THE WAR AGAINST SADDAM IS THE WAR AGAINST TERROR:

Hamas Leader Tells Muslims to Retaliate if U.S. Attacks (JAMES BENNET, February 8, 2003, NY Times)

The spiritual leader of the Palestinian group Hamas instructed Muslims worldwide today to retaliate against "Western interests" if the United States made war on Iraq.

In an open letter released today, the Hamas leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, wrote, "Muslims should threaten Western interests and strike them everywhere." Hamas leaders had previously said they would not widen their conflict with Israel to focus on Americans and other Westerners.

Calling an attack on Iraq part of "a crusaders' war" against Islam by "the envious West and the U.S. first among them," Sheik Yassin urged, "As they fight us, we have to fight them."

Sheik Yassin also called for a boycott of products from the United States and its allies.

Anti-war folk are fond of arguing that because Saddam is a secularists he can't have ties to al Qaeda and he doesn't really support Palestine: so what? The fact is that all three are mixed together in a big old anti-Western stew pot in the Muslim Middle East. The defeat of Saddam, especially if his fall is followed by a liberalization of Iraq, will come as a psychological blow to al Qaeda, to Palestinian radicals, and to Islamicists generally. It's quite reasonable, especially from the perspective of these groups, to view all of the 1990s as a period when radical Islam was winning its war with the West and one of the first victories in this long war was Saddam's triumph in the first Gulf War. If we defeat him now it will create a bookend effect--they'll not only have lost the latest battle but their putative victory in one of the first will go up in smoke, quite literally.

The key to our victory in the Cold War was twofold, both tactical and strategic. On the tactical level, in places like Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, it involved reversing the forward momentum of world communism. On the strategic level it involved a massive military buildup, including especially space-based weapons, that relied on technology that only we had the capacity to develop. The two combined to force a realization on the Soviets that their eventual defeat was inevitable. Looking at how quickly the Soviet Union crumbled once this realization dawned, it seems almost impossible to overstate this psychological impact.

War with Iraq has the advantage of working at both levels. On the tactical side it, along with Afghanistan, serves to reverse the momentum of Islamicism. On the strategic level, if Iraq and Turkey and, hopefully, Iran--three of the greatest nations of Islam--are tilted towards the West and begin to develop into healthy secular states, then what prospect can there be for a long term victory of radical Islam? None.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 8, 2003 7:26 AM