Seeker Blog

Tigerhawk is guest-blogging this week at Belmont Club. He has just posted there an updated version of his December 2005 essay “Considering victory conditions in the wider war and the importance of ideology”. For clear thinking on the long war, I recommend the latest version, hopefully to be read in conjunction with Tigerhawk’s November 2005 commentary on Steven den Beste’s “strategic overview”.

For motivation, here is just one segment on the logic for promoting democracy in al Qaeda-world:

Since the region’s clown governments lack credibility and citizens who are willing to take great personal risks to defend them, al Qaeda is able to create spaces in those countries in which to operate (see, e.g., southern Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s “tribal regions”). Where al Qaeda flourishes, it is able to cajole and coerce the local population — the Average Abdul — into cooperating. This creates a local base from which it can “vex and exhaust” the apostate regime.

We need Average Abdul to stop cooperating with al Qaeda and to start turning in the jihadis in the back of the mosque. Unfortunately, he won’t turn in the jihadis because he is more afraid of them than the local regime and he will not bear any risk to defend the clown regime. The jihadis will kill him and his family for blowing the whistle, but the clown regime will neither punish him for keeping silent or induce him to fight the jihadis out of patriotism. Average Abdul, simply put, is unwilling to risk his life for the clown regime, which has not earned his devotion, even for money.

Average Abdul will, however, risk his life for an idea, just as al Qaeda’s jihadis do. Once, that idea was pan-Arabism, or Communism. Today, both are discredited. “Moderate Islam,” whatever that means in a dusty town in Syria, Jordan or Egypt, obviously does not have the fire to motivate Abdul to risk his life to fight the Islamists. The only idea with the juice to do the job is popular sovereignty. Democracy. This is the realist case for the Bush administration’s “democratization strategy” (although it is not entirely clear how many people inside the Bush administration understand the realist case for their most important strategy).

The jihadis understand this, and fight against democracy in the Arab world with everything they’ve got, even if it costs them their Ba’athist allies.

In fighting against democracy in the Arab world, the jihadis polarize Arabs. While many decry this polarization as “instability,” by its nature polarization creates more enemies of the jihad. Some of these new enemies of jihad will be disgusted with al Qaeda’s mass casualty attacks, or they will be “national aspiration” Islamists who are threatened by the jihad’s internationalist reach and ambition. Others will be inspired by their last, best chance at some form of representative government. Either way, enemies of the jihad pick up a weapon, walk a post and — most importantly — drop a dime on their enemy, even if they don’t like Americans. Wherever a reasonably representative government emerges, Average Abdul will start to turn in the jihadis in the back of the mosque, now for his own reasons.