It’s time to fight back against terrorism.

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I

n December 1999, the Clinton administration

issued a worldwide terrorist alert to Americans

overseas advising them to avoid crowded millennial

celebrations. Bomb-toting Islamic militants under

the banner of the Saudi terrorist Usama bin Laden

had declared war, so Americans were to stay discreetly

indoors while other Westerners partied. In Israel and Jor-

dan, American Christians were strongly advised to avoid

any public manifestation of their faith. Vexed by the grow-

ing number, geographical range, and fearfulness of Wash-

ington’s warnings, one senior Foreign Service officer

declared the millennial alarm “the chicken-little PR finale

of America’s cover-your-ass foreign policy.”

Unfortunately, this hard-nosed diplomat was wrong.

The policy he deplored was not about to end. The Bush

administration has continued and actually surpassed its

predecessor’s display of timidity in the Middle East. The

possibility of terrorist attacks recently prompted the Penta-

gon to withdraw U.S. Marines from military exercises in

Jordan and hastily move ships anchored in Bahrain, the

home base of the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. Likewise,

pistol-packing FBI officials investigating the October 2000

attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, decided to scoot—

against the counsel of the State Department and the U.S.

embassy in San’a—when they thought a terrorist attack

might be imminent.

Which prompts the question: Are we a great power or

not? If we are, then what in the world are we doing run-

ning from men whose mission in life it is to make us flee?

If Marines and men-of-war cannot hold their own against

the specter of a Saudi terrorist, how will our friends, let

alone our enemies, in the macho Middle East measure us

against real heavyweights like Saddam Hussein or the cler-

ics of Iran?

Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, Al

Qaeda, scored an impressive victory by nearly sinking the

Cole, yet Washington still has not responded. Our fear is

pure oxygen to Islamic militants. Every alert, particularly

when it panics U.S. military and diplomatic personnel,

sends an adrenaline rush into the central nervous system of

men truly convinced that with God’s help and the right

explosives they can crack the will of the infidels who are, in

their eyes, destroying the one true faith.

Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to

yank the Marines out of Jordan is, when viewed from the

mud-brick and cinder-block ghettos of the Middle East, an

extraordinary triumph, further proof that the martyrs of

the Cole attack died gloriously. America’s military leaders

may think that they’re being prudent with our soldiers; the

average man in the streets of Amman certainly knows bet-

ter. Terrorism is war by unconventional means. Its ultimate

objective is the psychological debilitation of the enemy

through fear. In the fight against terrorism, the U.S. mili-

tary’s ever-more exclusive focus on “force protection”

diminishes the awe in which America is held abroad, the

ultimate guarantor of the safety of U.S. civilians and sol-

diers, especially in lands where hostility to the West rests

near the surface.

Martyrdom has a long and complex history in the Mus-

lim world. It began with God’s promise of paradise to the

seventh-century warriors who died expanding the first

Islamic state. Over the centuries, rules and understandings

evolved about the pivotal difference between combatants

and civilians, but these have evaporated in the fundamen-

talists’ radical modernity, which divides the world cleanly

and brutally between good and evil. If we want to play

hardball with Islamic militants—and the Bush administra-

tion isn’t spending billions of dollars on counterterrorism

to be nice—we need to pay more attention to the history

and metaphysics of Islamic extremism. In other words, we

need to take bin Laden’s men apart psychologically. Cut-

ting off the flow of oxygen to the Muslim world’s anti-

American radicals isn’t an impossible task, so long as we

patiently hold our ground.

sama bin Laden and his men are, or at least

aspire to be, contemporary “Assassins,” the

medieval founding fathers of modern political

terrorism, who from their mountain redoubts in Iran and

Syria first showed the possibilities of purposeful, disci-

A Cowering Superpower

B

Y

R

EUEL

M

ARC

G

ERECHT

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist in the Central

Intelligence Agency, directs the Middle East Initiative at the Project for

the New American Century. He is the author, under the pseudonym

Edward Shirley, of Know Thine Enemy: A Spy’s Journey into

Revolutionary Iran.

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plined terrorism. For a time, great sultanates and king-

doms lived in profound fear of men who gladly sacrificed

themselves to kill their enemies. The word “assassin”

entered Western languages because the originality and

shock of the Assassins’ assaults were sufficient to embed

the word permanently into the consciousness of the

region’s Muslims and Christians. The allure of the Assas-

sins’ propaganda, which depicted acts of violence as acts of

divine love and anger, tapped into strong currents within

Islam that see God’s justice continuously betrayed by the

‘ulu al-amr, “the men who hold the reins.” Bin Laden

might not like being paired religiously with the “Old Man

of the Mountain,” the mysterious Shi’ite overlord of

the Assassins, but the Sunni Arab militant

wouldn’t mind at all the geopolitical

comparison, which, given his own

mountain hideaway and his faith-

ful kamikazes, has no doubt

already occurred to him.

Though there have been

times when large numbers of

young Muslim men felt the

thrill of a charismatic calling—

the early years of Iran’s Islamic

revolution is the most recent

case—the contemporary Sun-

ni Arab world, where bin

Laden draws most of his

strength, hasn’t experienced

a similarly infectious wave.

One can find many angry

young men in Yemen, Egypt,

Saudi Arabia, Algeria, or Gaza;

few want to vent their emotions

against the age-old Western ene-

my by vaporizing themselves in a

truck or skiff. Jihad, the moral and spiritual obligation of

a Muslim to wage war to protect (and, in Islam’s ascendant

days, expand) the faith, is no longer understood by most

Muslims as denoting anything more than an individual’s

duty to survey his soul.

Drawing in good new recruits to Al Qaeda’s cause thus

isn’t, as many Westerners might assume, an easy task. In

Afghanistan, a broken, barren country far from the cross-

roads of the Muslim world, it probably seems daunting,

which is one reason why so many of bin Laden’s foot sol-

diers are hapless, ill-educated misfits who get themselves

arrested when they stray too far from their native stamping

grounds in the disorganized, listless Third World.

Islamic militants, like everybody else, must have hope.

They, like everybody else, believe in winning. Israel’s most

determined enemies—Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s mol-

lahs, the Palestinian fundamentalists in Hamas and Islam-

ic Jihad, and Yasser Arafat’s protégés in his security and

intelligence services—constantly underscore Israel’s deci-

sion to withdraw unilaterally from southern Lebanon in

their clarion calls for more martyrs. This Israeli action,

widely applauded in the West as strategically astute and

morally estimable, was seen (correctly) in the Middle East

as an astonishing retreat by a once seemingly unbeatable

Western power. Israeli weakness, not Israeli “intransi-

gence,” is what heats the militant’s death-wish dreams red-

hot.

We need to remember that Al Qaeda, like its allied fun-

damentalist organizations, has to survive on little reg-

ular positive feedback. For Hamas, killing

Israelis is easy since the Arab and Jew-

ish communities are geographically

and economically intertwined. The

body count on the nightly news

keeps the spirits up. For anti-Amer-

ican holy warriors based in

Afghanistan and the northwest

frontier of Pakistan, daily life in

comparison is tough. Radios and

satellite phones are the only con-

stant links with the outside

world. Time passes very slowly.

The two years between the

bombings of the U.S.

embassies in Africa in

August 1998 and the Cole

attack could seem like an eter-

nity to young men who burn to

die. When failures supervene—for

example, the botched suicide attack on

the USS The Sullivans in Aden in Janu-

ary 2000—it becomes that much harder to sus-

tain spirit and momentum.

America is, as Muslim militants quite frankly admit, an

awesome foe. The allure and mystique of America in the

Middle East are nearly impossible to overstate: It’s

Goliath, Thomas Jefferson, Wall Street, and Madonna

rolled together in a cacophony of sound and color that

relentlessly fascinates and repels. In the eyes of Islamic

fundamentalists, we are worse than the Mongols, who laid

low the Muslim heartland and nearly annihilated the faith.

As fundamentalists regularly complain, most Muslims are

easygoing backsliders, willing victims of Western ways.

Even the Saudi royal family—perhaps the folks bin Laden

detests the most—who are supposed to maintain the rigor-

ous, funless, Hanbali school of Sunni Islam, have become

woefully dependent on the West, in particular the United

States.

Illustration by K

evin Chadwick

Usama

bin Laden

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The Afghan civil war also probably complicates bin

Laden’s life. His disparate collection of holy warriors fight

alongside the fundamentalist Taliban, against Ahmad

Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. This gives Al Qaeda’s

guerrillas some combat experience and esprit de corps.

Though the main tie between bin Laden and Taliban

leader Mullah Omar is spiritual, the war allows the Saudi

militant to further secure his exile home by contributing

men and materiel to the Taliban campaigns and the Pak-

istani-approved camps where Kashmiri separatists are

sometimes trained.

However, this war really isn’t fun: ambushes, mine-

fields, artillery barrages, and trench warfare through

mountainous countryside increasingly define Afghan-

istan’s strife. The offer of “terrorist training” in

Afghanistan, a country where “good” Muslim peasants are

fighting “bad” Muslim peasants, isn’t a recruitment pitch

with lasting appeal for young Arab men who really just

want to kill Americans.

For bin Laden’s “sleepers”—agents already outside of

Afghanistan awaiting the right moment to strike an Amer-

ican target—the situation is probably little better. While

terrorists who’ve implanted themselves into the local envi-

ronment can obviously be lethally effective (both the

embassy attacks in Africa and the operations against The

Sullivans and the Cole in Yemen relied on such people), few

men in bin Laden’s network are likely to have the forti-

tude, talent, and discretion to hold themselves in position

long, their death-wish intact. Like isolated foreign espi-

onage agents in dangerous areas, they probably need regu-

lar spiritual reinforcement and monitoring, perhaps more

than their more numerous brethren in Afghanistan, who

can counter isolation and ennui through open fraternity.

I

f these are the terrorists we’re up against, what would a

successful American counterterrorist policy look like?

Obviously, it should play up our strengths and relent-

lessly play upon our enemy’s anxieties and fears.

Bloodied, the crew of the wounded Cole did better.

When their ship limped out of Aden’s mountain-ringed

harbor, the sailors played over the loudspeakers hard rock

graphically describing what they wanted to do to the ter-

rorists, if not the denizens of Aden. Would that the Clin-

ton White House and the Navy’s senior brass had matched

the crew’s insight into the Middle East’s power politics

and immediately dispatched other warships to Yemen to

demonstrate symbolically the indefatigability of American

power.

Once upon a time, the U.S. Navy reacted more astutely

to tragedy. After the kamikaze truck-bomb assault on the

U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the Navy’s plan-

ners correctly anticipated kamikaze boat-bombers. The

Navy experimented with weaponry and discovered that a

.50 caliber round fired into the engine block of a small boat

will stop forward momentum quite quickly. Such weapon-

ry on the Cole, combined with the shoot-to-kill orders that

are standard operating procedure for U.S. diplomatic secu-

rity officers who determine that a lethal threat exists,

would have likely saved the ship.

It’s hard to believe that the Navy, which enjoys a rela-

tively isolated and protected preserve for its vessels in

Bahrain, couldn’t have adopted similar tactics to protect its

ships and men. We ought not make our enemies larger

than they are: Bin Laden’s holy warriors aren’t remotely in

a class with our SEAL teams, the elite commando strike

units of the U.S. Navy which tirelessly train to disable war-

ships in protected harbors. If bin Laden wants to triumph

over us again, we should at least make his men do some-

thing more stressful than converse menacingly over inter-

cepted telephones—which apparently was enough to pro-

voke the Pentagon’s flight from Jordan and Bahrain.

Most American diplomats and intelligence officers

unquestionably know there is no efficacy in a bull-horned

terrorist warning: It’s quiet, bare-knuckled, local police

work, not worldwide bulletins on CNN, that saves lives.

Yet as another senior Foreign Service officer remarked,

“There is no percentage in standing against the tide.”

Informing American citizens discreetly that a specific and

credible threat exists in a certain time and place may have

some value (informing terrorists that we are privy to their

plans may well incline them to switch targets). But advis-

ing Americans that a country the size of Turkey, which

always seems to be in some state of alert, may have an anti-

American terrorist plotting within its borders is just silly.

In this risk-averse quagmire, America’s martial virtues and

pride inevitably get lost.

Going in the opposite direction, other foreign-affairs

circles pooh-pooh the terrorist threat from the Middle

East, pointing out that more Americans kill themselves

each year flying kites than die at the hands of holy war-

riors. Compared with those of the 1970s and 80s—the hal-

cyon days of the Palestine Liberation Organization,

Hezbollah, and the intelligence ministries of Syria, Libya,

and clerical Iran—today’s death tolls and sense of siege

really aren’t so bad. The issue of terrorism has been

hijacked, so these circles often assert, by the 24-hour

media maw and intelligence and security bureaucracies

eager to encourage Congress’s multi-billion-dollar coun-

terterrorist budgets.

This critique is statistically correct and bureaucratical-

ly astute, but otherwise wrong. Today’s radical Islamic ter-

rorism matters because it helps define the way the United

States is perceived in the Middle East and beyond. Only 17

sailors died on the Cole, but symbolically it was a stunning

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achievement for a jihadist fraternity that proved it could

strike a warship, the historic instrument of Western power.

Anyone who has been in the coffeehouses and bazaars of

the Middle East since the Cole attack knows how ordinary

Muslims, who generally don’t countenance bin Laden’s

killing, nevertheless are in awe of him. A good tactician

when it comes to Muslim emotions, bin Laden has played

well the clash of civilizations.

T

hese are bad days for America in the Middle East.

Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical overlord, isn’t alone

in seeing the United States on the defensive

throughout the region. American policy toward the Israeli-

Arab confrontation—keep trading Israeli-held land for the

promise of Arab peace—is naive. Yet the the Israeli Left

adopted this policy and kicked it into overdrive, and now

the inevitable dénouement is at hand: a real war between

the Israelis and Palestinians. Seemingly endless Israeli

concessions, always applauded by the Clinton administra-

tion, have undermined America’s standing in the Middle

East.

The Bush administration, led by an obviously and

understandably exasperated Colin Powell, has compound-

ed the problem by endorsing the Mitchell Report, which

puts forth the odd, very secular notion that Israeli settle-

ments in the West Bank and Gaza, comprising less than

2 percent of the land, have provoked Palestinian young

men to blow themselves to bits. The White House and

Foggy Bottom are desperate to “stop the cycle of violence.”

But only violence—Israeli violence, if prime minister

Ariel Sharon still has the stamina and insight at last to

unleash it—may recoup the damage that the Labor party,

Bill Clinton, and the Near East Bureau of the State

Department have done to America’s standing in the

region.

Farther east, the situation is even worse. From the

spring of 1996, the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy

was in meltdown; under the Bush administration, it has

completely liquefied. The administration’s retargeted

“smart sanctions” are clearly a huge retreat, which the

Russians, we can only pray, have turned into a permanent

defeat with their threatened veto in the Security Council.

All we need is to have two of our principal allies in the

region, Turkey and Jordan, further enmeshed in an Ameri-

ca-ordained, U.N.-“enforced” sanctions regime that pivots,

when all the diplomatic varnish is off, on bribery. Face to

face in the Middle East, rishwa is often the only expedi-

tious route for virtue to triumph over villainy. But bribery

mediated by the United Nations would be a strategic

cross-cultural mess. With “smart sanctions” in place, not

only would Saddam continue his “illegal” cross-border

weapons-related commerce—the allure of Iraqi oil money

is just too great—but we would have Turkey and Jordan

adamantly seeking financial redress for their efforts to

staunch the unstoppable trade. We would again be asking

others—in the case of Jordan, a weak kingdom always

inclined to appease Saddam Hussein—to bear the burden

and responsibility for our failure to confront directly the

Iraqi dictator.

Does anyone in the Bush administration remember

Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and their minions

spinning themselves dizzy trying to deny that Saddam

Hussein had outwaited and outplayed Washington? It

would be better to see the administration start explaining

how we will live with Saddam and his nuclear weapons

than to see senior Bush officials, in the manner of the Clin-

tonites, fib to themselves and the public. In any case, in

Middle Eastern eyes, the Butcher of Baghdad has checked,

if not checkmated, the United States.

Only against this backdrop can we properly assess the

threat bin Laden poses. The Saudi militant is unquestion-

ably going to come at us again. If he can find a weak spot,

which he probably can, he will target us most likely in the

Third World, where his men can maneuver. Then the

Bush administration will have to make a defining decision.

Will President Bush continue the Clinton administration’s

preference for putting terrorist strikes into the FBI’s

investigative hands and, forensic evidence willing, into the

courts, thereby avoiding the diplomatically messy ques-

tion of retaliation? Will the administration forcefully com-

plement the above with another barrage of cruise missiles

aimed at rock huts on the thin hope of catching bin Laden

and his lieutenants unawares?

Deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage recently

warned that the United States would hold the Taliban

responsible for future attacks by Al Qaeda. We can only

hope that this doesn’t mean filing some future court case

in New York City or bouncing the rubble in makeshift

camps in Afghanistan. The Taliban chieftain Mullah

Omar ought to discover that dead Americans mean cruise

missiles coming through his bedroom window and cluster

bombs all over his frontline troops.

The Pentagon’s alarms in the Middle East and the

fecklessness of the administration’s policy toward Saddam

Hussein and Yasser Arafat, however, suggest a different

chain of events. Odds are, America’s position in the Mid-

dle East is going to get much worse. In the not too distant

future, bin Laden may well rightfully proclaim that he, as

much as Saddam Hussein, exposed America’s writ and

most terrifying principles—liberal, secular democracy—as

finished in the Arab world. This would be an amazing

accomplishment for a Saudi holy warrior, considering the

forces arrayed against him. The Assassins achieved far less

and were immortalized by friend and foe alike.

♦

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