Samson's Fate,Caroline B. Glick

Nine days after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, President Bush stood before a joint session of Congress and announced, "Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

At the time, with so many momentous events seemingly happening at once, the full strategic significance of that comment went largely unnoted. The president of the United States had just declared war. It was obvious the U.S. would soon respond in a massive way to the attacks on its soil.

But for many in Israel, the meaning of that statement was as immediately clear as it was harsh. A year before, the Palestinians had begun their terror war. By limiting the definition of the enemies of the free world to terrorist groups "with global reach," Bush was explicitly removing Palestinian terrorists from the enemy camp. Correspondingly, Israel was not included in the camp of allies.

Many commentators have rightly criticized the Bush administration's decision to name the war the "War on Terror." After all, terror is not an enemy - it is a tool of war. To limit the aims of the war to the eradication of the suicide bomber or the roadside bomb means that the actual enemy that wields these weapons in order to advance its nefarious aims is never addressed.

While rarely acknowledged by Western leaders, the identity of the enemy is not hidden from view. The forces of jihad - whether comprised of state actors or non-state actors - are the enemy in this war. Consequently, anything that advances jihad's aim of Islamic domination is antithetical to the interests of the free world. And anything that harms that cause advances the interests of human liberty and freedom.

Given that terror is but a tool of war for the jihadists, countering terrorism, while necessary, is not sufficient to win the war.

By declaring that the war was against terror organizations of global reach, the U.S. hurt the cause of freedom twice. First, it denied itself the ability to acknowledge and understand the enemy that uses terror against it. Second, by limiting the scope of the fight to global terror groups, it divested itself of the ability to see and understand the relationships between local jihadist groups and the larger global arena.

When jihadists in Pakistan or Gaza or the Philippines or Nigeria call for the establishment of a caliphate in their neighborhood, is it reasonable to dismiss them as mere local political forces in the event that a direct link cannot be made between them and Osama bin Laden?

The U.S. has not been alone in failing to accept the significance of jihad and Israel's unique importance to the forces of jihad worldwide. Israel too has ignored these basic realities. Israeli leaders from Shimon Peres to Ehud Olmert have argued that if the Palestinian war against Israel is a jihad - a religious war - then that means that there is no way to peacefully resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Since they wish to peacefully resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, as far as they are concerned the Palestinian war against Israel cannot be a jihad.

Sadly, despite the best efforts of both the Bush administration and successive Israeli governments to dictate for their enemies who they can and cannot be and what they can and cannot stand for, American and Israeli arguments have failed to convince the jihadists. For them, the Palestinian jihad against Israel, the only non-Islamic enclave from the Mediterranean Sea to India, is a central front in the global jihad.

It is a strange predicament when the two nations most directly targeted by the enemies of civilization refuse to acknowledge their enemies' identity, ideology, doctrine or goals. It is tragic when as a result of their denial of the fact that their enemies are common ones they deny themselves also a true understanding of their own alliance.

And of course, in spite of their double denial of the nature of the war being waged against them, the U.S. and Israel are still far ahead of much of the rest of the world in coming to grips with reality just by recognizing that there is a war to begin with. Much of the world, and particularly Western European nations, but also Russia and China, have for various reasons refused even to acknowledge that a war is going on.

* * *

Seven years after the jihadist attacks on America, it is difficult to feel sanguine about the state of the war. Although U.S. forces in Iraq are moving swiftly toward strategic victory in that vital battlefield, back at home the trend is toward deeper and deeper denial of the challenges of the day.

Recently the Department of Homeland Security - established in response to the 9/11 attacks - published a memo prohibiting U.S. officials from using the terms "jihad," "jihadist," "Islamist" or "Islam," to describe the nature of the enemy in this war and his doctrine. The same memo - the instructions of which were happily adopted by the State Department - also said that it is wrong to make a distinction between "radical" and "moderate" Muslims because the latter take offense at the label.

Then too, the antiwar Democratic-controlled Congress is refusing to renew legislation permitting federal authorities to wiretap conversations carried out by terror suspects abroad.

Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership, Congress is blocking counter-terror authorities from doing the necessary work to prevent the U.S. from being attacked again. And it is doing so in the name of civil liberties. In other words, for the Democratic congressional leadership, the freedom of jihadists to plot attacks against the U.S. and its allies trumps America's right to defend itself.

As well, in its recent Boumediene decision, the U.S. Supreme Court granted constitutional protections to enemy combatants imprisoned by the U.S. military. In so ruling, the Supreme Court did two things. First it has made it undesirable and difficult for the U.S. to take enemy prisoners in battle. In order to remand such prisoners to custody, the U.S. military will be forced by this ruling to treat enemy prisoners like regular criminals, collect evidence against them and provide them with this evidence to enable them to defend themselves. This of course, makes a parody of the war.

And making a parody of this deadly serious war was apparently the second goal of the five justices who rendered the Boumediene decision. For what the justices showed more than anything else is that like a large and growing portion of the U.S. body politic, they wish to deny the fact that a war even exists or is being waged against their country. It is the Republicans, or the neocons, or the Israel Lobby at fault here. Not the jihadists - whom U.S. officials now are officially barred from mentioning. If it weren't for the warmongers, we could all just revert to the way things were on September 10, 2001.

In Israel the situation is even more dangerous because the stakes are existential. The U.S. will have an opportunity to regain its senses. Israel cannot depend on the luxury of being given a chance to learn from its mistakes. This is particularly true in light of Iran's nuclear weapons program. As Prof. Benzion Netanyahu told me recently, if the Nazi Holocaust happened in six years, the next one will happen in six seconds.

Disturbingly, at this crucial moment in its history Israel is being led by the most incompetent and strategically blind government it has ever seen. The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak is keeping its eyes tightly shut to the growing dangers to Israel's survival on all fronts. Rather than galvanize international opinion to support and perhaps participate in an Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear installations, the Israeli government is behaving as though this threat to Israel's existence is someone else's problem. The government plays along with the American and European fraud of diplomatic engagement with Iran and pretends that there is value in international sanctions against Iran, which have made no dent in the mullahs' nuclear weapons program.

If this weren't dispiriting enough, under its current government Israel is now surrendering to Iran's Hamas proxy in Gaza under the guise of a "cease-fire," which everyone understands is a joke. Instead of conducting a military offensive to overthrow the Hamas regime, Israel is giving Hamas breathing space to consolidate its power and open the door to a continuing flow of arms as well as international political legitimization.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government is bowing down to Hamas at the same time that Hizbullah is consolidating its control over Lebanon. And of course Hizbullah would never have been in a position to take over Lebanon for Iran if the Israeli government hadn't refused to fight the 2006 war against it to victory, opting instead for a humiliating cease-fire that left Hizbullah strengthened.

Finally, in its current, frankly bizarre negotiations with Syria - Iran's Arab client state - Israel has struck a mortal blow to U.S.-led efforts to isolate Syria in light of its partnership with Iran in fomenting the insurgency in Iraq and its assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. As a consequence of Israel's unjustifiable decision to reach out to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, French President Nicholas Sarkozy has embraced Assad as a peacemaker, inviting him to France's Mediterranean Summit next month and sending his senior advisers on a "peace mission" to meet with him.

On a basic level, Israel is leading the charge in encouraging the U.S. and Europe to deny the war's existence.

On the other hand, at least in Israel there is a strong sense of public revulsion with the weakness of our leadership. It is absolutely clear that if general elections are called, a better government will be elected that will be much more capable of defending the country against its sworn and raging enemies.

* * *

When the jihadists struck America seven years ago, I was at my home in Israel writing a retrospective article on the failed Israel-PLO peace process that had collapsed the year before, on September 28, 2000, when the Palestinians began their jihad against Israel.

After watching the second hijacked airliner fly into the World Trade Center, I called my editor at the Hebrew Makor Rishon newspaper where I worked at the time. I told him that my article would come in later than expected as I had to write a completely different one about a completely different war.

But even as I said those words, it was clear to me that it was the same war. The same regimes and private financiers were bankrolling both the Palestinians and Osama bin Laden. The Palestinians and al Qaeda ascribed to the same religious authorities. Just as the Palestinians cheered for al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, so al Qaeda cheers daily for Palestinian jihadists.

Over the years I have observed this war from a variety of vantage points. I have observed it as an Israeli citizen, whose neighbors and friends have been murdered and wounded in buses and cafes. I have observed it as a combat reporter, accompanying American forces in the invasion and liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's tyrannical regime. I have observed it as a researcher in the Israeli military, watching officers attempting to find ways to fight a war whose nature they are instructed to ignore.

I have watched it as a member of a think tank in Washington attempting to formulate policies for contending with a global web of jihadists whose existence governmental policy-makers in the U.S. and throughout the world studiously avoid acknowledging. And I have watched it as a newspaper columnist charged with placing the events of the day within wider social and strategic contexts.

As the years have passed, I have repeatedly been struck by the double chains that shackle Israel and the free world in contending with the war being waged against us. We blind ourselves by refusing to recognize the nature of the war. And once blinded, we deny ourselves the tools necessary to fight to victory.

Over the years, the image of the Samson - the biblical judge, the unwilling, shackled, and ultimately blinded warrior - has often entered my mind. Samson wished to be seduced by his enemies and ignore his responsibilities to his people and to his God. And when he did fight, although mighty, he was manacled and so his fighting hurt him as well and ultimately led to his own demise. How different his life might have been, and how different the fate of the Children of Israel might have looked, had he not been so inclined toward denial.

For several years I had been thinking of writing a book describing and analyzing these double binds the free world has placed on itself. But I couldn't figure out what such a book should look like. Then, about a year ago, a friend made an offhand comment about my columns, referring to them sardonically as "a running chronicle of the world war that no one will acknowledge."

After some consideration, it occurred to me that in my friend's offhand comment lay the key to the book I wished to write.

The war we dare not acknowledge is the defining feature of our times. The war and our societies' refusal to acknowledge its nature form twin axes around which events of our times revolve. My biweekly Jerusalem Post columns discuss many of those events as they occur. After some consideration, I realized that when read together and organized by theme, they go some ways toward achieving my goal of writing a book that explains our current predicament. And so, from an offhand comment by a friend, The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad was born.

Samson's fate was eminently avoidable. The Philistine women in his life were not particularly skilled in guile. But it was his willful blindness and self-absorption at the end of the day that made it essential for him to sacrifice himself in an effort to destroy his people's enemies.

It is my sincere belief that his fate need not - and will not - be shared by either Israel or the free world. We have the ability to win without being destroyed. But to do so, we must accept the reality of war. And we must love ourselves and respect our enemies.

Caroline Glick is deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. She writes an exclusive column for The Jewish Press that appears the last week of each month. This essay is an expanded version of the preface to her new book, "The Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad," available at Amazon.com.

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