Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

policy), and it continues to falsely claim that the many tactical victories scored by U.S. forces have moved the strategic situation in America’s favor. Not surprisingly, this litany of failures speaks directly to this governing generation’s lack of talent, worldliness, historical knowledge, and sadly, concern for genuine national interests. The leadership desert that exists in American politics mirrors the one that bin Laden has taken full advantage of in the Muslim world. Alas, America’s bin Laden has yet to emerge from its political-leadership desert.
    In early 2008, the worldwide Sunni Islamist insurgency led, inspired, and symbolized by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are gradually accomplishing the war aims defined by bin Laden: bleed America to bankruptcy, and spread out U.S. military and intelligence forces. The former is being pushed toward realization because of the wars won by the mujahedin in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latter by U.S. spending on those wars, on homeland security, and on bountiful bribes to keep U.S. allies in the war on terror. Bin Laden’s ability to send two mujahedin with an al-Qaeda banner to multiple spots on the earth, then sit back and watch U.S. forces deploy and spend money, most recently in Somalia, pushes forward the latter goal and assists in accomplishing the former.

CHAPTER 8
A Humble Suggestion—America First
    The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as Pandora with her box open; and the disguised one as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into paradise.
    James Madison, 1834
    We have not journeyed all the way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy…If anybody likes to play rough, we can play rough too.
    Winston Churchill, 1941
    Writing in the 1780s, Great Britain’s King George III squarely faced up to the fact that the British military had been defeated by George Washington’s army and that Britain’s thirteen English-speaking North American colonies were irretrievably lost to his realm. “America is lost,” George III wrote, then went on to survey what was to come next. “Must we fall beneath the blow? Or have we resources that may repair the mischief? What are those resources? Should they be sought in distant Regiouns [ sic ] held by precarious tenure, or should we seek them at home in exertions of a new policy?” 1 Ironically, the leaders of the nation established by General Washington’s victory today find themselves in much the same position as George III. They have lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and must now disengage from them with as much decorum as possible. The longer they wait, the more difficult it will be to prevent a Saigon-like exit. For Americans generally, the unavoidable conclusion is that their political leaders have bitten off overseas far more than the country can ever reasonably hope to chew. Americans and their leaders will henceforth have to decide, as did George III and his ministers, whether to continue adventuring about “in distant Regiouns,” or seek to find national security “at home in exertions of a new policy.”
    The bottom line for America is that the war against bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their allies was and is one that we must fight. As Abdel Bari Atwan has written, “We ignore al-Qaeda at our own risk. It is not going to go away.” 2
    We are, however, in the entirely enviable position of being able to decide how big a war we need to fight, and we can choose, once we evacuate Iraq and Afghanistan, where we need to fight it. As I have written previously, the United States is not the main enemy of bin Laden and other Islamists, and while this reality may dent our collective sense of self-importance, it is the beginning of wisdom. America is simply in the way of Islamist forces and so prevents the attainment of their