It is probably overreacting to call it a “war.” In Koppel’s view, effective responses to the terror threat of militant Islam will be only “20% military”; otherwise we can best work through policing, diplomacy, politics, economic pressure, and intelligence-gathering.
Whatever you call it, it’s going to be with us a long time – as long as the Cold War, perhaps, or longer. It’s a “generational conflict.” It might last a hundred years – and, just as we had no clear notice it was starting (smaller-scale terror attacks occurred many times before 9/11/01), we may have no sure way of knowing when it’s over.
Is Koppel right? Is there no way we can put a definite end to this in the near future?
Personally, I’m hoping it’ll spark a Reformation movement within Islam, so it’ll be their grandchildren against their other grandchildren, with the end result that tribalism gets replaced with rule of law.
But the Muslims already had their version of a Catholic-Protestant schism back in the Seventh Century, and it’s no nearer to replacing tribalism with law today than it ever was.
I didn’t think this was something that was going to end in the near future back when we invaded Afghanistan, let alone Iraq, and my opinion on that hasn’t changed. This is something we’re going to be doing for the foreseeable future, and I don’t see any realistic way to end it.
At present (900 years later) there is little resulting terrorist activity, but to suggest you can put a definite end to such bitter disputes seems wildly optimistic.
The world is always going to have fanatics willing to terrorize innocent people as their core strategy. Dealing with them on a military level is nonproductive, except in isolated instances where they are clearly agents of a specific national government, or the national government has de facto sponsored them. Afghanistan might be an example of this. Iraq is not.
Terrorism is best fought with very narrow action. Spies; special agents; bribes in alleyways; prices on the heads of naughty people; behind-the-scenes negotiations with governments in whose countries they hide out. Assassinations. Arrest or kill them quietly where you find them, and don’t make a big deal out of it. Destabilize every cell you find by having them disappear off the face of the earth.
Describing the invasion and occupation of a sovreign nation like Iraq as a “war on terror” is ignorant, unproductive, uninformed, and ridiculous. There may be other reasons to invade and occupy Iraq, but as a means to fight a war on terror, it will remain a failure.
I’ve always equated the Shi’a (rebelling against the established main stream of religious authority in their faith community) to the Protestants in that analogy, but I admit it’s hard to draw parallels – the causes of their schism bore no resemblance to those of Martin Luther’s.
But if you really want Dar-al-Islam to go through a Protestant Reformation based on critical re-examination of basic doctrinal assumptions – recall how much time it took, and how many bloody religious wars Europe had to go through, from the year (1517) Luther posted his 95 Theses, to the time (of less definite date, but certainly well over two centuries later) when Europe became a land of reason, enlightenment and secular government. Do you really want to wish that on the lands and peoples of Islam?