Naming the enemy
One of the things that we discover as we grow older is that it is not inevitable to live in the freedom, luxury or security that currently bless early 21st century America. Could America become Bangladesh? Hardly, but who is to say that catastrophe could not return America to the harshness of government in the seventeenth century? If New York and Washington, DC, were blown to smithereens by a couple of suitcase nukes, national wealth decreased by 50%, and every mortgage in the land in default, do you think that people would put up with the politics of San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or the no-longer-extant Upper West Side?
Clearly, we must prevent such destruction from happening. But can we? In a recent piece, we discussed Hugh Hewitt’s correct view that the USA is not in a war with Islam, but we noted that it is fair to say that people claiming to represent true Islam are in a war with us. This is way too verbose and complicated a formulation to fight a war from. Mark Steyn, we noted, made the observation that terrorist-Islam and establishment-Islam seem often to be kissing cousins, which is objectively verifiable.
The fulcrum on which the importance of these definitions rests is this: how dangerous are these maniacs to us? The Left wants to define this by their average dangerousness — eg, 4 bombers in a mall or on the subway. The Right wants to define this, in a Clauswitzian way, by their maximum dangerousness: 2 bombers, but both with nukes in NYC and DC, or another incarnation of the Magnificent 19, all with smallpox and riding Southwest Airlines and JetBlue until they keel over.
To be sure, there are dangers in overestimating the threat from the Islamist maniacs. But that is not where the balance of dangers lies today, and we can illustrate this in a very simple way: it is still, four years after 9-11, socially unacceptable to name our enemy.
It is fatuous to say that our enemy are Islamists who carry out suicide and other bombings. Is the infantry the enemy in a war? If someone says the enemy is Islam, that is not only factually incorrect, it is also, revealingly, taboo. As Freud has taught us, where there is hysteria and taboo, there is often some important truth in the background.
Here is our definition: our enemy is anyone who supports, or believes there is any excuse for, Islamist terrorism.
The beauty of this definition is that it is clear; in our view it is also correct. The problem is that it includes a significant swath of the Islamic world, some western european politicians and intellectuals, and quite a few Americans. Where do you place the Palestinian lobby, Ken Livingstone, the “root causes” people, those who say that Gitmo and Abu Ghraib are the problem, etc? — you get the idea of the difficulty we face.
It is possible the “average dangerousness” people will be correct — those like John Kerry who want to view this war as primarily a criminal matter. In our view this is unlikely: the Jihad against the West is scripturally based and part of subduing the unbelievers in the service of Allah, as Amir Taheri and others have said.
There will be no conclusion to this war until (a) Islam’s leaders insist that any notion of Jihad be utterly repudiated, and that the Islamic mission — to conquer and govern the earth — be understood in anagogical or allegorical terms; or (b) until the foot soldiers, financial and logistical supporters, and clerical backers of Jihad have been killed or resoundingly defeated. Perhaps there is another way; if so, it is not obvious to us. Somewhere along the way, the fuzzy thinkers, fellow travelers, fifth columnists and Leftists who try to muddy thinking and forestall decisive actions will have to change their minds or become silent. This latter part can’t happen too soon.