Al Qaeda's Seven Phase Strategy

Through analysis of an interview in Der Spiegel
Bill Roggio reviews the grand seven stages of Al Qaeda’s plan to bring
the whole world under a new caliphate.

The big question is how seriously we should take it. So a rich kid holed
out in Afghanistan has formulated a grand plan to take over the world. So
he has staged a spectacular attack on the icons of the great world hegemon. So
he predicted that the US would attack Iraq in response. So he got a bunch
of young hotheads fighting the Great Satan in Iraq.

So what?

The two competing western responses to the outrages of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7
both assume that Al Qaeda is a major movement that requires western response.
The Bush strategy is to move militarily and culturally into the Middle East against
the regimes that condone or encourage terrorism. The left’s strategy is to blame
the west for its hegemonic oppression of the Middle East and to demand
withdrawal from the West Bank and Iraq.

In evaluating these two strategies we must confess that we do not really
know if Al Qaeda is a real mass movement with the power to inspire millions
of young men to join up (e.g. another Nazi movement) or whether it is little more than a rich kids’ talking
shop spiced with a bit of mayhem (e.g. another Baader-Meinhof gang). But
we can figure out how this uncertainty meshes with the two strategies, Bush’s
and the left’s. In Bush’s strategy we are taking no chances; we are treating
the terrorists as a serious enemy that may turn out to be very powerful. The
left’s approach is a good way to encourage Al Qaeda to become in fact
a militant mass movement by giving it effortless
victories (unilateral withdrawal from Iraq and the West Bank) that would encourage it to believe that it was
a powerful movement on the march.

Coming up soon, of course, is the question of Iran.