Posted on 07/27/2004 5:27:47 AM PDT by SJackson
All of a sudden everybody's asking, "Who are we fighting anyway?" It's an interesting question, but it's not nearly as important as many of the debaters believe. The 9/11 Commission tells us we're fighting Islamists, or Islamist terrorists, and David Brooks has cooed over this, because he likes the notion that we're fighting an ideology. The White House has devoted lots of man-hours to this matter, trying to figure out how we win "the battle of ideas," and the Internet is full of people who argue, variously, that we're fighting "radical Islam," "Saddam's die-hards," "foreign fighters," or even "Islam itself." All of these "Islamic" definitions guide us back to Samuel Huntington's thesis that there is a war — or at least a clash — of civilizations underway. Most share the conviction that we're fighting something that is unusually dangerous because not a traditional enemy, that is to say, a state. It's much more than that, or so they believe.
I wonder. An awful lot of our enemies' ideology comes from us, as several scholars — Bernard Lewis and Amir Taheri, for starters — have stressed. The virulent anti-Semitism at the core of the (Sunni and Shiite) jihadists is right out of the Fuhrer's old playbook, which helps understand why jihad and the revival of anti-Semitism in Europe are running along in tandem. Sure, there's ample xenophobia in Islam, and Bat Yeor's fine work on dhimmitude abundantly documents the Muslim drive to dominate the infidel. But the kind of anti-Semitism — hardly distinguishable from anti-Americanism nowadays — that we find in Middle Eastern gutters has a Western trademark. It started in France in the 19th century, got a pseudoscientific gloss from the Austrians and Germans a generation later, and spread like topsy.
Notice, please, that many scholars at the time insisted that Nazism was first and foremost an ideology, not a state. Indeed, Hitler was at pains to proclaim that he was fighting for an Aryan reich, not a German state. And if you read some of the literature on Nazism or for that matter the broader work on totalitarianism produced by the "greatest generation," you'll find a profound preoccupation with "winning the war of ideas" against fascism. Indeed, a good deal of money and energy was expended by our armed forces, during and after the war, to de-Nazify and de-fascify the Old World.
But the important thing is that when we smashed Hitler, Nazi ideology died along with him, and fell into the same bunker.
The same debate over "whom or what are we fighting" raged during the Cold War, when we endlessly pondered whether we were fighting Communist ideology or Russian imperialism. Some — mostly intellectuals, many of them in the CIA — saw the Cold War primarily in ideological terms, and thought we would win if and only if we wooed the world's masses from the Communist dream. Others warned that this was an illusion, and that we'd better tend to "containment" else the Red Army would bring us and our allies to our knees.
In the end, when the Soviet Empire fell, the appeal of Communism was mortally wounded, at least for a generation.
You see where I'm going, surely. The debate is a trap, because it diverts our attention and our energies from the main thing, which is winning the war. It's an intellectual amusement, and it gets in our way. As that great Machiavellian Vince Lombardi reminds us, winning is the only thing.
That's why the public figure who has best understood the nature of the war, and has best defined our enemy, is George W. Bush. Of all people! He had it right from the start: We have been attacked by many terrorist groups and many countries that support the terrorists. It makes no sense to distinguish between them, and so we will not. We're going after them all.
Yes, I know he seems to lose his bearings from time to time, especially when the deep thinkers and the sheikhs and the Europeans and Kofi Annan and John Paul II insist we can't win the hearts and minds of the Middle East unless we first solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he has repeatedly pulled himself out of that trap very nicely, and he invariably does so in terms that show he has a uniquely deep understanding of our enemies.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
ORCHIDES FORUM TRAHITE
CORDES ET MENTES VENIANT
Grab them ball the b@lls
And their hearts and minds will follow
"There is no substitute for victory."
Screw "fighting an ideology."
Kill the terrorist, his "ideology" dies with him!
Everybody loves a winner.
These evil morons dont want you to win there hearts or minds, They want you dead.
I was about to post this article without doing a search because I hadn't seen it before, and have been spending a lot of time on-line. Maybe it didn't get much attention because it was posted too early in the day.
This article restates the thinking behind the Iraq war in a way that I wish the Republican party would emulate.
I think that the point of the article was that attempting to win over the hearts and minds of the terrorists is an empty gesture, a distraction, that we should just get the job done and talk later.
Won't happen, in public pronouncements the Republican position is that most of them are peaceful.
Actually, the statement that most of the Muslims are peaceful is meant to disengage from the philosophical arguments over the definition of who are enemy is. It is meant to redefine the threat of terrorism in a more inclusive, less ideologic way. So, in a sense this article is only restating what Bush has been saying all along. Bush's statements about the religion of peace overly simplify the issue. This article goes much deeper.
From a practical perspective, it's served to define the enemy, in a political sense, as al Quaida, not radical Islam. That's a problem, and that's why we're arguing, politically, over issues such as Sadaam's connection to "al Quaida", our enemy, when his connections to terror are clear.
Of course it also allows us to ignore the rol of allies such as Eqypt, Pakistan, and the Saudis in terror as well.
I'm not sure we really disagree, and I read the article. Sadaam and Assad, and Libya, the Sudan, Afghanistan, et al, shelter Islamic terrorists, not "plain vanilla terrorists". The IRA has never operated there. The Saudis and Egyptians suupply the ideology. Jihadist (better term than Islamic?) terror is the enemy, and those who shelter them. IMO, GWB hasn't really made that point, though I think he gets it.
But it's not just a matter of sheltering the terrorists, it's a matter of incubating the terrorists, by providing a sheltering enviroment. Incubating is more that just sheltering. Hopefully, if we take away the incubator and remove the life support, we will weaken the terrorists enough to defeat them in their own land.
Sheltering, a long list which extends to England, France, and here at home.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.