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| The Nature of the Enemy |
| 2004-07-27 |
| Michael Ledeen 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. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 Interesting take. The rogue state thingy is still real though. Thats why lately I've been harping on Canada. Who like France, Germany, Russia, Spain, ect, act like they, as has been said today, "don't have a dog in this fight". Until these states understand that a united front against jihad and the states that sponsor that ideal, is required, nothing will change. I blame the injustices bandied about by the likes of Mike Morph, the piles of dead innocent Iraqies, directly at those states that refused to look the evil thing in the eye and instead play coy. Had those democracies stood up and said "me to" Saddam would have been punked. Chumps wanted a new Jag though. Yesterday Rafael had an interesting joust relating to this subject and he was, to his credit, turned. The people of those other democracies need to have the same expierence. |
| Posted by: Lucky 2004-07-27 12:26:37 PM |
| #2 That's a great freakin' article. |
| Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-07-27 11:44:05 AM |
| #1 If the war is against the states who harbor the terrorists, in addition to being against the terrorists themselves, then it can't be fought as a "law enforcement" problem as Kerry wishes it to be. This is how the GOP takes back the debate from the Dems. The Dems have somehow managed to persuade people that Iraq was a derailment off the main track of the war against Al Qaeda. But if it is part of a strategy of confronting the rogue Muslim states, then the Kerry approach is seen for the wishful thinking that it is. In any case the rogue states will have to be confronted sooner or later. |
| Posted by: virginian 2004-07-27 8:36:00 AM |