5 good years for bin Laden

(Cross-posted at Ezra's.)

Andrew Brown has a bunch of good stuff in this article in Salon, but I particularly want to point out this bit:

Of course, the presence of a large disaffected and angry bloc of Muslim voters who believe that British foreign policy is immoral and misguided creates a problem. The fact that our army in Iraq will almost certainly have to retreat, defeated, makes the problem worse. It looks as if the army in Afghanistan is fighting a much harder war than some politicians foresaw; it's also clear that America will have to pull back from Iraq, and the British army is hardly going to stay there on its own.

One may not like the fact that the invasion of Iraq has made homegrown British terrorism more likely. But it is a fact, acknowledged by almost everyone except Prime Minster Tony Blair. The trouble is that a defeat in Iraq will make the invaders seem both weaker and more immoral. This is a dangerous position to be in.

This is perhaps the clearest expression of how Bush and Blair have failed in the war against terrorism. Through our own incompetence in fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now the IDF's similar performance in Lebanon against Hezbollah, the west has shown pretty clearly a few things that we wish the enemy didn't "know":

Read More...

1) We can be beaten. Iraq, Lebanon, and possibly Afghanistan are all areas where powerful western armies have been fought to a standstill and bloodied by asymmetrical means. Especially now with Hezbollah, an organized resistance to western military power has been shown to be successful. This might not quite be unprecedented, but it's certainly noteworthy.

I would compare this to the effect of the Japanese victory over the Russians in 1905. Many young Asian nationalists, including Nehru, traced their ambitions to the decisive Japanese victory at Tsushima. Once the west was proven to be vulnerable, liberation movements across the western colonies got a boost.

2) Avowedly "Islamic" armies can match western power, secular nationalists can't. (I say that al Qaeda types now "know this" only because this is almost certainly how it will be interpreted by them.) Look at the history of Israeli-Arab conflicts to get an idea of how this can be read in to history: The wars of '48, '67, and even 1973 are pretty spectacular Arab defeats, though I hesitate to call '73 a rousing victory for Israel, costly as it was.

Meanwhile, the Mujahideen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan (US aid has probably been forgotten), the resurgent Taliban looks to be laying the hurt on NATO forces there today (how soon until some young Afghan explains how Mullah Omar wasn't a "true muslim"?) and while the Arab nationalist Saddam Hussein collapsed before the Americans (twice!), the nominally muslim resistance will almost certainly drive the US Army out of Iraq. And now Hezbollah has stood up to the IDF in the field and survived. It's not a march through Tel Aviv, but for angry muslims across the world, it might as well be.

Through a combination of incompetence and arrogance, we've probably discredited the idea of secular muslim governments for a generation, at least. With our refusal to negotiate with governments as diverse as Syria, Iran, Fatah or Hamas, we've given the impression that we're uninterested in what Muslims have to say. An attack on Iran would certainly rehabilitate the Mullahs in the eyes of young Iran, so I guess if we want to continue down this road that's the next step.

All in all, it's been a good few years for bin Laden, and we've done most of his work for him.