Did We Overreact to 9/11?

Olivier Roy, a French researcher who is one of the most experienced and astute analysts of political Islam, had a useful Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune last Friday. He argues that whatever happens in Iraq, whatever choices the next American president makes about George Bush's military commitment in that country, al-Qaeda will not take power and establish an Islamic state in Iraq.

Roy defines al-Qaeda as a non-territorial global organization that has never tried to establish an Islamic state and focuses on the strategy that has made it famous: direct confrontation with the United States. Roy says al-Qaeda relies for members and recruits on disenfranchised Western Muslims with no strong political roots in Islamic lands. Al-Qaeda has sought to hijack existing conflicts for its anti-Western jihad, and aligned itself with radical Islamic groups in various countries. But history has shown that those groups have local aims and interests that ultimately clash with al-Qaeda's global jihad. As in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan previously, local Iraqi groups inside Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda's top brass, will call the shots. Ironically, Roy suggests, the U.S. military presence in Iraq helped generate some Iraqi support for al-Qaeda.

Says Roy: "Local actors, Islamist or not, want a political solution on their own terms. They do not want chaos or global jihad. As soon as there is a discrepancy between 'the policy of the worst' waged by al-Qaeda and a possible local political settlement, the local actors choose the local settlement."

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, seemed to validate this view where Iraq is concerned. Testifying to Congress last September, Crocker said, "The world should note that when al-Qaeda began implementing its twisted vision of the Caliphate in Iraq, Iraqis, from al-Anbar to Baghdad to Diyala, have ovemhelmingly rejected it."

Roy's argument loosely ties into the quiet, largely taboo debate--one that few American politicians dare enter into, anyway--about whether the U.S. "over-reacted" to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Nobody is suggesting, of course, that the killing of 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11 wasn't an outrage, deserving of justice for the victims and punishment for the perpetrators. The question is whether the horrific attacks led the Bush administration and the U.S. in general to greatly or massively overestimate the threat posed to the U.S. and global security by Islamic extremism. With regard to Iraq specifically, did an overreaction to 9/11 propel Bush to invade the Middle East and strongly predispose Americans to initially support the war? If al-Qaeda has no political future in Iraq, or in any other country, for that matter, as Roy suggests, doesn't that mean that Islamic extremism didn't pose the apocalyptic threat to Western civilization that justified the invasion in the first place?

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo