Moscow versus Washington vis-a-vis the Islamic world

In today's Wall Street Journal, Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis observes how Moscow traditionally dealt with the Islamic world versus the approach taken by Washington:

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?

As Lewis goes on to opine, this was no doubt why Arab and Muslim countries did not put much pressure on Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. As Lewis recalls:

After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets.

A notable exception to this "Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority," says Lewis, was Osama bin Laden and the Arab mujahideen.

He and his cohorts were happy to use U.S. dollars and American Stinger missiles in their fight against the Soviets out.

Later, as we know, bin Laden turned this army against America.

The U.S., he assured his followers would be a less formidable foe than the USSR. Look at how quickly President Reagan pulled American peacekeeping forces out of Lebanon in 1983, he pointed out, after 241 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing. By 1993, it would only take eighteen deaths to drive the Americans out of Somalia.

But after 9/11, it seemed that bin Laden was wrong. The U.S. showed that once again it could muster the will to fight.

But, as this type of mass-casualty terror attack becomes a distant memory, Lewis says, Islamists such as bin Laden must be encouraged by "the public discourse inside the U.S." As he writes, "[maybe] their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory."

As he concludes: "If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting."

What did Daniel Pearl's colleagues say about KSM's confession?

I can't imagine what the editors at the Wall Street Journal must have felt when they read that KSM, who confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks, also confessed to the murder of their colleague, Daniel Pearl. "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew," he is on record having told a U.S. military tribunal on March 10. "For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

They don't really go into their personal feelings in today's editorial but they do manage to point out some interesting details.

First, they do the math for us. According to what KSM says in his statement, a statement he swears wasn't coerced, for the record, he claims to have been responsible for the murder of some 3,280 people in 31 actual attacks. These attacks included the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bombings in 2002, the Istanbul attacks against Jewish and Western targets, and the murder of two GIs in Kuwait (though it turns out one actually survived to prove KSM wrong as James Taranto reports).

Then, there were the attacks he planned but for one reason or another failed to carry out - perhaps because he was captured? Anyway, these attacks targeted 12 countries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Given the range and scope of his designs, it does seem impossible, as the Journal editors suggest, not to acknowledge that this was a world war that KSM thought he was waging.

But, "perhaps most ominously," as the editors then go on to point out, "KSM also admitted to being 'directly in charge' of 'managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American Soil,'" as the Journal quotes directly from his statement.

"Given such a confession," the editors then ask, "is it too much to ask the FBI to reconsider its dogmatic view that the 2001 anthrax attacks could only have had a domestic source?"

They have more to say, and you should read the whole piece, but let me finish with their conclusion:

"For sure, I'm American enemies," said KSM in his broken English. For sure, too, he is a reminder of the evil that still confronts us in this conflict with radical Islam, and one that we underestimate at our existential peril.