David Ignatius cracks the code on the Big Bang strategy

■"Are the Terrorists Failing? Rather than bringing Islamic regimes to power, the holy warriors are creating internal strife and discord, says a French Arabist," op-ed by David Ignatius, Washington Post, 28 September 2004, p. A27.

Ignatius' op-ed is mostly a recounting of a recent speech by a French Arabist, Gilles Kepel, in a book-promotion tour (for The War for Muslim Minds). Here's the key section:

Kepel believes that the United States has stumbled badly in Iraq, and he's sharply critical of U.S. policies there. But that doesn't mean the jihadists are winning. Quite the contrary, their movement has backfired. Rather than bringing Islamic regimes to power, the holy warriors are creating internal strife and discord. Their actions are killing far more Muslims than nonbelievers.

"The principal goal of terrorismóto seize power in Muslim countries through mobilization of populations galvanized by jihad's sheer audacityóhas not been realized," Kepel writes. In fact, bin Laden's followers are losing ground: The Taliban regime in Afghanistan has been toppled; the fence-sitting semi-Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia has taken sides more strongly with the West; Islamists in Sudan and Libya are in retreat; and the plight of the Palestinians has never been more dire. And Baghdad, the traditional seat of Muslim caliphs, is under foreign occupation. Not what you would call a successful jihad.

Kepel argues that the insurgents' brutal tactics in Iraqóthe kidnappings and beheadings, and the car-bombing massacres of young Iraqi police recruitsóare increasingly alienating the Muslim masses. No sensible Muslim would want to live in Fallujah, which is now controlled by Taliban-style fanatics. Similarly, the Muslim masses can see that most of the dead from post-Sept. 11 al Qaeda bombings in Turkey and Morocco were fellow Muslims.

A perfect example of how the jihadists' efforts have backfired, argues Kepel, was last month's kidnapping of two French journalists in Iraq. The kidnappers announced that they would release their hostages only if the French government reversed its new policy banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves in French public schools. "They imagined that they would mobilize Muslims with this demand, but French Muslims were aghast and denounced the kidnappers," Kepel explained to a Washington audience. He noted that French Muslims took to the streets to protest against the kidnappers and to proclaim their French citizenship.

I think this sort of analysis only underscores my point that radical Islam is not our enemy, but the enemy of moderate, modernizing Islam. Yes, we get associated with that process, and sometimes we get targeted as a result. But radical Islam's identifying the U.S. as the Great Devil only highlights the projection going on here. We need to be about growing broadband economic connectivity between the Middle East and the outside world, and letting this intra-Islamic struggle work itself out. Yes, we'll kill bad guys as they stick their heads out of holes, but this is not a war of ideas we can win. Because, in the end, it's not our ideas that threaten radical Islam so much as moderate Islam's willingness to accept them. If the civilization apartheid that Osama dreams of really did exist, there would be no issues between Islam and the West. His problem is that this dream remains just that, and it's disappearing by the day as globalization increasingly penetrates the still largely disconnected Middle East.