter-century of conflict — thousands of American dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded, and massively greater casualties among other countries — the simple fact is we have failed.We managed to kill Osama Bin Laden after a long and expensive military and intelligence effort. Yet the spirit, ideology, and threat he represented is alive and finding ways to attack the West across the planet.We have engaged in huge military, intelligence, and foreign aid expenditures, and they have largely failed to achieve their goals.The closest we have come to success is Iraq, where the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was replaced with a government more sympathetic and helpful toward the Iranian religious dictatorship than to America.Afghanistan was an extraordinary defeat. Over 20 years of American military effort, we were defeated by the Taliban, and the country is now a center of anti-Western hostility. To the best of my knowledge, there is still no comprehensive review of what went wrong or how we should undertake future campaigns to win.The Iranian religious dictatorship is in the middle of a death struggle with America. In 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini defined the United States as the Great Satan, and Iranians began chanting “death to America.” Iranian agents began killing Americans and work began on nuclear weapons and missiles that could make the chant a reality rather than a slogan. While we have punished the Iranian dictatorship significantly, we have not defeated it. There is a real possibility the dictatorship will come out of the current conflict intact — and continuing to develop the ability to bring death to America.If we fail in stopping the Iranian dictatorship, the next 9/11 may be nuclear and involve 100 times as many dead.There is no reason to believe Iran’s allies among Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have been defeated. They have not given up on their goal of destroying Israel. Despite enormous casualties and great losses among their leadership elites, they remain serious dedicated organizations working to defeat the West.The Bush administration briefly and courageously identified the Islamist movement as a mortal threat to freedom and the West. Yet under pressure from its Arab and Turkish allies — and Western elites who were guilt ridden about their own culture and actually sympathized with the grievances of the Islamists — the Bush administration rapidly dropped the hardline approach and began to emphasize the peaceful nature of Islam.Yet, the radical, terrorist wing of Islamism is alive and well. It shows up in Syria, Nigeria, Chad ( indeed much of the Sahel), and in random small and large incidents throughout Western Europe. Just look at the German defenses around Christmas Markets, French no-go zones, or the growing number of Islamicized cities and neighborhoods in Britain. You can see that the post 9/11 campaign to protect the West failed.Turkey is today a vastly more Islamic society than it was in 2001. The spirit of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the great Turkish modernizer, has been destroyed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s commitment to recreating the reach of the Ottoman Empire.What we really need is an agonizing, honest, and serious national dialogue about what has gone wrong — and a courageous openness to rethinking where we are, what threatens us, what true safety would look like, and how to get there.That is what we really owe those who died a quarter-century ago and their families. Do we have the courage to do it?

The West, 25 Years After 9/11, Has Failed To Defeat Islamic Terrorism

The West, 25 Years After 9/11, Has Failed To Defeat Islamic Terrorism

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