The attacks of September 11, 2001 presented the American foreign policy world with extraordinarily complex challenges. The immediate need to devise policies to protect the nation and respond to the attacks obviously took pride of place in our “to do” list, and consumed most of the time and energy of those engaged. But beyond short-term demands was the long-term problem of how to understand the deeper causes of the attacks. Only by framing the events of 9/11 within some sort of plausible narrative of who attacked us and why would we be able to devise a strategy to prevent future attacks.
In this long-term effort to understand 9/11, some policymakers, experts and academic observers sought to provide crucial context by modifying existing frameworks; others proposed new or at least underappreciated ones. What emerged formed an array of intellectual products ranging from articulate intuition all the way to formal models and paradigms. These products had three main consequences. First, they all simplified a highly complex problem in order to render it “digestable.” Second, many of them, by adapting pre-existing frameworks, offered a false hope that the United States would be able to find solutions based on widely shared and (presumably) understood previous experiences.1
The third and final consequence of the post-9/11 intellectual agitation was perhaps the most significant one. The U.S. policymaking community could not agree on which narrative best explained 9/11. In the best of all worlds, this disagreement might have stimulated useful debate; on balance, it did not. What happened instead is that pre-existing divisions on basic questions projected themselves onto the analysis of 9/11, producing a splintered diagnosis of what 9/11 meant and what to do about it. Was the United States a good or bad actor on the world stage? Could diplomacy and law enforcement alone solve foreign policy dilemmas, or did the military still have a role to play? Were states the political unit that mattered most in world affairs? Did culture influence the behavior of political actors? Was religion merely epiphenomenal, or could it explain individual and national behavior? All old questions, lent a new life and edge by changed circumstances.
Given the heightened emotions provoked by the attacks, 9/11 sharpened the partisan divisions on these questions. This was already true before U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the latter episode made the contrast even more stark. Nevertheless, even without the Iraq War, disagreement on these basic issues would inevitably have yielded competing sets of answers. Inevitably, too, these disagreements would have suggested contradictory objectives for U.S. policy, different modes for operationalizing policy, and would have tasked differing lead agencies with carrying out distinctive strategies and tactics.
By 2006, several basic analytic models had come to dominate the thinking of policy practitioners and theorists. Although few adopted a single, pure model, influential agencies and individuals typically chose a particular model as their “best fit” for the so-called War on Terror. In standard recursive fashion, they then proceeded to see the world and recommend specific proposals based on that reading.
We will examine briefly here five of the most important models, all of which have very different starting points: the first model contended that a crime was carried out on 9/11; the second, that 9/11 was an expression of a worldwide clash of civilizations; the third, that 9/11 was a battle in (or perhaps the beginning of) a global insurgency; the fourth, that 9/11 was a small part of an ongoing, centuries-long Islamic reformation; and the fifth, that 9/11 was one attack in a Fourth World War that had more to do with bad regimes than it did with global insurgents.2 Each of these starting points implied widely differing objectives, policies and end points.
The Crime of 9/11
Immediately after 9/11, voices from the academy in particular called for restraint in answering the attacks. Behind these calls was an argument that 9/11 was a crime rather than an act of war. This narrative was expressed most succinctly by the board of directors of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the premier academic institution for American scholars of the Middle East and Islam, in a September 21 statement: “It is with great sadness that we write in response to the tragic events of last week. We call for calm and seriousness of purpose as those who planned and perpetrated the crimes are identified and brought to justice in courts of law.”
In the statements, speeches and articles that made the argument for treating 9/11 as a crime, the words “tragedy”, “victim” and “suffering” appear prominently, while the perpetrators of the terrible acts of that day are strangely absent. This emphasis transformed 9/11 into something akin to a natural disaster, an act of God, for which a few shadowy and undefined “suspects” should be held responsible, preferably in an international court.3
When this camp discussed the perpetrators, they took great care to separate them from the vast majority of Muslims in the world and to stress the small number of people directly involved in the attacks. They emphasized the differing national and social backgrounds of the hijackers, the political nature of the grievances that motivated them and the repudiation of the attacks by the vast majority of ordinary Middle Easterners, as well as by Sunni Islam’s religious leaders. Emblematic of this approach were depictions of candle-lit vigils for the victims of 9/11 held by Iranians, and herculean efforts to ignore the images of Palestinians rejoicing at news of the attacks. The declarations of war against the United States issued by Osama bin Laden in 1996 and 1998 were also conspicuously missing from this narrative.4
If the attackers had nothing to do with Islam or with ordinary Middle Easterners, what motivated them? Why did they murder 3,000 innocents in New York and Washington? The supporters of the crime model based their answers to these questions on two fundamental assumptions: first, that the motivations for the criminals who carried out the attacks were the same as the grievances animating the majority of the population in the Middle East; and second, that these motivations were Israeli occupation, dictatorial governments in the Middle East and American support for both. American foreign policy did not, of course, justify the murder of thousands of innocent civilians, but it did explain why the instruments of American political, defense and economic power were targeted.5 In the final analysis, then, the United States had provoked the crime by its own actions, and only a major shift in American policies would guarantee that such a crime would never happen again.
If this assumption were true, then the rule of law had to prevail in all efforts to deal with the criminals: They had to be brought to justice in a legitimate (preferably non-American) court. But the main policy prescription was to change America’s behavior in that region of the world. The typical list included: stop supporting Israel; remove our military presence and cease helping authoritarian regimes; create a “Marshall Plan for the Middle East”; and so forth. We certainly should not engage in revenge or retaliation through bombing or invasion, this camp said, for a “war” against a small group of desperate men would merely continue the usual American policies of violence against innocents that led to the attack in the first place and would eventually cause even greater acts of violence against us. This view was not confined to conventional left-wing circles. The late Charles Tilly, one of the most creative social scientists of recent times, predicted in the September 12, 2001, issue of the Social Science Research Council Bulletin t
hat attacking Afghanistan would “force countries to choose sides” and thus “aggravate the very conditions American leaders will declare they are preventing.”
Instead of using the military, carrying out the model’s policies should be a matter of law enforcement. The FBI or international instruments of the law would be the lead agencies in the hunt for bin Laden and his fellow criminals, in conjunction with international (or perhaps national) courts. The State Department could also actively participate in the effort by implementing and communicating the transformation of American policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Entirely missing from this view are any notions of culpability beyond that of the individual perpetrators, or deeper roots for 9/11 beyond late-20th-century U.S. policies. The attacks were “all about us”, and had nothing to do with the religious language used by bin Laden, the extreme version of sharia he wanted to impose on Muslims around the world, or his attacks, for example, on the Saudis as insufficiently religious. All this was mere rhetoric, this school of interpretation argued, used to win support for al-Qaeda’s true political goals by expressing anger with the United States. The conflation of bin Laden’s motivations with those of the rest of the Middle East was also contentious, risking the charge that this model saw all Arabs as haters of America and desiring the death of innocents, a charge that supporters of this model denied.
Supporters of this model argued further that ending the tragedy of 9/11 would depend, first, on capturing and properly trying bin Laden and his small gang and, second, on the United States changing its way of doing business in the world. The United States would know that it had succeeded when global opinion about America had rebounded and the country had rejoined the international community of nations as an equal, more humble partner, not a unilateralist hegemon.
The proponents of this model were steadfast critics of the invasion of Iraq, if not Afghanistan too at first, arguing consistently for an end to military involvement in the region and a return to the “rule of law.” By 2008, Juan Cole had ceased even his ambivalent support for the invasion of Afghanistan and stated that, since al-Qaeda had been defeated and the majority of its members there killed, there was no need any longer for the U.S. military to remain in the country. The criminals of 9/11 were gone, and it was time to move on.6
A Clash of Civilizations
Diametrically opposed to the “crime and punishment” paradigm was the model that envisioned 9/11 as an episode in a global clash of civilizations. Most frequently associated with the late Samuel Huntington, this thesis stated that culture—specifically, religious difference—was the main (but not only) source of friction between regions of the world, though the tensions were also exacerbated by globalization, Western imperialism and uneven economic development. Many concluded that this friction, of which 9/11 was but one result, could be explained by the West’s commitment to, and imposition of, its ideals as universal values—a commitment not shared by Muslim-majority societies.7
Another proponent of a “clash of civilizations” model, Bernard Lewis, expressed less criticism of the West and argued instead that Islam had somehow “gone wrong.” Aware that their civilization was not succeeding as it had in the past, some Muslims blamed the United States for both the economic and political problems of their individual countries, as well as for the failure of their civilization as a whole. For extremists within the Muslim-majority world, secularism and modernism, borrowed from the West, became the main enemies. The attacks of 9/11 were, for Lewis, a violent attempt by one small group of extremists to combat modernism and return Islamic civilization to its rightful place as a triumphant force in global events.8
The implications of these views were profound. If the “crime and punishment” model narrowed the problem to a few violent suspects reacting to U.S. foreign policy, the “clash of civilizations” model risked making nearly the entire Muslim-majority world supportive of the attacks, if not responsible for them. Both Huntington and Lewis clarified after 9/11 that these were not, in fact, the conclusions that should be drawn from their models. Only a small group of extremists was culpable for the attacks themselves. Yet they also argued that the deep roots for their violence lay within the societies from which these extremists gained support. Any policy response would have to address the broader social, economic and political context of the Muslim-majority world.
Radical proposals for preventing another 9/11 flowed directly from this fundamental assumption about the roots of the problem. The Muslim-majority world—the Middle East, in particular—had to be better integrated into the international community, a community by and large constructed around and still dominated by Western norms. The democratization, economic development and secularization of these countries would dry up the extremist swamp and allow the creation of competent, responsive and legitimate governments throughout the region. Huntington warned that this might be difficult, given the cultural/religious resistance to Western ideals, but he thought that the project was a worthwhile one if undertaken in a careful, patient fashion.
The “clash of civilizations” model also implied that there were few unilateral policies the United States could pursue in order to deal with the true roots of 9/11. Further use of military force, while necessary in Afghanistan as an immediate response to the attacks, might inflame the clash of civilizations. Other unilateral U.S. actions would be ineffectual, since the Muslim-majority world needed integration into the modern world and the international community, not just support or pressure from one country.
One of the larger problems implicit in this model was the poor performance of international institutions in integrating the Muslim world before 9/11. Would these institutions somehow become efficient and effective after the attacks? If they could not, how was the world to prevent further terrorism? Finally, the model itself argued that there would be widespread resistance in the Muslim world to the main cures for its ailments. How could this resistance be overcome without encouraging further violence and deepening the clash?
An Islamic Reformation?
The “clash of civilizations” concept was well known within government circles, where it had both supporters and critics. But by September 2006, when the House Committee on International Relations heard the testimony of several experts on the question, “Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Islam, Democracy, and U.S.-Middle East and Central Asia Policy”, the testifying experts, along with both Democratic and Republican representatives, generally agreed that 9/11 did not portend a clash, but instead showed that there was a fight going on within Islam itself.
This model, which at times portrayed the clash as a Reformation (or even Enlightenment) within Islam, had already been articulated from within the liberal Islamic community. The arguments made by men such as Stephen Schwartz, Reza Aslan and Abdelwahab Meddeb were not precisely the same, but they all shared a common central theme: The 9/11 attacks were not truly about the United States at all—despite what some Muslims said—but were rather the result of an internal struggle within Islam over authority, authenticity and the future of the religion.9
For Schwartz, an extremist version of Islam, Wahhabism, was ultimately responsible for the horrors of 9/11. He argued that this form of Islam promoted violence and extremism, and was spread throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the w
orld by an ambitious policy of proselytization that included financial support for extremist groups like al-Qaeda. In 2002, he said, “The involvement of 15 Saudis out of 19 hijackers reflects an inevitable outcome of Wahhabi ideology, not a special tactic by Osama bin Laden.”10 Opposed to this version of Islam was “Ashari theology”, which Schwartz believed offered a more authentic and hopeful form of the religion.
Aslan saw 9/11 in broader terms as an episode in a civil war within the Muslim community over the future of Islam. On one side were the modernists, who supported a reformation of the practice of Islamic religion, bringing Islam back to Muhammad’s original vision of tolerance and unity. Opposing them were the traditionalists and extremists who, he argued, supported a future of bigotry and fanaticism. The real goal of 9/11 was not to kill Americans; it was rather a desperate attempt to revive a failing movement by gaining international notoriety.11
In his discussion, however, Aslan drew attention to a rather curious deduction prompted by this view of the clash within Islam: If the Christian Reformation had been about returning to the roots of the Christian religion and the true teachings of its founder, stripping away the accretions of centuries, then bin Laden was just as likely to be viewed as a kind of Muslim “Luther” as the modernists were. If so, the Reformation model for understanding 9/11 presented policymakers with a most difficult challenge. Since, as Aslan noted, the West (and non-Muslims in general) were essentially bystanders in this conflict, intervention could easily strengthen the hand of the extremists—in much the same way, he believed, that colonialism had sown the seeds for the clash in the first place. All the United States could usefully do, therefore, was to encourage reform, perhaps by funding institutions that already existed throughout the Muslim majority world, or by encouraging allies in the Middle East to allow more freedom for the voices of reform in their countries.
Predicting on the basis of this model how the war on terror would end was also rather difficult. The Christian Reformation had taken nearly 200 years of bloody religious warfare throughout Europe to consolidate itself. The supporters of the Islamic Reformation model saw the current clash as a long-term struggle that had begun in the 18th century, if not earlier, and predicted that its future would be just as bloody and violent as its recent past had been. The conclusion to the clash would only come when the extremist vision of Islam had been defeated throughout the Muslim-majority world and an Enlightenment-like separation of religion and state (or even secularization) was widely accepted.
The Global Insurgency
In the wake of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and extensive U.S. involvement in aiding governments around the world against extremists, some within the U.S. military (and elsewhere) developed their own distinctive model to explain 9/11. The jihadis that the U.S. military faced every day were attempting to overthrow partner governments and replace them with regimes that reflected their ideological views. It made sense, then, to see 9/11—and even a chain of now seemingly related events before that time—as part of a global insurgency. This cast al-Qaeda as an insurgent group with worldwide aspirations and reach.
The first public airing of this view occurred in the summer of 2003.12 Within two years, a retired general (David Barno) and a retired Australian officer and counterinsurgency expert (David Kilcullen), along with several other military specialists, developed a well-articulated vision of the current conflict as an insurgency with global reach.13 The attacks of 9/11, in this view, were part of a broader conflict, one that began in 1996 and 1998 with Osama’s declarations of war, or perhaps in the summer of 1998 with the destruction of two American embassies in East Africa. After these preliminary blows, the insurgents turned to attacking the U.S. military with the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, culminating in the assaults on New York and Washington.
This model saw the enemy as al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements—a loosely connected group of insurgent factions held together by a common ideology (variously called “radical Islam”, “extremism”, “Islamism”, or “jihadism”) and a common objective (to set up an Islamic state, or caliphate, that would spread their version of Islam throughout the world). AQAM was the usual U.S. military acronym for the worldwide insurgents. As with every other insurgency, AQAM could be expected to recruit young men into its ranks if not prevented from doing so. Killing or capturing the criminals of 9/11, then, was not enough; the movement from which they sprang would simply generate replacements. The United States therefore had to adopt a global counterinsurgency policy (COIN) in order to prevent another attack on the United States, friendly governments had to be protected, and the insurgent factions had to be kept from setting up their dreamt-of state.
Kilcullen proposed a policy to combat al-Qaeda that was taken directly from classical COIN theory: the fragmentation—or disaggregation, as he called it—of insurgent groups on a global scale. This would entail breaking the global linkages between the disparate groups (financial, personal and communications, in particular) that allowed al-Qaeda to function as a global entity. Then each country’s insurgency could be addressed as a separate COIN problem, primarily through non-military methods. Barno, as well as other military thinkers, emphasized information operations and a war of ideas with the insurgents on a global scale in order to defeat their ideology and prevent them from finding support in the Muslim-majority world (read: win hearts and minds).14
The global insurgency model gave the military the key role during the “clear and hold” phase of COIN, but required other agencies, such as the State Department, USAID and the intelligence community, to fight the war of ideas. The Departments of Homeland Security and Treasury would meanwhile be vital to disrupt the financial, manpower and communications ties between the global insurgent nodes. Given the vast scope of the problem, the United States would also need partners around the world willing to work with these agencies—including the military—to prevent them from taking over ungoverned areas of their countries.
The adoption of a COIN model helped the military in particular to imagine successful policies based on previous conflicts with insurgents, but it also created two serious problems. First, no one had ever fought a global insurgency before. The leap from national boundaries to a worldwide conflict was not just one of quantity (a problem in its own right); it made a qualitative difference as well. Could the United States and its partners truly “clear and hold” the entire Muslim-majority world?
The other problem was the length and messiness of the war that was likely to follow. Counterinsurgencies generally last at least ten years, involve fighting that makes no distinction between combatants and civilians, and have ambiguous endings, with violence gradually winding down as support for the cause subsides in target populations. In the global insurgency model, the ending of the current conflict with al-Qaeda could be even further into the future and far more uncertain, with a victory clear only decades after large-scale violence had ended. Would the American people have the will to continue fighting, and financing, a low-level “long war”, as the term of art came to be called, that might last fifty years or more?15
World War IV
The fifth and final model also found the roots of 9/11 in the decades before the actual attacks and believed that dealing with the perpetrators would require a glob
al, long-term strategy. However, proponents of this “World War IV” model located the true problem not in the insurgents who sought to overthrow regimes, but in certain regimes themselves. The best analogy for the conflict, they argued, was the Cold War: a long ideological struggle only intermittently expressed in violence, a struggle carried out by non-state actors, at times, but in the main undertaken by states, some of which gave physical refuge to the terrorists (insurgents) while others provided ideological or financial support.16
In this view, 9/11 was more about the Taliban regime in Afghanistan than it was about al-Qaeda, since without the protection of a particular government, bin Laden would never have been able to plan and carry out the attack. But Afghanistan was just the tip of a very nasty iceberg. Looking around the globe, one could see many other regimes that the United States would need to deal with if another attack—perhaps this time with weapons of mass destruction—was to be prevented. North Korea, Iran and Iraq were the obvious bad actors, but there were far more states that allowed the presence of terrorists/insurgents on their soil, not necessarily through active malevolence, but because the current governments, unable to root them out, made a series of deals, implicit or explicit, with such groups. There is no dearth of examples: Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and others as well.
It is here that the World War IV model showed both its greatest strengths and its greatest flaws. Unlike other models, such as the “Islamic Reformation” model, which seemed to explain much of what was happening in the Muslim-majority world but offered no obvious policy fix, the Cold War analogy showed a hopeful way forward. The strategies used during the Cold War (containment, deterrence, rollback, ideological struggle and support for friendly imperiled countries) not only provided specific policy prescriptions for the current conflict; they had also proven spectacularly successful.
The model could also predict how the conflict was likely to play out in the future. Based on the Cold War analogy, experts said that the new struggle was likely to last decades. There were likely to be only a few hot wars during this time, interspersed with a great deal of diplomatic maneuvering and covert action by intelligence agencies. The conclusion of World War IV could be as ambiguous as the end of the Cold War, with no parades or celebrations to mark victory, simply the slow collapse of the animating ideology and the obvious (USSR) or not so obvious (China) regime change of its main supporters.
There were, at the same time, serious problems with most of the Cold War-cloned policies that would flow from this model. Containment was already the strategy of choice to deal with the states most likely to aid terrorists, but it seemed to be failing in the case of Saddam’s regime and it had not kept Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons. Deterrence certainly worked with states, as the Cold War had shown, but would it be possible to deter fanatical jihadists intent on acquiring and using WMD? Meanwhile rollback—regime change—was possible in only a very few cases, and there was no central organizing state, not even Iran, that could be the main target for this policy as the Soviet Union was for the Cold War. This left support for friendly states (capacity building) along with ideological struggle (a war of ideas) as the main policy options. Would these policies be enough to ensure victory?
Administrations and Their Models
It ought to be clear from the foregoing that these five models are not entirely distinct from each other. For example, an Islamic Reformation model can be explained as having come about as a result of pressure from Western civilization—from the “clash” model. The global insurgency and the World War IV models can be held simultaneously, as addressing complementary problems whose center of gravity—between insurgency and state-supported terrorism—oscillates over time. There isn’t even necessarily any contradiction between explanations that focus on social anthropological sources of jihadi terrorism and more near-term explanations that focus on the military manifestations of social dislocation. These, too, can be seen not as opposites but as complements.17
That is all very well, but pushing distinct models into a common mold does not provide any guidance for policy. Policy is about making choices, and one chooses courses of action based not only on what one might wish to do in the best of all possible worlds, but on what one thinks can actually be done with the resources and political capital at hand. The Bush and Obama Administrations, therefore, have chosen very different frameworks for understanding 9/11 and for making sense of the war on terror. ?
The Bush Administration chose the “World War IV” model as the primary policy framework from the start. President Bush’s first major speech after the attacks, in which the first version of the so-called Bush Doctrine was articulated, made very explicit the threat to hold regimes responsible for the terrorist acts committed by groups they supported or sheltered. The result of this choice was to locate the true roots of 9/11 in a few rogue regimes—Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and the “Axis of Evil” among them—that gave refuge and support to terrorists. However, important members of the Administration also seem to have adopted a version of the “clash of civilizations” narrative, seeing the lack of development, democracy and integration into the international system as the underlying source of the attacks.
The main policies of the Bush Administration (regime change, democracy promotion, capacity building and a war of ideas) flowed directly from a mix of these two models. It is important to note that the Cold War analogy created a sense throughout the Administration that, just as the world had needed the United States to step forward in 1947 to take up a great responsibility, so in the present day America had to shoulder the burden—with others if possible, but alone if necessary—of protecting the world from a heinous and destructive ideology.
The Obama Administration, in contrast, seems to have chosen the “crime and punishment” model. In his official statement on September 11, 2009, the President said,
[a]s we pay tribute to loved ones, friends, fellow citizens, and all who died, we reaffirm our commitment to the ideas and ideals that united Americans in the aftermath of the attacks. We must apprehend all those who perpetrated these heinous crimes, seek justice for those who were killed, and defend against all threats to our national security.
?
The implications of this choice have been far-reaching: a shift from the military to law enforcement as the primary focus of action; an attempt to deal with the root problem of 9/11 by changing how the United States does business in the world; and a move toward a greater internationalization of conflict-response. The decisions to close Guantánamo, put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in New York City and Mirandize the “alleged” perpetrator of the attempted December 25 plane bombing all flow directly from this policy. Yet the Obama Administration must deal with two “hot” wars as well, and it has done so by framing them as separate conflicts unconnected to any larger narrative. By disaggregating Iraq from 9/11 and Afghanistan from anything but a tiny gang, it is free to pursue al-Qaeda as criminals and to try any members it catches in courts of law. Only time will tell whether this shift in models will be successful in coping with the underlying issues exposed by the attacks, or whether still further adjustments will be made as new paradigms emerge.
1Another approach to the subject using a methodology similar to that of this essay, and stressing the influence of Cold War experiences and models inappropriately applied to the problem of Islamist terrorism, is Adam Garfinkle, “Comte’s Caveat: How We Misunderstand the War on Terror”, Orbis (Summer 2008).2Missing from this list is a “War on Terror” as such, which reflects the fact that this term was not a model but rather a legal and policy placeholder for a model.3See for instance Tom Barry and Martha Honey, “International Crime, Not War”, Foreign Policy In Focus, September 12, 2001; David Talbot, Interview with Susan Sontag, “The ‘Traitor’ Fires Back”, Salon, October 16, 2001; and Irene Khan, “Statement by Amnesty International.”4For example, see groups.colgate.edu/aarislam/response.htm. ?5This can be seen throughout the statements and writings of the most vocal proponents of this model, especially Noam Chomsky (see his interview immediately after 9/11 at www.counterpunch.org/chomskyintv.html), Robert Fisk (“My beating by refugees is a symbol of the hatred and fury of this filthy war”, Independent, December 10, 2001; “One year on: A view from the Middle East”, Independent, September 7, 2002); and Juan Cole, “9/11”, Foreign Policy (September/October 2006).6Cole, “On the Seventh Anniversary of September 11”, juancole.com, September 11, 2008.?7The following discussion is based on Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993); The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, 1996); interview with Samuel Huntington, “So, are civilisations at war?”, Guardian, October 21, 2001; and “Five Years After 9/11, The Clash of Civilizations Revisited”, interview by the Pew Forum, August 18, 2006.8The following discussion is based on Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (HarperCollins, 2002); and Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”, The Atlantic (September 1990).?9The following discussion is based on Schwartz, The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism (Anchor, 2003); Aslan, No God But God (Random House, 2005); Aslan, “One World, One God”, Santa Barbara Independent, January 19, 2006; Meddeb, The Malady of Islam (Basic Books, 2003); Meddeb, “Islam and the Enlightenment: Between Ebb and Flow”, Logos Journal (Fall 2006). Emmanuel Sivan, in “The Clash Within Islam”, Survival (Spring 2003), also made an argument for a struggle within Islam, but believed that al-Qaeda was not an important part of the conflict between radical and liberal Islam.10Interview with Stephen Schwartz, “The Good & the Bad”, National Review Online, November 18, 2002.11Lakshmi Chaudhrey interview with Aslan, “The Future of Islam”, Alternet, April 28, 2005.12Captain Matthew W. Lacy, “Al Qaeda ’s Global Insurgency: Airpower In The Battle For Legitimacy”, Air and Space Power Journal, Chronicles Online Journal (July 2003); and Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, “The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link”, New York Times, July 20, 2003.13The following discussion is taken from Lacy, “Al Qaeda’s Global Insurgency”, as well as Lieutenant Colonel Michael F. Morris, “Al-Qaeda As Insurgency”, Master’s thesis, U.S. Army War College (March 2005); David Barno, “Countering Global Insurgency”, Parameters (Summer 2006); and three versions of Kilcullen’s seminal work: “Countering Global Insurgency”, Small Wars Journal (November 2004–August 2005); “Countering Global Insurgency”, Journal of Strategic Studies (August 2005); “Countering Global Insurgency: A Strategy for the War on Terrorism”, Small Wars Journal (June–November 2005).14Only after the successes of the counterinsurgency in Iraq did supporters of the global insurgency model give more prominence to the military side of COIN, such as securing the population against the insurgents, clearing and holding territory, and killing or capturing the most intransigent fighters. See George Packer, “Kilcullen On Afghanistan: ‘It’s Still Winnable, But Only Just’”, New Yorker, November 14, 2008; and Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford University Press, 2009).15See Tom Hayden, “The Long War: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and more ahead”, Global Research, May 22, 2009.16Norman Podhoretz is most associated with this model, but Eliot Cohen was the first to use the term “World War IV” in November 2001, and Peter D. Feaver made the connection between 9/11 and the Cold War in October 2001. Many others, including James Carafano (who invented the term “The Long War”) and Newt Gingrich, have adopted this framework for understanding the War on Terror. The following discussion is taken from Podhoretz, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why It Matters”, Commentary (September 2004); Cohen, “World War IV: Let’s Call This Conflict What It Is”, Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2001; Feaver, “Cold War II”, Weekly Standard, October 1, 2001; and Carafano, “The Long War on Terrorism”, Knight-Rider Tribune Wire, September 8, 2003.17Thus, these are not necessarily contradictory models but can be seen to some extent as serial explanations of different phases of response to the same problem. A view that takes precisely this approach, and that posits religion as a core source of behavior, is Anna Simons, “Making Enemies: An Anthropology of Islamist Terror, Part I”, The American Interest (Summer 2006); and “Making Enemies, Part II”, The American Interest (September/October 2006).