Keep American Muslims on Our Side

SINCE 9/11, terrorism has increased significantly around the globe, but the United States has been spared. Eurasia rather than America has been the main source and victim. Why?

Increased awareness and surveillance have made a strike as sophisticated as the 9/11 attacks far more difficult to achieve, especially without local support. Unlike their counterparts in Britain, for example, few of America’s Muslims at least for now subscribe to the notion that Western governments or their proxies are deliberately hurting and humiliating Muslims and that the way to restore dignity is to join a jihad. Moreover, terrorist strategists like Ayman al-Zawahri have warned that while smaller strikes serve as training opportunities for their fighters, major strikes can backfire; attacking the wrong people at the wrong time would reduce the popularity of their movement.

The jihadists understand that they are fighting a war of ideas. According to “The Management of Savagery,” a Qaeda manual, the success of the movement will ultimately depend on the jihadists’ ability to damage America’s prestige throughout the globe, sow discord between America and its allies and expose the hollowness of American values. The manual prescribes a strategy of forcing America “to abandon its war against Islam by proxy” by provoking it into direct military confrontation with a Muslim country. When the United States attacked Iraq, it inadvertently “expanded the jihadi current” just as Osama bin Laden’s strategists had hoped.

Every foreign-policy decision entails tradeoffs in regard to terrorism, especially with respect to the spread of the jihadist idea. Attacking the wrong people at the wrong time can backfire, just as Al Qaeda’s strategists say. Let’s not make that mistake again.

— JESSICA STERN, a former National Security Council staff member and the author of “Terror in the Name of God.”