By Matt Korade, CQ Staff

As al Qaeda transforms from discrete terrorist network to a franchising organization for frustrated, religious-inspired nationalists, the need to counter Islamist, anti-Western propaganda grows ever more urgent, three terrorism experts told the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

And yet it is in “the War of Ideas” in which the U.S. government has performed the poorest, said Robert Grenier, the former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.

“It is widely understood that in a contest in which our enemy is more properly understood as a popular movement, countering the enemy’s propaganda and undermining his popular appeal become critical elements in the strategic battle,” Grenier said. “Otherwise, we run the risk of waging a highly competent and effective tactical struggle at the potential cost of strategic defeat.”

While killing or capturing Osama bin Laden no doubt would dispirit al Qaeda, his removal would probably not be fatal because the al Qaeda rallying cry has today become as fluid as rhetoric itself, Grenier said.

Examples abound of nationalistic, terrorist groups taking on the al Qaeda banner, including al Qaeda in the Maghreb and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, agreed Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. A common theme in their rhetoric is that the West is out to destroy Islam.

Such messages have spread rapidly through Europe, which was late to see the problems associated with the rapid importation of Islamist ideologies through unrestricted immigration, said Peter Bergen, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Attacks from London to Madrid, and numerous foiled attempts, have followed.

Although it has gained less traction in the United States, radicalization is prevalent here, as was revealed in the nearly 100,000 documents released after the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity accused by the government of funneling donations to terrorist groups in the Middle East, said Emerson.

A number of seemingly mainstream Muslim groups in the United States had their progenitor in the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic fundamentalist group from which many of these terrorist groups have derived their ideologies, whose stated goal is to subjugate and overthrow the Western world from within, Emerson said.

“I call this almost the stealth jihad,” Emerson said. And unless the United States sees the equal importance of battling al Qaeda and the radicalization that gives rise to such groups, it cannot win the war, he said.

The radical propaganda espoused by such groups serves to obscure the goal of terrorism movements, which in the near term is to overthrow secular regimes as part of the struggle for the Islamic world, Grenier said. Al Qaeda and its spin-offs have focused on the West to remove the main prop of unpopular Muslim governments and prepare the way for Islamist domination.

The West is depicted as broadly anti-Muslim, not just attacking Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan but also supporting non-Muslim oppressors in such places as Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia and Chechnya, he said.

The West thus becomes a common enemy against which different terrorist groups can rally and also serves as a broader focus of criticism around which more moderate Muslims can agree, Grenier said. This has the effect of forcing allied Muslim governments to act covertly in dealing with the United States and also makes the larger Muslim population ambivalent toward the West.

And yet, Grenier said, it’s important to understand that the problem of Islam’s relationship with the West isn’t just one of Muslim perceptions, but also policy. While the Muslim world is rife with conspiracy theories regarding the motives of the West, the environment from which these ideas spring is nurtured by the absence of definitive action from the United States and other Western nations to resolve decades-old problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir.