April 28, 2025:
Intelligence agencies avoid unpredictability because it often leads to failure. Nevertheless, intelligence specialists make a living clearing up, as much as they can, the fog of uncertainty. Failure usually appears unexpectedly leaving intel agencies to clean the mess up and restore clarity. An example of this was how Islamic terrorism seemed to appear out of nowhere in the late 20th century.
Large-scale Islamic terrorism actually began in the 1970s and changed Arab attitudes towards this perennial problem. For the first time in a long time the wealthiest Arab states, namely those with oil in the Persian Gulf recognized that Islamic terrorism was not just an ancient problem that kept recurring. Because of affluence and global communications, Islamic terrorism was a real threat to the lives of most Moslems and the wealth of the unprecedented number of Arabs who recently obtained it.
In response these Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates/ UAE and Qatar developed and built modern intelligence and internal security capabilities that have been increasingly able to deal with Islamic terrorism within their own borders as well as throughout the Islamic world. This was a modern solution for an ancient problem. But there was more.
Out of this came the unprecedented admission that we have met the enemy and they are us. There followed a frank discussion about the characteristics of Islamic culture that nurtured and periodically revived Islamic radicalism and terrorism. For over a thousand years something unexpected and terrifying happened. Every few generations Islamic conservatism became violent and disruptive. For the Moslem world it meant the War on Terror morphed into the War Against Islamic Radicalism. This religious radicalism has always been around, for Islam was born as an aggressive movement that used violence and terror to expand. Moslems long took it for granted but their neighbors didn’t.
Past periods of conquest are regarded fondly by Moslems, who are still taught by many of their religious leaders and teachers that non-Moslem infidels are inferior. The current enthusiasm for violence in the name of God has been building through the 20th and into the 21st centuries because the thousand year battles with Islamic conservatives have left Moslems, especially Arabs, both weaker and vulnerable to more advanced cultures.
Historically, Islamic radicalism flared up into mass bloodshed periodically, usually in response to corrupt governments or as a vain attempt to impose a religious solution on some social or political problem. The current violence was international because of the availability of planet wide mass media that needs a constant supply of headlines. One source of scary stories was the Islamic world, which was awash in tyranny and economic backwardness. This is why the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and their desire to establish democracies, sought and failed to do some permanent damage to the Islamic terrorism tradition. The excesses of Islamic terror groups trying to outdo each other in the righteous violence department was recorded and broadcast worldwide. This disgusted many observers, Moslems as well as infidels.
As a result there is growing condemnation of Islamic radicals by the media and leading Islamic clerics in Moslem nations. These changes did not come as quickly as many hoped, but at least they appear to have finally arrived. This came as a surprise to many Moslems. That’s because the past has had a huge influence on Islamic societies. For many, this resistance to change is considered a religious obligation. Many Moslems consider democracy a poisonous Western invention. There is still a lot of affection for the clerical dictatorship of legend, a just and efficient government run by virtuous religious leaders. The legends are false and there were centuries of failed religious dictatorships to prove it. But this legend became a core belief for many Moslems and tends to survive assaults by reality or the historical record.
Realizing this caused western leaders and intelligence specialists to take a closer look at Islamic terrorism. One awkward discovery was that Islamic scripture demands that Moslems attempt to convert non-Moslems, also known as infidels. Moslem scripture instructed the faithful to kill any infidel that refused to accept Islam.
That proved to be counterproductive because while Moslems were busy spreading their religion, the west was modernizing and becoming wealthier and more heavily armed than the Moslem world. Islamic radicalism and Islam itself was incapable of mustering much military power, and the movement largely relied on terrorism to gain attention. Most of the victims were fellow Moslems, which is why the radicals eventually became so unpopular among their own people that they ran out of popular support and faded away. This is what has been happening recently.
The 2003 American invasion of Iraq was a clever exploitation of this, forcing the Islamic radicals to fight in Iraq, where they killed many Moslems, especially women and children, thus causing the Islamic radicals to lose their popularity among Moslems. This sharp decline in the Islamic nation opinion polls was startling. The revival of Islamic terrorism in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings reminded people that this Religion-based violence is a liability for Islam, not a virtue, and this new spike in Islamic terrorism was roundly condemned by most Moslems.
For centuries the West did not get involved in these Islamic religious wars, unless attacked. Moreover, modern sensibilities made retaliation difficult. For example, fighting back is considered by Moslems as a culturally insensitive War on Islam. Some Western media picked up on this bizarre interpretation of reality. It got worse. Historians pointed out that the medieval Crusades were a series of wars fought in response to Islamic violence against Christians, not the opening act of aggression against Islam that continues to the present. The current war on terror was another of many Crusades. And there were many other Crusades brewing around the world, in areas where aggressive Islamic militants were making unprovoked war on their Christian and non-Moslem neighbors. Political correctness among academics and journalists caused media pundits to try and turn this reality inside out, but a close look at the violence in Africa, Asia and the Middle East shows a definite pattern of Islamic radicals persecuting those who do not agree with them, not the other way around.
While Islamic terrorism grabs most of the headlines, it is not the cause of many casualties, at least not compared to more traditional wars. The vast majority of the military-related violence and deaths in the world comes from many little wars in Africa, South America and Asia that rarely involve religion and get little media attention outside their region. Actually some of them are not so little. While casualties from international terrorism are relatively few, they are intentionally publicized by the killers. In contrast the dead and wounded from all the other wars actually comprise over 90 percent of all casualties. The only wars in the past 100 years which concerned Islamic issues and had more than a hundred thousand dead each were both Muslim against Muslim – the 1980s Iran v. Iraq War and the recent 21st century Syrian civil war. Islamic terrorism looms larger because the terrorists threaten attacks everywhere and at any time, putting a much larger population potentially in harm's way, and the more numerous potential victims are unhappy with that prospect. In the West and most Moslem nations, Islamic terrorism remains more of a threat than reality.
Saudi Arabia has been coping with the latest outbreak of Islamic terrorism since the 1970s. The Saudis adapted and drove most Islamic terrorists out of the country that many Islamic terrorists came from. For example, Osama bin Laden found this out in the 1980s and managed to flee Saudi Arabia, where he was born and raised. Bin Laden and many other Islamic terrorist leaders concluded that the West was at fault here, supplying the ideas and technology that made Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, impossible for Islamic terrorists to operate in. From that came the decision to launch more attacks in the West, to discourage Western nations from supporting Moslem despots and to encourage more Moslems to join the latest round of the eternal Islamic revolution. That actually worked for a while, but eventually people realized that most of those young men who went off to be Islamic terrorists were never heard from again and that most of their victims were fellow Moslems.
All this began in Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism, one of the strictest and most conservative strains of Islam developed over the centuries. With the arrival of vast quantities of oil income in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and wealthy individuals could finance a huge outreach program to recruit less zealous Moslems. This was done with cash to build mosques, religious schools and buy local cooperation as well as sending missionaries from Arabia. There were still a lot of old-school Moslems in Saudi Arabia but most now recognize that the Islamic terrorism, while a source of pride when Infidels died, was more of a liability than an asset.
Another incentive to reform and pacify Islam was the Shia form of Islam practiced in Iran. For over a thousand years the Indo-European Persians, now rebranded as Iranians, were a threat. The Iranians sought to overthrow the 80 percent Arab majority Sunni Islam predominance and control the Moslem holy places of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. This effort began in the 1980s and continues more than four decades later. Now Iran is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons and that changes a lot of attitudes in Arabia as well. Recent setbacks for Iran have left the Iranians sanctioned, disarmed and temporarily impotent. The Iranians have long been the regional superpower. Their resourcefulness, persistence and pride made them a formidable foe of the Sunni Arabs. Now the Iranians declare they want to destroy Israel and the United States as well.
Once more, the superiority of western intelligence and military forces thwarts these Iranian ambitions. Most Iranians would prefer to return to the good old days, before the 1980s revolution that left conservative religious zealots in charge of Iran. Back then Iran and Israel were allies and trading partners. The emergence of a religious dictatorship in Iran, as western intelligence agencies soon discovered, left Iran angry, threatening and unable to do anything against the more powerful, and rational western nations. This included Israel, which regularly humiliated Iranian radicals by defeating their attacks and destroying Iranian air defenses, missile manufacturing facilities and intelligence capabilities.