24 April 2013 –
The media are reporting well on the events of the Boston Bombings.
We are learning much about the accused
perpetrators, the Tsarneav brothers: events of the brothers’ lives in the U.S.;
their journeys from the Caucasus to the United States; the mosque in the Boston area where the
brothers knelt alongside convicted Islamic jihadists; the older brother’s violent,
misogynist ways; their parents’ return to the Caucasus; the brothers’ voicing of
their jihadist motives for murders; and, not surprising to those who study Islamic
jihad, the older brother’s six-month séjour in Dagestan, where he probably underwent
terrorist training. All this has come
out in less than two weeks, and more revelations probably are on the way. When I was a new intelligence officer in the
Air Force, I got most crisis information from a 100 word-a-minute teletype
machine in a special-access-only vault. Now,
the Information Age allows all to compile large amounts of data in a short
time. But, information never changes itself
easily into actionable intelligence. We
still must parse the information in the right way to make the right calls at
the right time to resolve a crisis. We can
do that and still maintain an open and free society, but we need the right
strategy.
The Boston Bombing has become a legal case and has
entered the evidence accumulation and due process phases. Now, many will pose the inevitable question: How
can we stop such violence in our society?
Sadly, our politicians will answer the question by enacting misdirected
laws. A better response is that we shouldn’t
focus our efforts on the terminal phase of jihadist terrorism. We need to understand the base cause and motive
of jihadist violence and then determine steps to prevent it.
I base my assessment on a career in military intelligence. Among the topics where I was compelled to
become an instant expert, I studied the wheres, whys, hows, whos, whens, and whats
of what many now call Islamic jihadist terrorism. I suggest that Western civilization and Islam
have been fighting a thirteen-hundred-year war for world dominance and that jihadist
terrorism is the latest campaign by a determined enemy to achieve victory. Accepting that view will allow us to devise a
successful strategy for our war against terrorists. Mine is not a politically correct attempt to communally
establish peace with fellow world travelers.
It is a statement that western civilization must protect its basic
principles of tolerance and individual rights or lose its freedom to a
determined enemy.
Islamic jihadists are not uniformed military units. They do not represent sovereign nations as official
combatants; therefore, the laws of war, which we wrote as a by-product in the
forging of modern Europe, do not apply well to the modern battlefield. But, jihadists
are indeed soldiers, in a war of their making and on a battlefield of their
choosing. They successfully apply one
of the basic principles of warfare: They control the initiative and the tempo
of the war. We let them do so because we
still don’t want to call our actions a war on bad guys.
Bad buys? Well, they
publicly reject the tenets of our Constitution and of western society; yes,
they are indeed bad guys. As any student
of Islam must admit, state sovereignty in the traditional, western sense—separation
of church and state and the individual rights of the citizen—has no place where
Islam rules or tries to rule. Religion
and politics are not separate forces in Islamic society. They are one and will
continue to be so until Islam rules the world.
Terrorism is today’s violent application of political/religious jihad. This is a war.
Tragically, we fuel our enemies by channeling billions of
oil and gas dollars to the abettors of jihad in the oil-rich Moslem world. We are funding our own defeat. Our nation’s most decisive strategic act should
be to become energy independent and, thereby, staunch the flow of money to
those who would dominate us.
And now? For too
long we watch the news as if it were a bad movie, horrible, but not touching us
personally. The stark reality is that
this bad movie will not be over when the late-night comedians start their monologues. Few Americans were physically harmed by the latest
bombings; but, our way of life is seriously threatened. The United States has been under attack by
Islamic jihadists, home-grown and foreign, for a generation. Our enemies have a persistent campaign, and they
are winning every battle they choose to fight.
We must admit that and compel our elected officials to put on their
big-boy pants and defend our way of life.
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