Who's Responsible?
by Ken Bell

History abounds with irony and paradox.

For nearly 50 years, the whole of Eastern Europe on a line from divided Germany southward to the Adriatic and eastward suffocated , imprisoned behind an iron curtain. The man most responsible for that half century of communist oppression wasn’t Joseph Stalin—it was Adolf Hitler. The Warsaw Pact was the unintended consequence of the Nazi dictator’s fateful strategic blunders.

Similarly, the man most responsible for the revolutionary changes roiling the Middle East is—Osama bin Laden. His extraordinary strategic miscalculation on September 11, 2001 has accomplished the opposite of what he had intended.

Hitler’s gravest political error was in underestimating the character of Winston Churchill, whose persistent defiance ultimately assured the destruction of the Third Reich. Bin Laden’s gravest error was in ‘misunderstimating’ George W. Bush.

For more than a quarter century, through four successive presidencies of both major political parties, the United States had retreated before the rising onslaught of FascIslam in all its variant virulent forms, and had simultaneously abetted the continuance of Arab autocracies through a misguided ‘realism’ that exacerbated the crisis.

Bin Laden assumed that any counterstroke by America would be, as they always previously had been, ephemeral, transitory, limited and indecisive. He further assumed that his act would lead rapidly and inexorably to revolution in the Arab world and ultimately throughout the realm of Islam.

It has—but not the revolution bin Laden intended. The leader of the revolutionary forces is George W. Bush.

Bush’s aggressive forward strategy of prosecuting the war against FascIslam on its breeding grounds has begun a transformation as profound as that which forever altered Europe half a generation ago.

As Lebanon’s Walid Jumblatt averred to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, the fruit of September 11th—the Iraqi elections—has proven to be the Middle Eastern equivalent of the fall of the Berlin wall.

In the brief three-and-a-half year span since that fateful late summer day, America under the Bush administration has liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban scourge; freed Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s terror; dismantled the incredibly dangerous A.Q. Khan network for proliferation of nuclear weapons to terrorist states; disarmed Libya; short-circuited the greatest international fraud conspiracy of all time, the U.N. Oil for “Food” scandal; and set in motion a process of democratization which will inevitably alter the entire region.

The inevitable setbacks of war which we have painfully endured in Iraq have proven to be less a quagmire than a pathway. From Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east, momentous changes are underway across the Islamic world.

But this is not the time to declare victory, or to indulge in self-congratulation. The war against FascIslam, waged upon us for nearly a quarter century with increasing intensity before we even understood that it existed, has only begun. Much remains to be done—though not necessarily by force of arms—in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran, in Sudan and beyond. And much remains at risk.

We cannot afford to lose in nuclear-armed Pakistan. We cannot afford to lose in Saudi Arabia, with its stranglehold on world oil supplies and the global economy. And we cannot afford to lose in Egypt, the most populous and influential of all the Arab states.

The Cold War lasted nearly half a century. Our present War On Terror may well equal that span. In George W. Bush, this war has found its Harry Truman; it may yet be many years before it finds its Ronald Reagan.

--From the March 2005 Austin Review