INP/AFP Joint Op Nets Terrorists in Indonesia: World's Largest Muslim Nation Proves Moderate Islamic Democracy Successful

A significant event in the War on Terror occurred in Java, Indonesia last week, and was publicly reported for the first time today. As reported in The Australian, late last week a joint operation between Indonesian and Australian police resulted in the arrests of 7 members of the terrorist group Jammah Islamiah (JL) in Java. An eighth member of the group was shot and killed during the police raid. According to Australian Federal Police (AFP) officials, the terrorists were in the advanced stages of preparing a bombing campaign estimated to be twice the size of the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, mostly tourists. The AFP’s interest in the JL terrorists stemmed from the fact that 88 Australians died in the Bali bombings.

According to Indonesian National Police (INP) and AFP officials quoted in The Australian, the raid netted the following seizures: 20 completed bombs; 1,606 pounds of explosive materials; 99 pounds of TNT; nearly 200 detonators; 1,000+ rounds of ammunition; and a cache of weapons.

The INP and AFP have successfully disrupted this future attack which was in the advanced planning stages and that in and of itself is a significant achievement worthy of accolade. However, this counterterrorism operation, for all its intrinsic results, symbolizes an incredibly important truth that radical Islamic terrorists worldwide, and America’s current anti-Iraq War Democratic Party, do not want to hear: Muslim populations can and have embraced democracy and joined with other democracies to root terrorism out of their midst. Opponents of the Iraq War, who claim that attempting to establish democracy in an Islamic Middle Eastern nation is foolish and doomed to failure, argue that position out of historical ignorance. Although not a Middle Eastern nation, Indonesia is a success story that should be closely examined before making a determination that Muslim societies do not want democracy or freedom.

Indonesia, with a population of 245 million (2006 statistics), is the world’s largest Muslim nation. Freed from Japanese control after WWII, Indonesia experienced nearly 50 years of authoritarian Islamic rule until 2005. In that year, in an effort to establish democracy, Indonesia reached an internal peace agreement with armed separatists who preferred the controlling dominance of radical Islam to freedom and modernization (parallel with Iraqi insurgents?), which led to democratic elections in December 2006. Indonesia is now governed by an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch, and is committed to combating radical Islamic terrorism, which continues to pose a threat to the democratically elected government.

Democrats in Congress incessantly complain that the Iraqi police are not doing enough to root out terrorists and that the Iraqi military has not achieved sustained viability as quickly as we had hoped, but such expectations are unrealistic and should not be shaped by short-sighted short term measures of success. It took Indonesia nearly 50 years of internal government evolution, but the people eventually demanded and established democratic elections and three branches of government to share power. The suppression of radical Islamic separatists was also required to achieve democracy. It should not be forgotten that our forces in Iraq are working to do just that, in conjunction with the Iraqi military and police forces.

Because of its location and more isolated archipelago geography, Indonesia did not suffer from significant infiltration by or interference from neighboring nations as its democracy took shape and blossomed. Iraq, of course, is surrounded by other Islamic nations, mainly radical Islamic nations like Iran and Syria that share borders with Iraq but do not share the desire for freedom and democracy for their people. Sheer proximity to and access from interfering radical Islamic nations ensures that Iraq’s road to stability and the survival of its democracy will be more difficult than Indonesia’s, but the bigoted notion that Muslim populations do not want democracy is an anti-war myth. An even larger myth is that negotiating with Iran and Syria will bring peace to Iraq. Yet that is precisely what Speaker Pelosi did this week during her visit to the Middle East, which was actually an end-run around the constitutional authority of the President to conduct foreign policy. Watching Speaker Pelosi walking through marketplaces in Damascus wearing a traditional head covering required of females by the fundamentalist brand of Islamic Sharia, I could not help but chuckle at the irony that the Speaker would rather submit to second-class treatment for women and negotiate with terrorist governments than support democratization and modernization of formerly fundamentalist Iraq. The highest ranking woman in the history of American politics covered her head in respect for radical Islam while disrespecting our Constitution by conducting "alternative Democratic foreign policy" with a government designated by our State Department to be a state sponsor of terrorism.

The raid and arrests of JL terrorists last week in Java demonstrated that the largest Muslim nation on earth is working actively to eliminate terrorists residing, planning, and operating within its borders. They also demonstrated that the world’s largest Muslim nation works willingly and well with non-Muslim nations, in this case Australia, to avert disastrous attacks outside of its borders. In other words, the world’s largest Muslim nation is doing what America’s anti-war Democrats and even some Republicans (Chuck Hagel) have declared an impossibility: Successfully meshing Islamic tradition and belief with a modern democracy and economy as a responsible member of the global community of free nations. Refusing to believe that Iraq can achieve similar successes, with vast natural resources and a strategic geographical position, smacks of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” President Bush has warned America not to accept.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, in the epilogue to his enlightening book My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, wrote a terrific summary of why radical Islamic terrorists hate America and why American-Iraqi victory in Iraq is critical to the future not just of Iraq but all other nations in which radical Islam quashes liberty and the advance of human freedom. I quote Freeh here at length, and encourage readers to compare his analysis with the incessant sound bites from Democrats about “redeployment,” “changing course in Iraq,” “bringing the troops home quickly,” and “our troops should not be caught in the middle of a ‘civil war’”:

We need to remember, too, that an idea can be more powerful than an entire arsenal of missiles and bombs. The terrorist brief against the United States includes our superpower status and our determination to continue guaranteeing the presence of a Jewish state in Israel, but that the terrorists really hate is America’s diversity and its traditions of individual liberty. They are violently opposed to free ideas, to freedom of religion, to free markets and freedom for women. Worse, and what makes their acts increasingly desperate, they know that they are on the wrong side of history. From Athens to the Covenant of Abraham, from the Magna Carta to the Warsaw Uprising, men and women have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that they want to be free; and increasingly, they are acting on that desire.

Today, the authoritarians who hold power in Damascus and Tehran are more threatened by the nascent democracy taking root next door in Iraq than they are by any army, however powerful. With its restive, youthful, Web-based population, Iran is virtually certain in my mind to overthrow its fundamentalist mullahs within a decade. Millions of Iranians will soon be free, and great Iranian-American patriots like my good friend Nasser Kazeminy will have served the cause of peaceful democratic transition. Likewise, the fascists running Damascus have to be more preoccupied with their own exit strategies than they are with clinging to the levers of power.

In their place, I’m convinced, self-government will rise-flawed at first, as new systems are always flawed, but powerful all the same. Indonesia is living proof that a largely Muslim nation can establish a working democracy. (Any suggestion to the contrary is pure prejudice.) That and Turkey will be the model of the future for the Islamic worlds, not Iran and Syria. And a democracy takes root and grows, conflict will die down and terrorism abates because that is an odd feature about true self-government. Nations that practice it, ones that aren’t in the grip of authoritarians, of dictators, of theocratic zealots rarely, if ever, wage war on or seek to destabilize one another. Millions of newly freed people will demand free markets, enterprise, and opportunity, and then rule of law, once established in the Middle East, will work the same revolution there that it did in the 1960s in the American South, when tiny group of federal judges had the courage to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution.

Indonesia is currently experiencing much of what Freeh described, and its willingness to raid terrorist hideouts and assist other democracies is further proof that the vision President Bush has for Iraq is not a noble but misguided policy, as Democrats have portrayed it. His vision has already been proven successful in a much larger nation than Iraq, yet because it has not happened quickly enough for the impatient sound bite media Democrats, they are now conducting separate negotiations with official state sponsors of terrorism (Syria) and are loudly calling for the abandonment Iraq’s fledgling democracy while it faces constant destructive interference from Iran and Syria. There are only two possible explanations for the behavior of Speaker Pelosi and the anti-war Democrats: first, they despise President Bush so much that they cannot afford to allow the Iraq War to be won, as a victory there would cement President Bush’s legacy as the man who brought democracy to the Middle East and ensure a Republican sweep in the 2008 elections; or second, Democrats are prejudiced in their belief that democracy should not be shared or supported in Muslim nations because Muslims are too backward in their thinking to truly want democracy.

Either explanation is reprehensible, but there are no others. If their claim that the war has been mismanaged is sincere, then they should be proposing more effective methods and strategies for winning, not ending, the war for Iraqi freedom. Their arguments and attempts to usurp President Bush’s war powers clearly indicate that Iraqi freedom is not the Democrats’ goal. Better to win the war and keep Iraqis free than spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours posturing over pre-war intelligence and whether Saddam had WMD. There will be ample time for such debates and hearings after the war has been won and a stable, self-sustaining Iraqi democracy is controlling its own destiny.

As the INP-AFP joint investigation of JL terrorists in Java, demonstrated, responsible democratic Muslim nations can play a key role in identifying terrorists who need safe haven in which to hide and plan future attacks. When these safe havens determine for themselves, as Indonesia did, that they do not accept radial Islamic terrorists in their midst, finding and eliminating fugitive and unprotected terrorists will become a more manageable proposition. Australians owe the INP a debt of gratitude for capturing the terrorists before they could kill more Australian tourists. The world’s democracies should thank Indonesia for providing an encouraging example of Muslim democratic success when small minded people had declared such success impossible or not worth supporting.