MUST READ: QUESTION PERIOD: WAR OF THE WORLDS

Question Period: War of the Worlds
By Walid Phares

Walid Phares is a Lebanese-American historian who has just released his sixth book, The War of Ideas: Jihadism versus Democracy. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and a visiting fellow with the European Foundation for Democracies in Brussels.

WS: In your new book, you say the war on terror is actually a war of ideas. Why do you think many in the West are slow to recognize this?

Walid Phares: At first, the West and other democracies didn't even realize they were at war with the jihadis or that the latter had declared war against them decades ago. Western intellectual elites have ignored the threat and portrayed the ideology as a form of protest against colonialism and western foreign policies, while in reality it was and remains jihadism, a doctrine calling for a new imperialism and the re-establishment of an old empire, the Caliphate.

If this is a war of ideas, do militaries have any role to play?

Walid Phares: Militaries have a responsibility when military and security situations occur. They fight the hardware dimension of the war on terror. The NGOs, human rights activists, students, women, journalists, intellectuals, artists, and civil society in general--the ones who participate in the war of ideas--are the software dimension of it.

Defense has to do with countering the terrorist threat until civil societies can defeat the fascist ideologies in their midst. During the Cold War, NATO defended the West until the forces of change acted from inside the Soviet Union. In this war on terror, the West has gathered military resources around the world and within its countries, but little was achieved in terms of the war of ideas, particularly investing in intellectual resistance and reaching out to the forces of change inside the societies where the battlefields of ideas are decisive

There's a section in your book where you say that the democracies are in real danger of losing this war. In what ways do you think we're losing?

Walid Phares: Winning the war is to be able to contain the jihadi terror forces (regimes and organizations) until the counter-jihadi forces rise and win their war of ideas against the totalitarians, authoritarians and fascists. Losing the war of ideas is when . . . the West is not able either to identify the ideological threat or to extend support to the forces of change inside the Arab and Muslim world. . . . [In] my book, I argue that democracies have to win this war of ideas from within; that is, making sure the public is educated and informed and thus engaged in shaping policies. Then, as the West regains consciousness of the problem, it should help the civil societies in the greater Middle East to counter the jihadi ideologies, establish an alternative set of values and, eventually, in one generation, reverse the influence of the jihadis to a minimal size. . . .

The West is losing as long as it is not advancing forward in the war of ideas. It has all the resources to achieve success, but the pressure groups, mostly funded by oil-producing regimes from the region, have penetrated its educational system, some of its media, and are delaying the rise of awareness from within.

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Pertinent Links:

1) Question Period: War of the Worlds