An End to Al Qaeda

While bloggers are reposting Rachel Maddow's rebuttal to Glenn Beck, we have to note a segment on her show last night that is of interest to us. Retired Naval intelligence officer Malcolm Nance appeared on the show hawking his book An End to Al Qaeda, promising its defeat in 24 months. This isn't your John McCain boast that he knew how to get Bin Laden, a secret he has been withholding from everyone since the election. Rather, Mr. Nance, who is an expert on terrorism and also against torture, says we have neglected a key component in fighting Al Qaeda--the public relations front.

Mr. Nance makes the cogent argument that Al Qaeda is a cult and should be treated as such. He indicated how the gonad bomber's father couldn't relate to his son to talk him out of his Islamist trek and instead went to the CIA. That's like the blind leading the blind. But the overall message is that Al Qaeda's insistance that young recruits cut their ties to their families operates just like any cult we know. Nance argues that Al Qaeda is not some "knights heroically wandering the world" for the love of Islam but are people bent on upending all of Islam's structures and re-engineering the religion to its own ends. He said evidence of this appeared most dramatically in Iraq when it tried to take over the insurgency. Once Iraqis learned that Al Qaeda didn't care about them but insisted on killing civilians they rose up against it.

Mr. Nance claims that we have made the issue all about us--which is a mistake. Al Qaeda has basically determined how it would be perceived by Muslims by focusing on mistakes in American policy to justify their own actions. They can do this forever. Instead, Mr.Nance proposes we aim our information efforts at emphasizing Al Qaeda's ideology and how it runs against basic tenets of Islam. I have also suggested elsewhere what other steps we might make within the Moslem community to reach out to these young disaffected men. But Mr. Nance is on the right track.