In 2013 I wrote an essay for COMMENTARY titled “The Failed War on the ‘War on Terror.’” The basic premise was that despite all the opposition to individual components of it from varied constituencies, the war on terror persisted because terrorism persisted as a threat.
The architecture of the war may have been imperfect—my article points out some of the assumptions that probably should have been challenged more forcefully—but its designers saw the big picture more clearly than its critics did.
Asymmetric warfare in the 21st century is so fundamentally different from traditional armed conflict that to use the same set of military, diplomatic, and strategic assumptions for both is absurd, no less today than in 2001. And the recent terrorist attack in Michigan is only the latest example of how desperately the West needs to fix the lens through which it assesses resurgent Islamic terrorism.
Ayman Ghazali was the Lebanon-born naturalized U.S. citizen who attempted to massacre young Jewish children at a large synagogue last week. Reporting has focused on his motivation: The New York Times describes a man mourning two brothers who were “killed in an airstrike in Lebanon stemming from the United States and Israel’s war in Iran.”
Strange language. Iran and Lebanon do not border each other, so this wasn’t an errant shot. Why would the strike in Lebanon “stem from” the war in Iran? Only because Iranian military proxies based in Lebanon decided to attack Israel in defense of their masters in Tehran. Israel retaliated.
Forces in Lebanon decided to open up another front in the war, though you would get none of that just by reading the Times’s description.
And just who is it in Lebanon who is firing at Israel on behalf of Iran? That would be Hezbollah, arguably the most dangerous terrorist organization on the planet for decades. It is also soaked in the blood of Americans it has been murdering at will for 40-plus years.
Similarly to the Times, NPR’s “domestic extremist correspondent” described Ghazali as a man who “lost two brothers last week to an Israeli strike in Lebanon.”
Finally, we got the inevitable reveal. From CNN:
“The Israeli military said the brother of the man who drove a vehicle laden with explosives into a Michigan synagogue Thursday was a Hezbollah commander killed in a strike last week.
“In a statement Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces said the assailant’s brother, Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali, was in charge of managing weapons operations in the Iranian proxy group’s Badr unit.
“IDF Arabic language spokesman Avichay Adraee said Ibrahim Ghazali was killed March 5 when the IDF struck a Hezbollah military building used to store weapons.”
And now we know the rest of the story.
You’ll notice how similar this pattern is to the reporting all throughout the Gaza war. Israel, fighting a defensive war, strikes a military target and kills commanders in an Iran-sponsored terrorist army. The media report the people killed by their cover stories—that is, their supposed day jobs. Hence the IDF stands accused of killing a doctor we later discover to be a Hamas commander; an emergency medical responder with Doctors Without Borders who turns out to be a Palestinian Islamic Jihad ranking officer; and a journalist with a terror propaganda outlet who is also an active member of Hamas in good standing.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the West has returned to a point at which terrorists are essentially treated as noncombatants. This is a travesty, and it is also suicidal.
Without the war-on-terror framing, the only “war” on at the moment is between Iran and the U.S.-Israel alliance, with NATO countries contributing as well. But long before the war came to Iranian territory, Iran had begun the war a thousand miles away. Israel, in fact, had to fight through all those miles of Iran-aligned troops just to get to Iran itself.
The war was started in Israel by the Iran-sponsored-and-directed Hamas, based in Gaza. The second front opened up in the north, with Hezbollah. There were Iranian clients in Syria and proxies in Yemen and in Iraq, which had killed Americans in Jordan.
By the time the U.S. joined strikes on Iran proper, the war that Iran had started had been raging for two years.
It was a war waged by terror proxies. Terrorists who have cover stories, who hide among the civilian population, who militarize homes and shops and the very ground underneath their feet. What appears to have happened in Michigan last week was this: A terrorist tried to murder dozens of Jewish children in America because his terrorist-commander brother was killed in a war he started.
Hamas fighters are very rarely referred to by Western media and politicians as soldiers, but it began the October 7 war with an army of perhaps 40,000 men. Hezbollah itself is a global menace. All of these groups hide among civilians and target civilians, and part of the reason it is so effective is because political and media institutions in the West treat them as civilians.
Terrorism is a different kind of threat from traditional state warfare. It only makes sense to treat it that way. And that means recognizing the war on terror never truly went away, it was merely neglected. That neglect must end.
