Among the cache of documents that the SEALs captured during their raid of Osama Bin Laden’s compound last year, one in particular should make many Republican foreign-policy advisers reassess their whole approach to the “war on terror.”
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In this letter, Bin Laden regrets that his organization’s original name, “Qa’ida al-Jihad”, has come to be known as simply “al-Qa’ida.” The abridgement, he writes, “reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them, and allows the enemies to claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam and Muslims.” Rather, the United States could claim that it was at war only with the al-Qaida organization, which it depicted as “an outside entity from the teachings of Islam.” Bin Laden complains that Obama has “repeatedly” made this argument. Therefore, he concluded, if al-Qaida adopted a new name, which included a reference to Islam, “it would be difficult for him to say” that he wasn’t at war with Islam.
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Along the same lines, Bin Laden is upset that his enemies “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims, because they felt that saying the war on terror could appear to most people to be a war on Islam, especially after they unjustly spilled the blood of innocent Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

And so, there it is: confirmation of the critique that many Democrats (and foreign-policy specialists of various political stripes) have lodged against the Republicans’ approach toward the war on terror this past decade—that their pet phrases (“Islamo-fascism,” “Islamo-terrorism,” even “war on terror”) play into the hands of al-Qaida, reinforcing the rallying cry bellowed by Bin Laden and his successors that America is waging war on Islam.