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Conclusion
The WOT three years on has not achieved its goal of making the world a safer place. 75% of Americans think the world is now a more dangerous place than a decade ago. Yet despite this, there remains a fundamental myopia at the heart of the American and British government’s strategy. They have not only failed to name this war correctly, but in terms of execution they are seriously ill equipped to win the battle of ideas. Finally, they have also seriously underestimated the effect of Islamic political ideas on millions of Muslims. Winning the battle of ideas requires sincere leadership, honesty, strong principles and the ability to convince your opponent through the power of thought, not the barrel of a gun. Though the WOT will inevitably go the same way as the war on drugs and the war on poverty in its failure to achieve its lofty objectives, the residue of failure may have far reaching effects on the future political paradigm, especially in the Islamic world where change may occur in an unintended fashion, this ironically may be its lasting legacy. I will conclude with a quote, but unlike the previous quotes I have given in this article, I cannot name this person. He is if reports are to be believed a serving CIA terrorist expert and he writes under the name ‘Anonymous’. He is a 22-year CIA veteran, who directed research into bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, and his most recent book is called Imperial Hubris: Why the West is losing the War on Terror. When asked by US TODAY about the mindset of the country on the war on terror, and where he thought the misconceptions come from, he answered in the following way, “It's trite to say, but the idea of political correctness is very, very important in terms of the performance of the intelligence community. How many times has USA TODAY, or The New York Times or The Washington Post discussed the role of Islam as a motivating factor in bin Laden's appeal in the Muslim world? I can't remember it very frequently. The director of intelligence and the president say Al Qaeda represents the lunatic fringe of the Muslim world, which, on the face of it, is absurd. But there is no one talking about Islam as a motivating factor for war. There were times when our ancestors went to war to defend their faith. So, the debate is very constricted, not only in America but certainly within the intelligence community. We do a lot of analysis by assertion rather than by reality. Somehow the argument that someone is fighting for his faith is seen as a negative. So we assert that only gangsters do that. We make bin Laden into a gangster. But it doesn't get you anywhere.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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