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by Phil Brennan, Trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute
and Editor of Wednesday on the Web
A while back I got an e-mail from a reader who was outraged over my assertion that Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States years ago. He described that statement as totally without merit (he put it in more earthy terms).
It has become fashionable in leftist circles and among Democrats to ignore bin Laden’s declaration of war on the U.S. and to insist that the attack on Iraq, the Abu Ghraib incidents, and the falsely alleged mistreatment of detainees at Gitmo have inflamed Islamic tempers and are therefore fully and solely responsible for an increase in both terrorism and the recruitment of terrorist volunteers.
Liberals manage to ignore history which is often at odds with their interpretation of the Islamic aggression against the U.S. and the West which goes back far beyond the war against Afghanistan and Iraq and all the events arising out of them.
In the current issue of the American Spectator, William Shawcross, often regarded as being a left-of-center journalist while uniquely a completely fair and honest one, not only dispels that absurd idea, but thoroughly demolishes it. He knows his history and uses it like a scalpel to excise the cancerous myths being peddled by the enemies of George W. Bush.
Noting that those like bin Laden and his followers and imitators “see this as an existential war,” he writes that: “Their ambition is to impose worldwide Islamic theocracy; their game plan is to use every country as a staging post for the next.” Mohammed himself could not have said it better; his eighth century ambitions are still alive and distressingly well.
In an update of his 2004 book Allies, Shawcross lays it on the line, stating that it is a false notion to blame Western policy for creating what he called “bin Ladenism.”
Recent history, he wrote, shows that during the 1990s, when there wasn’t a U.S. led war in Afghanistan and Iraq, “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Islamic warriors were trained in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan.”
This, he notes, was at a time when Bill Clinton was trying to forge a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and had come to the aid of Moslems in Bosnia.
“None of these efforts stopped bin Laden from building up his organization and attacking the U.S. whenever he could,” he recalled, citing a book by two senior Clinton counterterrorist officials, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon which spoke of “tens of thousands” of Islamic fighters being trained in al Qaeda camps in the 90s.
They wrote: “Osama bin Laden does not himself direct all terrorist attacks in the Western and Arab world, but his doctrine and his extraordinary success in 9/11 have given new strength and a perverse vision to disparate Islamic groups around the world. They live to kill. The most determined live to die. Or perhaps more often, they brainwash others to do so.”
Shawcross quotes an al Qaeda operative in Saudi Arabia on their goal:
“We renew our determination to repel crusader forces and their arrogance, to liberate the land of the Muslims, to apply sharia law and cleanse the Arabian peninsula of infidels.”
Anyone familiar with the declared aims of the goals of radical Islam recognizes their determination to subject the entire world to sharia law, with Islamic governments ruling Europe and the U.S. as well as Arabia. Their battle cry echoes Hitler’s: Tage Arabia; mogen ze ganze welt. Today Arabia; tomorrow the whole world.
On February 23, 1998, bin Laden re-issued his 1996 fatwa – his declaration of war against the United States. He wrote: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,’ and ‘fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.’ ”
Those were his words. Among the deeds backing them up: numerous indictments including the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the bombing of two U.S. Embassies in Africa, and the bombing of the USS Cole. All took place before the U.S. attacked Iraq.
And bin Laden got away with it all because nobody believed him when he declared war on us.
Shawcross makes his point – we are at war and we had better realize it. He also makes a prima facie case for our Iraq policy and justifies our deposing Saddam. His article in the September issue of the American Spectator is must reading for anyone who wants to understand why we attacked Iraq.
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