How to lose the ‘war on terror’

by Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke

08 June 2006

PART 1: Talking with the ‘terrorists’
Apart from Israel, there are five political movements and governments in the Middle East of undeniable importance: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The governments of the West don’t talk to any of them, being unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between legitimate Islamist political groups and terrorists. The result is fatal ignorance about the realities of the Middle East, and policies that drive Muslim moderates into the arms of the radicals. Here is what Hamas and Hezbollah have to say.

PART 2: Handing victory to the extremists
The takfiris – those who view all Westerners as infidels and condemn moderate Muslims who talk with the West – have their counterparts in the West: those who fail to distinguish between terrorists and nationalists, between al-Qaeda and legitimate Islamists. With this “they’re all the same” attitude, the takfiris in both camps undermine their own causes.

PART 3: An exchange of narratives
After five years of “war on terror” and a staggering expenditure of lives and money, there remains in the West an indefinable yet definite sense of anxiety that somehow the war has gone terribly wrong. Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke explore the intellectual foundations of the confrontation in order to address this anxiety.

PART 4: Acts of faith
The genius of neo-conservatism in the US is that its adherents have an unshakable faith that they are right. Thus opposing views to their vision of a secular Middle East based on Turkey’s model are dismissed as “babbling”. The voices of Islam, though, while they may be exiled from the halls of government, cannot be banished from the street or the mosque.

NEW: PART 5: The politics of indignation
The architects of the West’s response to September 11, 2001, are feeling angst because it is slowly dawning on them that they got the “war on terrorism” all wrong, misled, perhaps, by mistaken analogies to the collapse of Soviet communism. So far they have not absorbed what Islamic revivalists are saying.