It is going to be a long frustrating season based on today’s Green Bay Packers loss to the Lions. I am going to try and look on the bright side by recalling the Packers have always had problems winning in Detroit. Besides the defense was better than absolutely horrible and could emerge as an average NFL unit if the penalties get eliminated. I’ll even give Brett Favre a pass considering the circumstances he has endured the last two weeks.
Today is the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 Jihadist attacks on our country and I will forever remember how Brett Favre and the Packers took the field and won the first NFL game played after those evil assaults. That Packers victory over Washington was one of my personal indicators that American society would survive, and life would continue to progress back to normality. Not the normality of the 20th century, but at least one where games could be played and enjoyed while understanding and responding to the problem was being started.
It is sometimes forgotten with the passage of time, but during those first several days this country faced a real debate over what exactly was the problem to be addressed. In reading through various posts, I came across a Policy Review Online article from August 2002 that I believe correctly describes the evil we are still attempting to eliminate. Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology is a long article that deserves a slow and careful reading. As the author points out in the opening paragraph, correctly understanding the threat is necessary in order to effectively eliminate the treat.
The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?
It is essential to understand the practitioners of radical Islam believe all events are the desire of Allah, and western concepts of cause and effect are truly meaningless to al Qaeda jihadists. If this were a traditional political assault on the west, then the 9/11 attacks would have been followed by smaller and more frequent subsequent attacks, much like the ongoing political Palestinian struggle against Israel.
But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom — martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.
A campaign of smaller-scale acts of terror would have no glamour in it, and it was glamour — and grandiosity — that al Qaeda was seeking in its targets. The pure Islamic David required a Goliath. After all, if David had merely killed someone his own size, where would be the evidence of God’s favor toward him?
The danger of al Qaeda is precisely the fantasy ideology that Allah may decide to abolish infidel civilization if true believers show enough devotion through the martyrdom destruction of infidels. In the Jihadist mind, the existence of all things is the will of Allah, so being out numbered is no real problem if you exist in divine favor. No one should doubt that these religious fanatics will use whatever means of mass murder they can obtain if they believe their actions serve the will of the almighty.
There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.
What the Bush Administration understands, both then and now, is that America is confronting an ideological epidemic, and the only way combat an evil ideology is to eliminate the practitioners and demonstrate to the rest of the world that Allah does not come to their aid. Jihad must fail so that the attraction of Jihad diminishes, or the concept of killing for divine glory will create a true hell on earth.
