January 19, 2006
Radical Islam’s Engine
By Tom Bevan

Think about terrorism as a machine currently in motion. We want to slow it down, to grind it to a halt, if possible, and radical Islamists want the machine to move faster, gaining in momentum and force. If you were to pop the hood on this metaphorical terror machine, you’d find three major components keeping its engine running: technology, tolerance, and money. The good news, as well as the bad, is that terrorists rely heavily on the Western world for all three.

Technology
No single factor has been more empowering or more enabling for terrorists than the rapid spread of technology. Cell phones, the Internet, and the ease with which money can be moved electronically have all dramatically improved the logistical operations of terrorists working around the globe.

Advances in media technology have ensured that no matter where terrorists strike, images of the attacks will be transmitted instantaneously around the globe, vastly enhancing the terrorists’ ability to instill fear and manipulate public opinion.

Lastly, advances in knowledge and access to materials for the development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons have significantly increased the terrorists’ potential capability to inflict catastrophic damage and loss of life.

Obviously, this is all a bit of history. We cannot halt the spread of technology. The West may be able to slow its march from time to time - like bombing Osirak, busting up the A.Q. Kahn network and potentially striking Iran, for instance – but we cannot prevent the inevitable. The greater challenge lies in doing the best we can to minimize the benefits terrorists receive from using modern technology.

This could involve doing a number of things, but certainly one of the priorities must be monitoring the electronic communications of suspected terrorists as effectively as possible. Setting aside a discussion of whether President Bush violated the law or not in authorizing the NSA surveillance program, we need to make sure our laws and procedures are streamlined, updated, and make full use of our superior technology to deprive terrorists of the benefits of theirs.

Tolerance
Free, open societies are the hallmark of the West – and the United States in particular. Our unwavering commitment to freedom, by its very nature, ensures that we will remain vulnerable to terrorist attacks in the future.

Tolerance, however, is very different from freedom. Radical Islamists exploit the openness of Western societies to operate, but the engine that keeps the terrorist machine running relies in part on the devotion of Western elites to the concept of tolerance and multiculturalism.

We see this manifest across Western Europe - and to a lesser degree in the United States - in a hesitancy and/or unwillingness to employ tactics like common sense profiling, to toughen immigration and visa standards, and to crack down on radicals preaching jihad for fear of violating codes of political correctness or offending the sensibilities of Muslims.

It is one of the great ironies of the current struggle: a group who despises tolerance and whose main goal is to impose a sharia-based Caliphate across vast portions of the globe finds additional protection in the excessive tolerance of the West. One of the traditional cultural strengths of Western society has now become a vulnerability in fighting terrorism.

Money
The greatest irony of all, however, is that the West continues to fuel the terror machine by remaining dependent on Middle Eastern oil. Though obscured from view for years, the connection between oil-rich states and the funding and export of radical Islam became quite obvious after September 11, 2001.

Since then, however, the United States has achieved precious little progress in moving toward energy independence. Thomas Friedman outlined the problem well in a column last week:

We cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil -- thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.

One of the great failings of the Bush administration, which has done such an admirable job of aggressively fighting the threat of terrorism, has been the lack of urgency it has given to the issue of energy independence.

Yes, there has been stiff resistance from Democrats and the left on the need to boost domestic production. We should have opened ANWR three years ago. But domestic production is only one piece of a short-term puzzle and does nothing to address a long-term solution. At this point we should already be halfway through a Manhattan Project designed to perfect hydrogen fuel technology and have massive government based incentives for car manufacturers and consumers to switch to hybrid vehicles.

These types of changes are happening, but too slowly and without the constant pressure and attention they demand. We still aren’t treating energy independence as a vital component of national security. That’s a mistake. In the meantime, our dollars, pounds, and euros continue to flow to countries that use their oil wealth to either actively or passively support the people and the ideology working for our destruction.

Though we didn’t realize it at the time, the terrorist machine was set in motion a long time ago. Slowing the machine down is going to be a decades-long process as well, but we’ll have a much better chance of success if we focus on trying to take away the things that make it run.

Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.

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