On Saturday the New York Times sniffed that it was “un-American” to “paint the Democratic candidate as a friend to terrorism.” The Times editorial board, that august organ of mainstream opinion, didn’t feel it worth their time, however, to examine the core question: which candidate would the terrorists prefer?

I must admit a bias in the issue, seeing as I’m the proud owner of a “ten out of ten terrorists are for Anybody but Bush” button and bumper sticker (I stopped wearing the button after several people, in a truly alarming development, interpreted it as an anti-Bush attack). However, the essential question remains unanswered: which candidate would the terrorists rather see in the White House come January 2005?

Let’s start by looking at the latest anti-Bush meme floating about, this idea that the President has been the “best recruiting tool that the terrorists ever had”. This, in my opinion, is patent nonsense. But before we get to that, we need to ask a more fundamental question: what are the strategic goals of the terrorists? Or, more briefly: what do they want?

Broadly, the strategic goals of Islamism are something like the following:
1) Destroy the State of Israel.
2) Force the United States to withdraw its forces from the Middle East and abandon all interventions in the Moslem world.
3) Impose a “pure” form of Islamic law upon nations within the Moslem world.
4) Reclaim the “lost territories” of Islam (in addition to Israel, this would cover chunks of Europe as well as disputed zones such as Chechnya and Kashmir).

The question then becomes: are the Islamists any closer to achieving any of these goals than they were four years ago? Have more than three years of intense fighting moved their cause any closer to its objectives? Do four more years of George W. Bush in the White House appear likely to assist them in any of these things?

We must answer all of these questions with an emphatic “no.”

Israel has, through a tough campaign led by the gallant Ariel Sharon, truly crushed Hamas and managed to mostly stem the tide of terrorism. The so-called “Second Intifada” has clearly been defeated. Terrorists may still kill Israelis, but the chances of a pro-Palestinian settlement have declined dramatically in the last four years.

The United States is far less likely to be forced to disengage from the Islamic world (so long as Bush remains President) than it was four years ago. US forces have engaged the terrorists on their home soil and won repeatedly. Nations such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Libya have all been forced to move in a much more pro-American direction. Four years ago Saudi Arabia was paying off al-Qaeda as part of a protection arrangement, now they’re fighting and killing them. Pakistan was assisting the Taliban and al-Qaeda, now they’re hunting them. Libya was working to acquire weapons of mass destruction, now they’ve given them up and exposed what one expert called the “Wal Mart of nuclear proliferation”, setting back the efforts of terrorist and terrorists states to acquire nukes by years.

The news on the third count is largely positive as well. Afghanistan, which four years ago was the most extreme Islamist state in the world, is about to hold the first free elections in its history. Iraq, a nation with a long history of repression, aggression, and the sponsorship of terror, is going to go to the polls in January. There are anti-regime protests in Iran almost daily. Even states such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are taking steps towards democratic reform.

History will not allow any government to turn its back on these things. Women, once freed, will not again willingly submit to slavery. Anyone who thinks that free Iraqi women would now submit to live in an Islamist state is deluding themselves. Once the genesis of freedom has taken place in any part of the world it can only be undone by truly great efforts.

As to the final matter, the news there is even worse for the Islamists. In virtually every perimeter battle along the frontiers of Islam the last three years have brought ill tidings. Not only have the terrorists been turned back in Israel, but India has also been successful in turning the tide along its borders with Pakistan as well. Worse still (for the Islamists), the savagery with which their forces have behaved in the Chechen conflict has ensured that their dream of an Islamic state to be torn away from Russia will never come to pass.

In short: the Islamists are losing this war. They’re getting more attention now, but that’s simply because their atrocities are increasing in brutality.

Let’s look at the tactics adopted by the Islamists in Iraq and elsewhere in recent months. They’ve slaughtered schoolchildren for no good reason at Beslan. And, in Iraq, they’ve taken to kidnapping civilians and beheading them on camera. Tell me this: are these the actions of people who are winning or gaining in a war? Are these actions which are likely to bring recruits to the cause?

If you’re going to seriously argue to me that the Middle East is full of people who are going to look at what happened at Beslan and say to themselves, en masse, “I want to get in on that”, I’m going to have to seriously argue that it’s time to nuke the entire Middle East from one end to the other. Thankfully, I have a little more faith in the people on the region than others do.

In truth, there’s exactly zero evidence to back up the contention that the President has helped the terrorists in their recruiting efforts. Assertions that he has are, to say the least, counterintuitive.

Four years ago, when al-Qaeda was becoming increasingly venerated across the Islamic world, had the support from both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and when the only risk was an occasional cruise missile attack, I can imagine any number of young Moslems being attracted to the romance of Osama Bin Laden’s cause. Four years later, with al-Qaeda members being hunted like dogs all over the world, the organization starved for cash and its members driven to ever increasing acts of horror to attempt to get their point across, it’s far-fetched to think that people are going to look at the situation and say, “I want to sign on for that.”

So the question becomes this: what is there to recommend Kerry to the terrorists over Bush? The answer: lots.

The most obvious thing is this: far more than Bush, Kerry is likely to cut and run in Iraq. Frankly, having watched his public statements on the issue, I suspect that to do exactly that has been his plan all along. Even if it isn’t, it hardly takes a genius to figure out that Kerry is the candidate whose background suggests that he’d be open to such a move.

Under George W. Bush, US forces have relentlessly closed upon the terrorists and gone about the hard work of killing them. We get a constant stream of reports about dead or captured al-Qaeda functionaries and, while we lack a hard count, I don’t think anyone can dispute that the toll of the dead among the terrorists in the past three years runs into the thousands and perhaps the tens of thousands.

Does anyone think that John Kerry would pursue the terrorists that aggressively? Or do you think, as I do, that a President Kerry would constantly be looking for agreement and consent from foreign powers and that he’d be far more inclined than President Bush to listen to the whining of his lawyers, diplomats, and the other assorted people who, for reasons that are their own, tend to get in the way of killing people.

Now, if you’ve got some bizarre moral objection to the death of terrorists, then Kerry may well be your guy. However, I don’t think that any serious person can assert with a straight face that al-Qaeda fears a UN Security Council Resolution more than it does an American cluster bomb.

Only a fool or a liar (to repeat myself: a Democrat) would claim that al-Qaeda fears John Kerry more than it fears George W. Bush. A Kerry Presidency would mean increased prestige for al-Qaeda (who would be widely seen as having “beaten” President Bush) and such a perception would certainly drive more people to al-Qaeda (people flee a losing cause and rally to a winning one).

Most of all, we have the actions of the terrorists to show us just who they prefer. If they really thought, as so many try to claim, that the war is driving support to them, then why do they keep trying to unseat pro-war governments? Why is the core of al-Qaeda’s strategic planning today seemingly to defeat its opponents in the voting booths?

If al-Qaeda really thought that the war was such a great boon to its recruiting, wouldn’t it be staging attacks in non-combatant countries to try to draw them into the war instead of launching attacks against America’s allies to drive them out of the war?

So the question then becomes, is it somehow unfair or “un-American” to point any of this out? If one candidate’s policies are obviously favourable to an outside group when compared to the policies of his opponent, why shouldn’t this be pointed out?

The only reason I can think of is because the New York Times has, by fiat, declared the subject to be off limits. However, I put it to you that in election season which has descended to the level of having a major liberal organization launch a serious effort to blame the President for hurricanes, pretty much nothing ought to be off limits.