By Ralph PetersAl Qaeda does one thing extremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational's victims were Westerners. The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda claims to be their defender.
I've long complained that we fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's blood thirst in our information operations. Al Qaeda (as well as the Taliban and other insurgent groups) slaughters Muslims -- yet we let the media flip the blame to us.
Last weekend, a Pentagon insider passed me a no-nonsense study recently released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Deadly Vanguards: A Study of al Qaeda's Violence Against Muslims" is exactly the kind of work our analysts should produce -- but rarely do. Using exclusively Arabic-language media reports and including only those incidents for which al Qaeda proudly claimed responsibility, this scrupulously documented study explodes the myth of al Qaeda as a champion of Muslims:
* Between 2004 and 2008, only 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners, and that number skewed upward because of the Madrid and London attacks.
* Between 2006 and 2008, a non-Westerner was 54 times likelier to die in an al Qaeda attack than a Westerner.
* "Outside of the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, 99 percent of al Qaeda's victims were non-Western in 2007 and 96 percent were non-Western in 2008."
Bravo to Scott Helfstein, Nassir Abdullah and Muhammad al-Obaidi for producing this supremely useful report. Now the question is: Will we use it?
The propaganda skills of our enemies eclipse our timid, lawyer-ridden information operations. In the Muslim world, we get blamed even for al Qaeda's proudest massacres of Muslims -- while Pakistanis blame us for Taliban suicide bombings. As this report documents, we possess facts that could be wielded as weapons. But we're no more willing to fight an aggressive information war than we are to wage a serious ground war against our enemies.
Personally, I was astonished -- and delighted -- that this hard-headed report came out of West Point, the most politically correct major institution in the US Army, now dedicated to the proposition that killing our nation's enemies is so yesterday. Is there new hope for the stumbling Long Gray Line?
Back to al Qaeda: Our porcine intelligence system doesn't bother to ask the basic question of why al Qaeda kills Muslims so avidly. (Even conservative Muslim scholars are questioning al Qaeda's practices.) The answer's as clear as a sunny day in the desert: Al Qaeda fully reflects its Saudi parentage. Neither the Saudis nor al Qaeda cares a whit about individual Muslims. They only care about Islam.
I've seen, in country after country, how the Saudis sacrifice the well-being and human potential of countless Muslims in order to prevent them from integrating into local societies and to promote the dour Wahhabi cult that has deformed Islam so horribly: purity matters, people don't. Likewise, al Qaeda is happy to sacrifice any number of Muslims to promote its neo-Wahhabi death cult. The al Qaeda serpent may have turned on the Saudi royals, but their differences are a matter of degree.
Meanwhile, we imagine that our passivity and "tolerance" are virtues. We fail to capitalize on al Qaeda's horrendous record, while our government protects the Saudi-funded extremists who poison American mosques. (Our leaders blather about "freedom of religion," ignoring the fact that there's no freedom of religion in Saudi Arabia. Can't we prohibit religious funding from states that don't themselves exercise tolerance? We're being idiotic, not virtuous.)
We continue to hear endless nonsense from Washington about how "soft power" is so much more effective than military force. OK, show us. Three good men at West Point have given us a powerful information weapon against al Qaeda. Will our leaders have the sense to use it?