Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Read Free

at the level of colonel and below. These individuals have shown initiative, courage, and a deep and abiding concern for the security of Americans and their country. They have taken life-risking actions that more senior careerists would have avoided like grim death. They have helped defend America but have not advanced their careers. There surely is a story to be told about these heroic individuals who spent their blood to buy time for America, but it will not be told here. Why? Because their undeniable substantive and admirable tactical victories have not advanced America’s strategic position in the war against al-Qaeda and the Islamists since they have occurred within the context of a national-security strategy, which is the common handiwork of the first Bush, Clinton, and current Bush presidencies, that creates enemies faster than they can be killed and that finds America in a worse position today than it was on 9/11. Indeed, the lives of those who died on 9/11 and all those who have since died battling al-Qaeda–led forces have been squandered uselessly because of the arrogance-and ignorance-powered failure of their leaders. It is the story of that failure that this book will tell.

Introduction
    [E]vents started by human folly link themselves in a sequence which no sagacity can foresee and no courage can break through.
    Joseph Conrad, 1911
    It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.
    Major General T. J. Jackson, 1862
    In two previous books and numerous articles, I have tried to explain and defend my conclusion that U.S. political leaders from both parties and American citizens generally have misunderstood the motivation of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their steadily increasing number of Islamist allies. My argument, simply stated, was and is that Islamist militants are attacking America because of what it does in the Islamic world and not because of the way America’s people think, vote, behave, and believe or not believe in God. I readily acknowledge that many of the Islamists confronting us detest our society and lifestyle and would never duplicate them in any country they would govern. Clearly, there would be nothing akin to MTV, gender equality, or quadrennial presidential elections in an al-Qaeda–run Saudi Arabia.
    But granting that reality, I argued that it was a profound and unnecessary mistake, an instance of what Conrad called “human folly,” to believe that the Islamist militants’ animosities for the accoutrements of our society were the main motivating and unifying factors behind their hatred and willingness to wage war against the United States. Such an error, moreover, would cause U.S. leaders and citizens to grossly underestimate the threat they faced from the Islamists, lead them to deploy insufficient military force, and stand pat on untenable foreign policies, thereby leading to America’s defeat. It would be better, I argued, to face the unpleasant reality head on and recognize that the forces led and personified by Osama bin Laden are motivated and united by an ever-deepening hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world. Unqualified support for Israel, a half-century of protecting and nurturing Muslim police states, and a military presence in Muslim lands—these were the tangible, physical manifestations of U.S. foreign policy that are perceived by most—yes, definitively, most—Muslims as a concerted and deliberate attempt to destroy Islam and its followers. This formulation was meant to alert Americans to what I saw as an existential threat to the United States that was in some ways greater than that which had been posed by the Soviet Union. It was more dangerous because it came from an opponent that was far less easy to define, one who, unlike the USSR, had virtues and a thoroughly human and egalitarian theology, and one that was all but impossible