Seeker Blog

A Long Hard Fight, interview with Gen. John Abazaid, Feb. 23, 2005:

BAGHDAD–Standing in the thick mud before a giant Paladin howitzer, Capt. John Benoit, an artilleryman from the Louisiana National Guard, looked Gen. John Abizaid squarely in the eye and asked bluntly: How’s the war going?…

The insurgency, Abizaid acknowledged, has grown worse over the past year. There’s no defensiveness on that point, though, as he segues into a discussion of why the insurgents–particularly the radical Islamists–must be confronted. "What we can’t allow to happen is guys like Abu Musab Zarqawi to get started," Abizaid told Benoit and the soldiers of the 1-141 Field Artillery. "It’s the same way that we turned our back when Hitler was getting going and Lenin was getting going. You just cannot turn your back on these types of people. You have to stand up and fight."

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Abizaid tends to cast the conflict slightly differently, as the "war on extremism" or the "long war." America has a chance to confront and stop an Islamic extremist movement akin to fascism or communism in its early stages, the general believes, before it metastasizes and dominates a significant chunk of the world….

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Missed signals. Within Central Command headquarters, Abizaid has established an advisory group of six officers and two civilians with Middle Eastern expertise. The task of this mini think tank is to turn up ideas about the region from academia and find new ways of thinking about, and fighting, Islamic extremism. These advisers contend, for instance, that the United States missed the significance when Saddam Hussein, never a devout Muslim, embraced religion and, mindful of the growing American efforts against him, gave Sunni imams wide latitude to preach a fiery new brand of Islam. "We didn’t appreciate how people got radicalized," says a member of the advisory group. "We didn’t appreciate it, and it hurt us after the invasion."

In policy circles, there continues to be debate about the nature of the Iraqi insurgency–the role of disaffected Sunnis, of Iraqi nationalists, and of foreign jihadists. The most important enemy, Abizaid argues, is Iraqis who have come to follow the brand of extremist Islamic fascism preached by Zarqawi or al Qaeda. Those are the insurgents, Abizaid argues, on whom the military must focus. "There are all kinds of complexities," the general says. "But . . . the point is, there is a main enemy in the theater, and it is al Qaeda-inspired, [with an] ideological desire to dominate the region."