The Confrontation: Winning the War Against Future Jihad
By Walid Phares, Senior Fellow, The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa, Contributing Editor
Video: http://multimedia.heritage.org/content/wm/Lehrman-032608a.wvx

In a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation, Walid Phares, Professor of Middle East Studies at Florida Atlantic University and an expert on jihadist movements, discussed the world's confrontation with global jihadist terrorism. Phares stated that to win the war against global jihadists, the United States and its allies must understand the nature of the threat and develop a long-term, patient strategy for isolating and defeating our enemies.

According to Phares, the world is confronted with two main global jihadist networks: the Salafists, which includes Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and the Khomeinists, who are led by Iran and include groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. The jihadists, like Marxist-Leninists during the Cold War, have ideologies, a world vision, and global strategies which may differ in details but have the same goal: the establishment of a worldwide Muslim empire or caliphate. Phares points out that this long-term goal is not a reaction to, and will not be affected by, U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The United States and its allies, Phares lamented, missed the immediate signs and indicators of this emerging confrontation during the 1990s. In fact, the global jihadist movement developed and grew in an arc stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan during the same time period that the United States and its western allies were focused on the ideological struggle against Marxism in Europe, parts of Asia, and Latin America. While we fought one “war of ideas,” we neglected or failed to perceive the “war of ideas” going on in the Arab and Muslim world.

The jihadist attacks against the United States on 9/11 and subsequent jihadist strikes in other parts of the world finally awakened many in the West to the fact that we were at war, but nearly seven years later there is still widespread disagreement as to the precise nature of the conflict and how best to wage it. Phares believes that we need to redefine the war into two complementary phases: a world campaign to resist jihadists and a world campaign to reverse jihadists. Like President Bush, Phares also believes that the end of the jihadist threat will only come with a democratic revolution in the Muslim world. The only effective way to counter the jihadist threat, he concludes, is with the “political culture of democracy.”