Defeating Jihad

The Winnable War

Sebastian Gorka

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781621575276
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Conservadurismo y liberalismo

Now a New York Times bestseller! America is at war. The fight against global jihad has cost 7, 000 American lives and almost $2 trillion, and yet, most Americans do not understand what is at stake. The public lacks knowledge and safety because two presidents and their administrations neglected the most basic strategic question: who is the enemy?
Presidents Bush and Obama both named the global jihadi movement—a movement with an intent to destroy the West—"violent extremism." Their tidy term was an attempt to maintain peace with the Muslim community. But when they failed to appropriately name the enemy, they failed to fully understand Islamic extremism. This failure is why the U.S. has been in Afghanistan for sixteen years with no end in sight.But this war is eminently winnable if we remove our ideological blinders, accurately name our enemy, and draw up a strategy to defeat the ideas that inspire terrorism. So says Dr. Sebastian Gorka, one of the most experienced and sought-after authorities on counterterrorism.Dr. Gorka has been one of the intelligence community's go-to experts on counterterrorism since 9/11. He's been called to brief Congress and the Marine Corps and was asked to analyze the Patriot's Day Boston Marathon Bombing for the US government. Dr. Gorka's report for the trial of Dzhokhar "Jahar" Tsarnaev was widely circulated in counterterrorism circles and the media because it accurately painted a picture, not of a teenager on the cover of Rolling Stone, but of a terrorist.Dr. Gorka is respected by peers because he understands our enemy is not "terror" or "violent extremism." Our enemy is the global jihadi movement, a modern totalitarian ideology rooted in the doctrines and martial history of Islam whose goals are to build an empire, suppress "false Muslims, " and engage in guerilla warfare against infidels.Taking his cue from the formerly top-secret analyses that shaped the U.S. response to the communist threat, Dr. Gorka has produced a compelling profile of the jihadi movement—its mind and motivation—and a plan to defeat it.

CHAPTER 1

THE WAR SO FAR

We are a nation at war. Or at least we should be, because there are large numbers of deeply committed people in the world who wish to see us all dead or enslaved.

America stands for something unique. It is the only nation to have been established around an idea, not an ethnicity, language, or dynastic fiefdom, and it will always have enemies who disagree with that idea. And that founding concept is liberty and the freedom of the individual.

Other nations are the result of national identities established over centuries. Identities based upon a shared ethnic heritage, or simply the accident of being established on the territory of a preexisting political monopoly.

America was born in direct opposition to “power by decree,” under which an unelected elite exercised unaccountable control over the people. America was an idea formed in the crucible of a monarchy’s arrogating the sovereignty of its citizens, the colonists of British North America. The American Revolution was defined by the idea that it wasn’t the happenstance of being born into the correct family or class which secured your membership in a governing elite. Government was recognized by the Founding Fathers as an expression of the will of the people, not the caprice of an unrepresentative elite.

And anyone can be an American. Membership of the Republic does not depend on whether you belong to a special group but on whether you share and respect the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The values expressed in these documents created America and made it the mightiest nation the world has ever seen—more powerful than the ancient Greeks, more powerful than the Roman Empire, more powerful even than the British Empire.

But this power hasn’t brought safety and security.

In part because of the values upon which the nation was founded and in part because evil always prowls the earth, America is anathema to those who follow false gods or those who believe in their own power to define and monopolize truth here on earth or in the hereafter. Just look at the history of the last hundred years. First it was Nazis who wished to create a global empire in which the individual was just a cog in the machine of a state that worshipped racial purity and the glorious Führer. Then there were the Marxists and the communists, who replaced the Aryan race with the working class, but who again saw freedom and individual liberty as a threat to the power of the “enlightened” elite.

Sixty million people were killed in the war that followed the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland. More than one hundred million souls were extinguished by communists between 1917 and 1989, from the gulags of the Soviet Union to the killing fields of Cambodia. The only nation that could put a stop to the totalitarianism of Berlin and then Moscow was the United States.

In the case of Hitler’s Third Reich, the victory was won on the battlefields of Europe, in the deserts of North Africa, and in the jungles of Asia. In the case of the USSR, it took the bipartisan application of the policy of containment, the delegitimizing of the ideology of communism, and the bankruptcy of the Soviet economy to bring down the Iron Curtain. But it took just a generation for a new globally ambitious totalitarianism to establish itself as the greatest threat to democracy and target us as the bastion of individual freedom and liberty. That new hybrid totalitarianism was global jihad.

ONLY AMERICA

On the beautifully sunny day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the jihadists of Al Qaeda managed to do something that neither Hitler nor Stalin had ever achieved. In less than two hours they massacred almost three thousand innocent men, women, and children on American soil, including members of our armed forces working inside the Pentagon. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, is said to have bellowed at the American people, “We will bury you!” But the Soviets never buried us. The new totalitarians, the Islamic terrorists of Al Qaeda, succeeded in doing so in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania. And so our world changed.

As I write, we have entered the fifteenth year of our war with global jihadism, making this the longest war America has ever fought. We have lost thousands of our brave servicemen and women in faraway campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet our nation is still not safe. While our intelligence community tracked down Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and our special operators killed him in one of the most daring raids in military history, Americans are still dying in attacks on U.S. soil, from the Boston Marathon bombing to the San Bernardino Christmas party massacre. And now we face an even deadlier threat in the form of the jihadi insurgency that calls itself the Islamic State (ISIS), which now controls territory in Iraq and Syria and has affiliates in more than a dozen countries from the Middle East to Africa and even Asia.

My first motivation in writing this book is the reality that America’s strategic response to this new existential threat is failing. And believe me, it is an existential threat. The global jihadist movement may not yet have tank divisions at its disposal as did the Nazi regime or thousands of nuclear weapons as did the Soviets, but it has something much more important: a religious fervor combined with an un-Western degree of patience that produces a lethal and unbelievably resilient commitment to its cause. And the jihadists will not be negotiated with. For this enemy it truly is a question of “them or us.” They will not be stopped unless someone stops them.

I am also writing this book because I am now a proud American who believes that no other nation can defeat the global jihadist movement. Whatever your politics, ask yourself one question: Whom do you trust to fight this fight if we don’t? France? Germany? China? North Korea? Russia?

Our European allies simply do not have the ability to do what is required, even if they had the will to do so—which they do not. In light of the resolve he has shown in Syria, many see Vladimir Putin as the answer. But ask yourself another question: Is Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel who spent his pre-political career plotting to subvert and destroy us, moving into the Middle East because he believes in the values upon which America was founded?

Once again, America is the only answer to a globally ambitious and capable totalitarian threat. But is it just a matter of redeploying the Eighty-Second Airborne and sending U.S. troops into harm’s way overseas? The past fourteen years would seem to be an argument against our using large-scale military operations against terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or insurgents like the Islamic State. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started under George W. Bush’s administration with the names Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom may have removed the Taleban and Saddam Hussein, but they have not led to a victory over the jihadists or the increased safety of our citizens back home. On the contrary.

As I write, America is witnessing the greatest increase in domestic jihadist plots and attacks since September 11, 2001. From a free speech rally in Garland, Texas, to a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee; from an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, to the attempted assassination of a police officer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the global appeal of the jihadist message is being turned into horrific violence against Americans, not to mention the scores of deadly attacks in Canada, France, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, and Africa.

At the same time, ISIS has displaced Al Qaeda as the brand leader of global jihadism and succeeded where Osama bin Laden and all other previous jihadi groups have failed: It has reestablished the theocratic empire of Islam. It has founded the new caliphate.

Why are we still fighting this war more than a decade later, and why are we losing? We defeated the Nazis in less than five years, yet the global war on terror is now in its fifteenth year. How can America, a country of unprecedented military power, not yet have vanquished this new deadly religious totalitarianism?

The answer to this burning question has many elements, the most obvious one being that we have applied the wrong strategy since 9/11. But the most important reasons go beyond not having the right plan of action and have instead to do with politics and ideology.

NAMING THE ENEMY

Our nation’s immediate response to the attacks of September 2001 was to declare a “global war on terror.” Yet this wasn’t actually a war, nor was it global. It may seem a pedantic point, but the law defines war as protracted armed conflict between two or more nations. Al Qaeda is not a nation, nor is it a signatory to the Hague or Geneva Conventions on the laws of war. Our troops, therefore, were contending with a new threat that had very little to do with the system established in the twentieth century to regulate the use of force in international conflict. Nor did America apply itself “globally” to the mission of eradicating all terrorism. We did not deploy our special operators or CIA paramilitary forces to “take down” the Basque separatists of Spain, the ecoterrorists in the forests of Canada, or the Naxalite Marxist terrorists of India. We focused instead on a specific threat group, which we seemed unwilling to call what it called itself—jihadists, or holy warriors of Islam.

The sensitivities were clear. Originally, President Bush did not want to give the impression that America was at war with a religion. Nor did he want to alienate our Muslim allies. This was despite the fact that our Muslim partners, such as the Jordanians and the Egyptians, knew full well how Al Qaeda was using religion to fuel its war against not only the West but Muslims who disagreed with its vision of a theocratic future. Unfortunately, this distortion of reality would only increase over time until it reached outlandish and surreal proportions under President Barack Obama.

Under the bumper-sticker slogan of “global war,” our brave fighters joined battle with Al Qaeda and its hosts, the Taleban regime of Afghanistan. In a stunning series of operations starting in October 2001, a handful of CIA personnel and U.S. special operations forces leveraged the Taleban’s domestic enemies, the Northern Alliance, and not only destroyed Osama bin Laden’s terror bases in Afghanistan but deposed the Taleban government in Kabul.

MISSION CREEP

However unfavorable your impression of the military endeavors that followed the fall of the Taleban, the initial operations in the winter of 2001 were a truly masterly example of “unconventional warfare.” As the Green Berets like to say, we should try to achieve America’s objectives “by, with, and through” the local friendly forces. And this is exactly what we did at the end of 2001 with just a handful of men in uniform on the ground. But after that fabulous initial success, the mission mutated, accelerated, and expanded in ways that would not be good for America or its citizens.

Once the Taleban fell, it was decided that that wasn’t enough. Very soon the mission expanded from punishing or destroying those responsible for the original 9/11 attacks into what was called “nation building.” Afghanistan would become home to tens of thousands of American and NATO and non-NATO troops, and the country would be molded into the shape of a modern country with a representative government and human rights for all. This despite the fact that Afghanistan, which had been at war for more than a generation, was made up of dozens of competing tribes and ethnic groups that had foiled similar grandiose and foreign plans over the centuries, from those of Alexander the Great to those of the British Empire and the Soviet Union.

But these realities were pushed aside. President Bush’s advisors were confident: Afghanistan would be made into a modern nation that never again would harbor the likes of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist cadre. Then came the next war.

Key members of the Bush administration, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, had been involved in the first Gulf War back in 1990–1991. Many of them thought that war had not been concluded properly. The decision by the first President Bush not to decapitate the Iraqi regime and remove Saddam Hussein after his forces had been ejected from Kuwait had been a mistake, according to these members of his son’s administration. And now, after 9/11, the reality of mass-casualty terrorism was no longer just a hypothetical.

Al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan had been destroyed, but bin Laden had escaped. Should he wish to attack the United States once more and kill even more innocent Americans, what better way than to use some type of weapon of mass destruction (WMD)? And the Bush cabinet knew that Saddam Hussein had WMD capability. What if Al Qaeda could lay its hands on Iraq’s chemical weapons, smuggle them into the United States, and use them in Boston or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.?

THE LESSONS OF IRAQ

This is not the place to relitigate the question of Al Qaeda and Iraqi WMD, but I must make three points before we finish our review of what happened after 9/11. First, it was reasonable to conclude that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Second, it was reasonable to expect a certain amount of cooperation between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda. But, third, Saddam was nevertheless unlikely to share WMD with Al Qaeda.

Saddam Hussein was a bad man, and one of the reasons he was so bad was that he did have weapons of mass destruction and he used them against his own citizens. It is remarkable that even today otherwise reasonable people will parrot the line “Bush lied, people died,” as if George W. Bush and his team knowingly fabricated intelligence reports to justify invading Iraq. (The point of this deception, presumably, was to “steal their oil,” an accusation I find mildly amusing. If that were truly the case, wouldn’t we still be there siphoning off their oil wells?) This accusation can hold water only if you falsify the story. Saddam had WMD. We know it because he used them, only the second leader in history to do so (after Hitler).

The assertion that Iraq was still a WMD state, moreover, was not a uniquely American accusation or simply the product of the febrile minds of the dastardly “neoconservatives” working for George W. Bush. The determination that Saddam still possessed chemical weapons was shared by key U.S. allies in NATO. The Bush administration shared the intelligence with politicians on both sides of the aisle in Congress, who agreed with the assessment and voted in favor of the second Gulf War.

Now, what Saddam did with those weapons is another question entirely, but he flagrantly and repeatedly violated the terms of the 1991 ceasefire agreement and numerous United Nations resolutions, which required him to demonstrate that he was dismantling his WMD facilities and destroying or handing over his stockpiles for destruction.

If the assertion that Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator, was in possession of weapons of mass destruction wasn’t simply reasonable but almost unanimously agreed upon, was the decision to go to war a sound one? Not necessarily. Saddam may have been evil and clearly in breach of the agreement that ended the previous Gulf War. But that did not mean that he was an imminent threat to U.S. national interests or that he would be the man to provide mass-casualty weapons to Osama bin Laden.

Here it is important to dispel some erroneous conventional wisdom. The common assertion that Saddam Hussein would never assist the likes of Osama bin Laden is plainly incorrect. Although the Bush administration’s assertion prior to the invasion that men connected with the Iraqi intelligence service had met with Al Qaeda agents in Europe was based on unreliable information, there were nevertheless operational ties b...