On Monday, a Central Intelligence Agency report, insofar selectively and illegally divulged to the New York Times, stated that the deposition of Saddam Hussein and multinational occupation of Iraq engendered Near East terrorism. On Tuesday, when President Bush ordered partial content of the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate revealed for people's consumption, the report stated that, indeed, a foreign presence in Iraq fulfilled a certain propagandistic prophecy — but Iraq's salience was also the threat to Islamic fascism posed by counterterrorist and democratist successes.
On Wednesday, the United States Military Academy published an al Qaeda epistle from December of last year, its topic familiar: Islamist impuissance and failure. The same day, the Program on International Policy Attitudes released a poll of Iraqi attitudes that, rough as the survey was, showed no ambivalence towards the prospect of American forces leaving so Iraqis could turn their attention to hated al Qaeda operatives as soon as possible. Brought to mind was a year-old Pew study in which respondents in six Muslim countries spurned the same Islamist call to jihad we were told on Monday they wanted to answer.
Now, polls are inductive and their implications can only be made by projecting the tiny part onto the very large whole. Still, there are constants in Near Eastern opinion, such as the broad dislike of Jews expressed in every country Pew visited. Yet as the Middle East Media Research Institute proves, sympathy for messianic fascism is as prevalent in discourse conducted and constrained by most states in that region as traducement for male-pattern baldness on Madison Avenue — and the poll numbers evince public contravention.
Nobody has taken a census of active or prospective terrorists, so we don't know precisely who they are. The nineteen 2001 al Qaeda hijackers made clear that affluence was no inoculation. Abnormalities can be extrapolated from the defining accomplishments of someone like Mohammed Atta. Guantanamo Bay detainees remain a danger to their wardens. Beyond that, what is drawn from interviews with terrorists but literal transmissions of what a terrorist believes, with just a hint as to the subject's criminality? This has been asked before but must be again: what drives a man to invest his time or even his life in the preferential, not incidental or accidental, murder of innocents? Better, what other than psychopathy?
This distinction matters quite a bit when the debate is over a quantifiable number of people committing terrorism who would not have otherwise, as based on an impression of cultural indignation — one that is often instigated by Near Eastern tyrants, encouraged by conformist cultures and framed in telephoto lenses of Reuters and the Associated Press. The Monday version of the National Intelligence Estimate reinforced the position held by opponents of intervention, mostly on the left but on the isolationist right, too: that the intrusive removal of a dictator so offended people that they decided to respond with wanton killing, mainly under the direction of al Qaeda or Ba'athists.
Now, the military layman knows that strategies may initially exacerbate adverse conditions, such as mobilization of the enemy before its eventual defeat. National Review's Jonah Goldberg accepted, for the sake of argument, the proposition that Operation Iraqi Freedom "stirred up a hornet's nest." Yes but, opined Goldberg, "If my backyard is festooned with hornet nests, I will likely be safer from a sting on any given day if I do nothing than I will be on the day or days I begin destroying them." A reader responded within the day: "The only problem with your analogy is that you don't create more hornets when you destroy the hornets' nest," and the speculation ended there.
In non-state authoritarianism is something both primal and unprecedented. The men who are al Qaeda — those who are willing, not imbeciles or captives strapped to bombs — are not conscripts. Recruits of a democracy's army learn to observe the laws of war, engage military targets with precision and, increasingly, moonlight as civil infrastructure administrators. Terrorists flaunt military conduct, make sport of civilian butchery and raise standards of living of others only to extract dependency. With, say, the Wehrmacht, an American in theater could always find some distant comfort in knowing that the soldiers oppugning him might not have if it weren't for their "Fuhrer" — Stephen Ambrose once wrote that GIs found the strongest propinquity, next to the Dutch, with the Germans. For a country, one could be caught up by nationalism — in the terror cell, the shared trait is slavering aggression.
For al Qaeda and its affiliates, there is the assumption that the enemy is not comprised of the insane. On how sound a basis? If the foregoing analogy is apt: What is to say the hornets weren't hornets that were simply quiescent, not a terrorist reserve so much as a vein of disturbed or malign men who disgust most of their countrymen as much as they do us. Iraq is the war's affirmed central battlefield and it may divert men from their courses in life to terrorism. Unconfirmed is whether the men get mad or were mad to begin with, and which use of antonomasia applies. Would the terrorist have been a Perry Como, or a Jack the Ripper?