{"id":3075,"date":"2011-05-20T17:32:21","date_gmt":"2011-05-20T17:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com.108-166-28-151.mdgnetworks.com\/wordpress\/?p=3075"},"modified":"2013-03-25T17:36:11","modified_gmt":"2013-03-25T17:36:11","slug":"bin-laden-and-the-eternal-hydra-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bin-laden-and-the-eternal-hydra-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Bin Laden and the Eternal Hydra of War"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n

Hudson New York<\/em><\/p>\n

As we ponder the significance of Osama bin Laden’s death, it is well to reflect that Islamists are not the\u00a0cause<\/em>\u00a0of hostilities; they are but\u00a0symptoms<\/em>\u00a0of a much greater cause. Individually killing them off \u2014 which is nice \u2014 is like a doctor temporarily treating a sick patient’s symptoms without eliminating the cause of sickness. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s\u00a0de facto<\/em>\u00a0leader, once summarized this phenomenon well. Asked in an interview about the status of bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, he confidently replied:<\/p>\n

Jihad in the path of Allah is greater than any individual or organization. It is a struggle between Truth and Falsehood, until Allah Almighty inherits the earth and those who live in it. Mullah Muhammad Omar and Sheikh Osama bin Laden \u2014 may Allah protect them from all evil \u2014 are merely two soldiers of Islam in the journey of jihad, while the struggle between Truth [Islam] and Falsehood [non-Islam] transcends time (The Al Qaeda Reader<\/em><\/a>, p.182).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Believing that the death of any individual Islamist leader \u2014 who is seen as a “martyr” living in eternal bliss \u2014 will somehow be a\u00a0devastating blow<\/a>\u00a0to Islamists is no less erroneous than thinking the death of any individual American president will be a devastating blow to the American way of life.<\/p>\n

Yet that is precisely how many of America’s leaders behave. Even before bin Laden, US leaders triumphed over the killings of lesser, virtually unknown al-Qaeda players: when Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayub al-Masri were killed a year ago, Vice President\u00a0Joe Biden<\/a>\u00a0said the slayings were “devastating blows to al Qaeda in Iraq;” when al-Qaeda leader Abu Laith al-Libi was killed in early 2008, Congressman\u00a0Peter Hoekstra<\/a>\u00a0issued a statement saying al-Libi’s death “clearly will have an impact on the radical jihadist movement.”<\/p>\n

And who could forget all the hubbub surrounding the 2006 killing of head-chopping Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Then,\u00a0almost every major politician<\/a>, including President Bush, exulted.<\/p>\n

The fact is, history is replete with examples of Islamist leaders dying only for the movements they started to continue growing in strength.<\/p>\n

Consider the progress of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s largest and oldest Islamist organization. Founded in 1928 in Egypt by\u00a0Tariq Ramadan’s<\/a>grandfather, Hasan al-Banna, it originally boasted only six members. In the following decades, in part thanks to the radical writings of Sayyid Qutb \u2014 an al Qaeda favorite \u2014 the Brotherhood, though constantly clashing with Egypt’s government, grew steadily.<\/p>\n

As leaders, both Banna and Qutb were eventually targeted and killed by the Egyptian regime. Yet the Brotherhood continued to thrive underground. Then, to the world’s surprise, the partially-banned, constantly-suppressed Brotherhood managed to win 88 out of 454 seats in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections \u2014 making it the largest opposition bloc in the government.<\/p>\n

After two of its most prominent leaders were killed, and after thousands of its members have been harassed, jailed, or otherwise eliminated, today, with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Brotherhood is poised to take over Egypt.<\/p>\n

Palestinian Hamas, itself an offshoot of the Brotherhood, furnishes another example. Founded in 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Hamas has been labeled a terrorist organization by several governments, including the US, most notably for Hamas’s suicide operations against Israel. Yassin was eventually assassinated in March 2004.<\/p>\n

The result? Far from fizzling away, Hamas, like the Brotherhood, went on to win a major landslide election in the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, establishing it even more strongly than before.<\/p>\n

Then ,of course, there is the Ayatollah Khomeini \u2014 the original poster-boy of radical Islam. Overthrowing Iran’s secular government in 1979, Khomeini transformed Iran into a theocratic state \u2014 precisely what all Islamists yearn to see for the rest of the world. From precipitating the American hostage crisis, to issuing a fatwa condemning a novelist to death, to taunting the US \u2014which he dubbed “the Great Satan” \u2014 for a decade, Khomeini was the bane of the West.<\/p>\n

Today, over twenty years after his death, not much has changed in Iran: Sharia law still governs; Sharia-endorsed enmity towards the West still thrives. The only real difference is that Iran’s nuclear aspirations are nearly fulfilled.<\/p>\n

There are countless other historical examples, both past and present, in which popular Islamist leaders were either killed or died naturally, only for their Islamist movements to grow and consolidate even greater power.<\/p>\n

The West would therefore do well to take a lesson from Hercules’s legendary encounter with the multi-headed Hydra-monster. Every time the mythical strongman lopped off one of its serpentine heads, two new ones grew in its stead. To slay the beast once and for all, Hercules had to cauterize the stumps with fire, thereby preventing any more heads from sprouting out.<\/p>\n

Similarly, while the West continues to lop off Islamist “monster-heads” \u2014 most recently, bin Laden’s \u2014 to achieve true and lasting victory, the ideologies that generate these monster-heads must first be identified and cauterized.<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a92011 Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Raymond Ibrahim Hudson New York As we ponder the significance of Osama bin Laden’s death, it is well to reflect that Islamists are not the\u00a0cause\u00a0of hostilities; they are but\u00a0symptoms\u00a0of a much greater cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,227,576],"tags":[1035,228,1017,183,239,1043,296,545,197],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-NB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2532,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/al-qaedas-zawahiri-bigger-threat-than-osama\/","url_meta":{"origin":3075,"position":0},"title":"Al Qaeda’s Zawahiri, Bigger Threat Than Osama?","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Bloomberg Now that Ayman Zawahiri has assumed leadership of al Qaeda, it is important to end the widespread perception that he is a dour intellectual who is disconnected from young, would-be jihadists. 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In our context, did Osama bin\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3281,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/osama-bin-laden-man-of-love\/","url_meta":{"origin":3075,"position":2},"title":"Osama bin Laden: Man of Love?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 8, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim MESH (Middle East Strategy at Harvard) In many ways, Michael Scheuer is the paradigmatic case of an otherwise knowledgeable and experienced Western adult who takes al Qaeda\u2019s word at face value. According to his book,\u00a0Imperial Hubris, his credentials and thus authority to speak about al Qaeda and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5480,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hydra-of-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":3075,"position":3},"title":"Hydra of War","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 4, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Radical Islam will ensure the constant replacement of whatever terrorists we kill. by Raymond Ibrahim National Review Online Is the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Masri, dead? Iraqi authorities just proclaimed that he was recently killed due to infighting. But al Qaeda-related websites beg to differ: \u201c[H]e\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3265,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/islam-and-innocence\/","url_meta":{"origin":3075,"position":4},"title":"Islam and Innocence","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 19, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch Just recently, a high ranking Pakistani cleric, one Munib ur-Rehmen,asserted\u00a0that \u201cIslam does not allow anybody to take lives of innocent people by any means.\u201d However, when he was grand mufti, two years earlier, he alsosaid\u00a0that \u201ctruly Islamic\u201d states must kill the apostate from Islam. 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