Rethinking the Battle of Ideas: How the United States Can Help Muslim Moderates

Terrorism Religion

The so-called War on Terror seems to be with us to stay. More than six years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, even the war’s critics, who might prefer this campaign to be waged under the law- enforcement paradigm, have resigned themselves to it,1 and presidential candidates of both parties almost universally pay deference to it. But there can be no political victory in this supposed war without the emergence of an authentic and legitimate moderate politics in the Muslim world. This is hardly news to the architects of U.S. counterterrorist policy, who in recent years have devoted increasingly coordinated thought and action to cultivating Muslim moderates.