Last week US President Barack Obama declared war against the terrorist organisation known as the Islamic State (IS), and announced that nine allies will be joining the US in that battle. At the same time, Saudi Arabia hosted a conference in Jeddah aimed at building an international regional alliance to fight terrorism. In both cases, the strategic aim is to uproot a cancer that has afflicted our region and the world for the past four decades, wreaking enormous suffering and doing more damage to Islam than the worst enemies of this faith have ever done. At last the international community is resuming the tradition of fighting terrorism the way it should be fought, which is to use armed force in the framework of a coalition that brings together those with the strength, resources and will to fight, as occurred in World War II and in the war to liberate Kuwait. This time, the war will not be against a state, as was the case in those earlier wars, against Germany, Italy, Japan and Iraq. Rather, it will be against an organisation that has many branches, has assumed many forms, and that arose from the bowels of mother organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda. The question now is not whether victory in this war is possible or certain. The balance of forces and resources leave no doubt on that subject. Rather, the question is why the confrontation was put off for so long, making it exorbitantly expensive and costly in other ways. To answer, or attempt to answer, this I would say that different perceptions, lack of clarity, poor communications and many other problems in the history of relations between the West and Arab and Islamic countries made the process of reaching a consensus difficult and wearying. Amazingly, a major part of the difficulty had to do with approaches to the concept of “terrorism”. The Arab tendency is to confuse it with “resistance” and when history is invoked it only complicated matters. In short, the concept has become so intertwined with the Palestinian cause that it became impossible, in spite of the close strategic and economic bonds between these countries, to develop a definition of terrorism that could be shared by both the Arabs and the West. But the problem on the other side — the West — was multifarious. Firstly, it related terrorism to the “Israeli cause” or the Jewish question that is so intimately connected with Western history. The effect of this was to turn terrorism into a phenomenon closely associated with Arabs and Muslims. Secondly, the question of terrorism became entangled with the West's perception of a need to perform political and social engineering operations on Arab and Islamic countries. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and attempts to recast these countries in Western moulds proved abysmal failures, the most salient outcome of which was to fuel terrorism and ensure it supplies of arms, money and personnel in quantities that would have been undreamed of were it not for policy decisions that have become the curse of the West since the appalling terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. A third facet of the problem is the result of a huge blind spot that arose when liberals and leftists in the West converged with various groups of scholars and researchers on the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood and groups like it were “moderate” and were the “natural” prelude to democracy for Arab and Islamic countries. When the winds of the Arab Spring blew, Obama, along with the democratic and socialist parties, believed that those groups held the key to changing the political regimes of the region. In a way, presidents Obama and Bush Jr were in conceptual agreement on the question of reshaping Arab countries. While the latter preferred force, the former opted to rely on organisations and agencies that may not have been armed but were just as lethal. Ultimately, weakening the Arab state supplied terrorists with the means to spread throughout an area that stretches from Morocco and the Sahara to the west and Pakistan in the east. In those spaces, terrorists found ample opportunity for murder and destruction, in the course of which they did not differentiate between Arab and non-Arab, Muslim and Christian, US ambassador and journalist. There were more than enough miscalculations along the road to the point that we have finally reached. Diverse parties were to blame for the mistakes but, as the saying has it, it is far better to have reached this point than not to have arrived at all. The partners to the coalition that is being built in Washington and Jeddah may have arrived on different boats, but now they are being assembled on a single ship. This ship is bound for winning the war against terrorism, terrorists and terrorist organisations. However, this war, like all wars, will not be easy. Perhaps the visible part related to IS will be the least strenuous. The balance of forces is certainly not in its favour. It is living in a hostile environment in the territories it has seized, as no group that thrives on violence, extremism, murder and intimidation is welcomed with open arms. Meanwhile, the other side has the numbers, resources, technology, intelligence facilities and forces to defeat the self-proclaimed “caliphate”. Nevertheless, given the particular nature of this war, IS's defeat may not necessarily constitute a victory. Recall how the Taliban regime collapsed and then managed to reassemble. Such organisations have the ability to acclimatise to diverse geographic spaces; they are skilled in the arts of deception and disguise their nature behind such gleaming banners as “caliphate”, “Sharia law” and “victory”, which draw youths whom others have failed to attract. The primary ideological core of these groups is based on extremism, fanaticism and expounding on interpretations of Islam espoused by groups that can be traced to the Kharijites and even the notorious Hashashin. Here, precisely, is where the major battle is: the battle over the minds and hearts of Arabs and Muslims throughout the world. This type of battle cannot be won by Special Forces, drones or satellite surveillance. It will take soldiers of a different sort, from the worlds of politics, sociology and communications. Obama has set a three-year timeframe for this war. For us here in the Arab world it is likely to take longer and may require a strategy that can be sustained over the long term and that sets certain priorities. These priorities may begin with IS, but they certainly do not end there. There are a number of Arab states in our region that need to be reconstructed after many years of struggling the blight of extremism. These are Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Perhaps the Egyptian victory over the Muslim Brotherhood was the first win in the battle against terrorism. It should be borne in mind, however, that in Egypt it was the strong and established state, with a long tradition of a professional, national army, which made this victory possible. The battle in other arenas is likely to be more difficult and complex. Still, it is a war from which there is no escape, for this war is not only to save our lives on earth, but also to save our souls in the hereafter.
