IN DECEMBER 1999, the Clinton administration issued a worldwide terrorist alert to Americans overseas advising them to avoid crowded millennial celebrations. Bomb-toting Islamic militants under the banner of the Saudi terrorist Usama bin Laden had declared war, so Americans were to stay discreetly indoors while other Westerners partied. In Israel and Jordan, American Christians were strongly advised to avoid any public manifestation of their faith. Vexed by the growing number, geographical range, and fearfulness of Washington’s warnings, one senior Foreign Service officer declared the millennial alarm "the chicken-little PR finale of America’s cover-your-ass foreign policy."

Unfortunately, this hard-nosed diplomat was wrong. The policy he deplored was not about to end. The Bush administration has continued and actually surpassed its predecessor’s display of timidity in the Middle East. The possibility of terrorist attacks recently prompted the Pentagon to withdraw U.S. Marines from military exercises in Jordan and hastily move ships anchored in Bahrain, the home base of the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. Likewise, pistol-packing FBI officials investigating the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, decided to scoot—against the counsel of the State Department and the U.S. embassy in San’a—when they thought a terrorist attack might be imminent.

Which prompts the question: Are we a great power or not? If we are, then what in the world are we doing running from men whose mission in life it is to make us flee? If Marines and men-of-war cannot hold their own against the specter of a Saudi terrorist, how will our friends, let alone our enemies, in the macho Middle East measure us against real heavyweights like Saddam Hussein or the clerics of Iran?

Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, scored an impressive victory by nearly sinking the Cole, yet Washington still has not responded. Our fear is pure oxygen to Islamic militants. Every alert, particularly when it panics U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, sends an adrenaline rush into the central nervous system of men truly convinced that with God’s help and the right explosives they can crack the will of the infidels who are, in their eyes, destroying the one true faith.

Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to yank the Marines out of Jordan is, when viewed from the mud-brick and cinder-block ghettos of the Middle East, an extraordinary triumph, further proof that the martyrs of the Cole attack died gloriously. America’s military leaders may think that they’re being prudent with our soldiers; the average man in the streets of Amman certainly knows better. Terrorism is war by unconventional means. Its ultimate objective is the psychological debilitation of the enemy through fear. In the fight against terrorism, the U.S. military’s ever-more exclusive focus on "force protection" diminishes the awe in which America is held abroad, the ultimate guarantor of the safety of U.S. civilians and soldiers, especially in lands where hostility to the West rests near the surface.

Martyrdom has a long and complex history in the Muslim world. It began with God’s promise of paradise to the seventh-century warriors who died expanding the first Islamic state. Over the centuries, rules and understandings evolved about the pivotal difference between combatants and civilians, but these have evaporated in the fundamentalists’ radical modernity, which divides the world cleanly and brutally between good and evil. If we want to play hardball with Islamic militants—and the Bush administration isn’t spending billions of dollars on counterterrorism to be nice—we need to pay more attention to the history and metaphysics of Islamic extremism. In other words, we need to take bin Laden’s men apart psychologically. Cutting off the flow of oxygen to the Muslim world’s anti-American radicals isn’t an impossible task, so long as we patiently hold our ground.
Val:Y