Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [390]
Still, we never successfully translated that basic vision into a message that explained to Americans and the world who we were fighting and why they had attacked us. In fact, we often seemed to do the opposite, out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim—a pattern that the Obama administration has taken to a dangerous extreme in initially denying the ideological links among the terrorist plots in Times Square, Fort Hood, and Detroit.
While those of us in the Bush administration did not engage in the debate needed to identify the enemy’s ideology, we did at least recognize that the challenge we faced was fundamentally ideological. “The important point is that what we face is an ideologically-based challenge,” I wrote in 2004, when we were engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan. “Radical Islamists may be centered in the Middle East, but their reach is worldwide and their goals are global.” My memo continued:
If it is an ideological challenge, our task is not simply to defend, but to preempt, to go on the offensive, and to keep the radicals offbalance. We learned this lesson in the Soviet Union cold war case. For one thing, we will need to show the moderates in the religion that they have support. . . . [T]hey must take up the battle and defend their religion against those who would hijack it. . . . [I]deologies can be defeated. The Soviet collapse teaches us this. If Islamism’s goal is the fantasy of a new “Caliphate,” we can deflate it by, over time, demonstrating its certain futility. Simply by not giving in to terrorist blackmail—by not being riven out of the Middle East—we will demonstrate over time that the extremists’ ideology cannot deliver.19
One of the three components of the strategy we developed in the months after 9/11 addressed how to counter the enemy’s ideology. We knew that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would not end Islamist terrorism and, in fact, in the short term could give the enemy opportunities to attract more recruits and cite the inevitable casualties as proof that the United States was warring against Islam. As long as madrassas and mosques from Jakarta to Hamburg preached Islamism and justified terrorism in its service, military action could make only limited headway. After circulating our 2005 national defense strategy, the State Department objected to the inclusion of “countering ideological support” as a goal.20 While some in the administration recognized the problem, there was never any resolution and as a result we are not able to fashion and execute a plan to confront it effectively.
I favored a major effort to win over those Muslims who were sitting on the fence—those not supporting al-Qaida but who were not actively opposing the extremists either. Our extremist enemies did not terrorize only Westerners, but their fellow Muslims. I thought we needed a campaign to win over friends and allies in the Muslim world and “mobilize moderate Muslims,” as I argued in July 2005.21 We needed to tell the truth about the Islamist extremists—about their brutality, injustice, and totalitarian political ambitions. The best way to communicate that message was not for American political leaders to do it, but to find ways to get more Muslims around the world publicly speaking out against them. But the United States and other Western countries have been notably unsuccessful in encouraging Muslim political, religious, and educational leaders to take a stand against Islamism and the preaching of violence and terror.
This failure has been a serious deficiency in the West’s struggle against the extremists. Our inability to