Later Bush attempted to move the labeling a little closer to home, calling the enemy "islamo-Fascist" and we have seen the criticism he drew for that, and it appears that the administration has subsequently backed off from this description.
No matter, the lapse is self-correcting. In order to advance their war, the islamo fascists must strike our homeland again. When they do, we will be in no mood for labeling games. If they do not, no harm - no foul and there is no war against terrorism, against Islam, or against "islamo fascists."
As important as clearly identifying the enemy is the need to clearly identify one's friends and allies. There are hundreds of millions of Arabs and over a billion Muslims. From this immense worldwide pool of Mohammedens the enemy needs to find only 19 suicidal terrorists to kill 3000 of our citizens, throw our economy into recession, shut down at least temporarily our stock market, and nearly bankrupt our airline industry. As the direct and indirect consequence of the of the attack by those 19 terrorists (out of a pool of 1.3 billion potential terrorists) we are waging two wars.
In neither war have we demonstrated that we are able to convert Muslims into allies who will root out the potential terrorists in their midst to make their own world safe, if not our own. Worse, we have demonstrated that we cannot bail out the boat fast enough in either Iraq or Afghanistan to kill the terrorists ourselves.
Under these circumstances, unless we want to wage unrestrained nuclear war against the whole of the crescent of Islam, murdering over a billion people, and still having tens of millions of Muslims in our midst, we ought to think through our policy about how to wage the war against terrorism. Before we declare war on one out of every five people in the world, we ought to pause for at least a moment.
I think we are in grave danger of losing this war against Islamic fascism which will not shrink from mass murder in our homeland with weapons of mass destruction. I think we don't know how to identify and destroy the cancer within Islam. I think only the Muslims themselves can do that. I think we should rack our brains to find ways of mobilizing the sane, moderate, Muslim world against the crazies in their midst. I do not see how labeling all Muslims our enemy advances that cause.
In addition to allies in the Muslim world, America cannot hope to survive this war if we lose our allies in western world. As one who lives in Germany, I walk in a world where anti-Americanism is rife and contempt for George Bush is as common as beer and sausage. I think George Bush pushed the envelope about as far as he could go after 9/11. I think he would have succeeded in overcoming the left-wing resistance of Europe except that no WMD's were found in Iraq. With that, his cause, I mean George Bush's personal standing, was irretrievably lost, and with it The Bush Doctrine. What do you suppose will happen to the Western alliance if we declare war on all of Islam?
