Take the enemy at his word

Carol Platt Liebau:

It’s a reflection on the inherent goodness of most Americans that we are willing, in almost all cases, to make an effort to avoid offending Islamic sensibilities. When President Bush spoke recently at the D.C. Islamic center, the female staffers accompanying him donned headscarves. Suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay receive prayer rugs and complimentary copies of the Koran, and large painted arrows point the direction of Mecca. Female soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia conform to the local laws forbidding women to drive. Politicians and the press alike are careful to distinguish jihadists from the ordinary practitioners of the “religion of peace.”

In fact, we pay the Islamic world every courtesy except the one that really matters: Too often, we simply refuse to take its most threatening leaders seriously. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, hasn’t been shy about defying every U.N. mandate forbidding Iran to develop nuclear weapons – or about expressing his contempt for Israel and the United States. The hateful rhetoric is reported (for the most part) – and nothing happens. It’s as if we simply don’t believe he means what he says.

The audiotape released late last week by Ayman al-Zawahiri – Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda deputy – is an even more stunning example. As in previous communications, al-Zawahiri described Iraq as the centerpiece of the fight against America, and portrayed Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq as the vehicle for repelling the US military and establishing a caliphate of Islamic rule across the region. Again, not much opacity there – it should be crystal clear to every American that our enemies see the battle for Iraq as vital to their terrorist aims, and as a precursor to yet more aggression across the Islamic world and elsewhere. This is hardly the first time that such a message from Al Qaeda has been disseminated worldwide in plain and unmistakable language.

Even so, on the very day the al-Zawahiri tape was made available, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) threw in his lot with the majority of congressional Democrats, a group of “chicken littles” who are seeking little more than hasty withdrawal from Iraq, whatever the cost to the war on terror. Given that our enemies have made it clear that they will regard an American retreat as a victory of the first order and a vindication of their terrorist methods, it’s hard to understand how any elected official who purports to take America’s national security seriously would even consider it.

What’s even more amazing is that someone with Domenici’s experience – and, often, level-headedness – would decide simply to give up on the effort to stabilize Iraq and in so doing, abandon the opportunity to deal a stunning blow to the forces of Islamofascist terrorism worldwide. To the applause of much of the mainstream media, Domenici justified his decision on the failure of the Iraqi government to meet many of the benchmarks set forth for it by the American government.

By resorting to that rationale a year before his reelection in order to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, Domenici wilfully ignores what is really at stake. What’s happening in Iraq isn’t some innocuous American exercise in nation-building, where the developing nation can simply be abandoned when the going gets tough or the public grows restive.

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Domenici has made a serious misjudgment. Republicans will get no credit for retreating from Iraq, but they will get plenty of the blame for the consequences of the retreat. On top of that it is just irrational and ignores the facts on the ground in Iraq which have changed dramatically in the last six months.