Playing Nicely
Our tall and incredibly smart editorial director, Dick Meyer, scribbled a note to us a little while ago, elaborating on some ideas he set forth in his column Against the Grain. Take a look. In real life, he's not as scary as his picture. – Ed.
One important and thoroughly ignored point made repeatedly in the publicly released summary is that is something very important in the war on terror we don't talk about much: other countries. Specifically, other western countries besides the U.S., and other Arab and Muslim countries besides Iraq.
One of the NIE's key findings was "that activists identifying themselves as jihadists, although a small percentage of Muslims, are increasing in both number and geographic dispersion." In other words, there are more terrorists in more countries than there were a few years ago. Western Europe, the report says, is probably a fatter target than the U.S. And the most effective curb on the growth of jihadism, the report says, is increased pluralism, democracy and honesty in Arab and Muslim governments.
What does that mean for fighting the war on terrorism? "Countering the spread of the jihadist movement will require coordinated multilateral efforts that go well beyond operations to capture or kill terrorist leaders." Multilateral means other countries, not just America.
U.S. policy has had a hard time garnering multilateral support. Of course, Democrats and Republicans in our own country can't even play nicely together on this. But even if our own leaders can't listen to each other, maybe they can start doing a better job of listening to the rest of the world.