Can Conservatives Accept Success in Fighting Terror?

America is winning the War on Terror.  At least by the most visible metrics, that is.  As David Frum wrote for FrumForum, the death of Osama bin Laden was the culmination of a decade in which the leadership of Al-Qaeda has been decimated by Predator drones and Islamic terrorism in general has collapsed in complexity, scope, and ambition.

But some conservatives seem reluctant to accept the gains that they, themselves, fought so hard to achieve.  Instead, they are desperately grasping for new enemies to fight.

I visited the Heritage Foundation on June 28th to watch Catherine Herridge of Fox News promote her new book, The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al-Qaeda’s American Recruits.  What I saw from Herridge and the audience was a voracious appetite for claims of Muslim American subversion tinged with a faint, but troubling willingness to engage in 9/11 conspiracy speculation.

The lion’s share of Herridge’s talk was devoted to the activities of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the New Mexico-born civil engineering student turned radical Al-Qaeda cleric. Aulaqi is one of the most active radical Muslim clerics in the Middle East.  He releases footage of his extremist sermons on a regular basis and is currently allied with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. The U.S. government has placed Aulaqi on its list of global terrorists to be killed without trial.

But Herridge believes that the government is doing too little too late.  She explained that the intelligence community overlooked his role in the 9/11 attacks and is now trying to cover up their failure to address his radicalization.  In one instance, she said, Aulaqi was taken into custody only to be released without charge.  “This event is like a bomb waiting to be triggered.  I’ve spoken to people on the Hill about this.  I have spoken to people within the government about this, and it’s just what I call ‘crickets,’ radio silence,” Herridge said.

Herridge uses a somewhat fluid standard of proof for her charges, one that ranges from official arrest warrants to the presence of “too many coincidences.”  Nonetheless, she held Aulaqi up as an example of “Al-Qaeda 2.0,” a social media-savvy, largely American-born incarnation of global jihad. “There always seem to be his fingerprints on these plots,” she said.  According to Herridge, these new terrorists are the “digital jihadist Facebook friends from hell.”

On some level, this is true.  There are definitely American Muslims being radicalized and social media does contribute to those instances.  But the important question is this: With the figurehead of global jihad resting at the bottom of the Arabian Sea and Islamic terrorism on the retreat, what type of threat do disjointed and largely incompetent would-be terrorists actually pose?

Well, Herridge disagrees with the premise of the question. According to her, the recent ineptitude of Islamic terrorism is not a triumph of our national security apparatus, but a tactical shift of which we must be especially wary.  “There has been a shift.  Part of that has been by design because we’ve become better at pulling a string and unraveling these things, but it doesn’t make them less important,” she told FrumForum. And the small scale of recent attacks is not the only worrisome terrorist strategy:  “A failed plot is good news for them too.  It gets them a lot of publicity and it helps them raise a lot of money,” she said.  Apparently, the terrorists benefit even when we foil their schemes.  Is there any way to beat these guys?

Herridge’s illusion of an inexhaustible, ever-regrouping global jihad is troubling.  As a nation we have sacrificed immensely to combat terrorism. Our fight has consumed vast amounts of blood and treasure and eroded our conception of liberty at home. Necessary as it may have been at one point, does anybody want to live under the Patriot Act forever?  If we cannot acknowledge progress and eventually victory, we will continue paying this price indefinitely.  Now, when we finally have Islamic terrorism on its heels, we cannot afford to ignore our own success.