THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TERRORIST TUNNEL

The War on Terrorism – more precisely the War on Moslem Terrorism – may have been won on March 1st, 2005. That was the day US intel folks announced they had intercepted messages from Osama Bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, begging Zarqawi to launch terrorist attacks inside America itself.

The media went into a tizzy, bombarding Homeland Security officials with demands as to how they were going to protect us from this latest threat. And maybe there is a threat. Far more likely it’s an announcement of surrender.

Osama’s message was in Arabic. Let’s translate its real meaning into plain English:

“Dear Abu. I’m afraid I must announce to the world that, as a pitiful schmuck hiding in a mountain cave, I am powerless to organize or conduct any more terrorist attacks on the Great Satan of America. Can you do anything? I know you’re being hunted down in every mud-hole in Iraq right now, and it might be a little difficult for you to make your way undetected to the US, create your own terrorist network since mine obviously no longer functions, and start your own terrorist war there – but do your best, OK? I am depending on you, since our Islamofascist brothers can no longer depend on me. Yours, Osama.”

This is why Osama’s plea to Zarqawi should be a cause for celebration – as it proclaims his Al Qaeda no longer has the capacity to attack America any longer. (Albeit a quiet celebration. As the President said today, preventing such an attack remains his highest priority, as we cannot afford to take a chance and not prepare for the worst.)

Not quite a year ago, April 2004, I wrote The Fragility of Terrorism . I argued that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be over far sooner than anyone thought. The key excerpt:

A prediction we hear often regarding the War on Moslem Terrorism is that it is going to last a long, long time — for so many years into the future that no one can see the end of it.

Maybe it will. Maybe it will be a war our grandchildren will be fighting when they’re our age. But no analysis of the war shows that it must be this way. It’s just a prediction, one which could turn out to be dramatically wrong. It’s entirely possible that the War on Moslem Terrorism could be won quickly.

When I began giving speeches in 1984 entitled “The Coming Collapse of the Soviet Union,” most people couldn’t even imagine a world in which the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Yet I went on to predict something even more unimaginable — that the Soviet collapse wasn’t far off in the distant future, but that it was coming fast.

This was because, I argued, that the structure of the Soviet Empire, including the Soviet Union itself, was brittle. A brittle physical structure, like a glass, can be unchanging and unyielding — but if the right stress is placed upon it, it doesn’t slowly give or crumble, it shatters. One minute it looks like it always has, the next moment it’s in pieces. Social structures can be brittle in the same way — which is why the result of the stress placed upon it by the Reagan Doctrine was that the Soviet Union shattered virtually overnight.

The phenomenon of Moslem Terrorism is not a social structure — it is a psychological structure; it is not located in any physical or geographical space, but in certain people’s minds. It is thus not a political or social or economic event, it is a mental event. If we want to get rid of it, we must understand and dissect it as such.

Moslem Terrorism is something which the 19th century British scholar Charles Mackay would have recognized as a “moral epidemic.” In 1841, he wrote a history of such epidemics entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. What all such mass delusions have in common is an incredibly intense psychological energy that is impervious to reason, reality, and morality.

That is the strength of these mass frenzies. Their weakness is that the energy, however intense, is inherently unstable — in fact, the more intense, the more unstable. There is thus a fragility to them. They spring into a roaring existence, wreak their havoc, then vanish. They are ephemeral.

What feeds their energy is irrational hope, hope oblivious to danger and fact, hope that drives the absolute conviction that prices of tulips and South Sea islands and dotcom stocks will forever rise, that driving a plane into a building will cause the disintegration of the richest economy the world has ever known, that blowing yourself up to kill a few soldiers will defeat the most powerful military force in history�

The energy of fanatical radical Islam is unstable and fragile. It is the crux vulnerability. When the cost of tulip bulbs in 17th century Holland reached a point where there was no hope of finding more people willing to pay it, the tulip craze evaporated. When the cost of committing terrorism in Iraq and against America reaches a point where there is no or little hope of any gain thereby, the terrorist craze among Moslems will evaporate.

Osama’s plea to Zarqawi is a signal of hopelessness. It is part of the tectonic shift taking place throughout the Moslem world since the re-election of George W. Bush. The great hope of the terrorists was his defeat. Kerry would have postponed the elections in Iraq, giving hope to Zarqawi that he could win, and perhaps even started negotiating with Al Qaeda. Now, despite Zarqawi’s lashing out with suicide bombers blowing up Iraqis, the war in Iraq is “All But Won,” the title of TTP Guest Author Jack Kelly’s article this week.

Jack Kelly’s analogy with the Battle of Iwo Jima is apt. It took over a month to finish off the enemy, but the battle was tipped inevitably for the Marines when they took Mount Suribachi on the fifth day. There are going to be more bad days, more terrorist attacks in Iraq, we have to keep hunting down the Zarqawis and Osamas until we kill them, there will not be an unrestricted march towards the sunshine of Middle East peace and freedom with no storms along the way.

Yet whatever the storms, “freedom is on the march,” as President Bush has proclaimed, now in Iraq and Lebanon, tomorrow in Syria and Egypt, day after tomorrow in Iran, and ultimately in Saudi Arabia. Which means Osama Bin Laden is in retreat. He has lost and he knows it. The light of victory is shining at the end of the terrorist tunnel.