Peter Beinart: Just Who Is Our Enemy?
If you don't know who you're fighting, you can't beat them. In World War II, the enemy was clear: the Axis powers. In the cold war, the enemy was fuzzier. George Kennan, architect of President Truman's early containment policies, believed we were fighting one country: the Soviet Union. But Dean Acheson, Truman's secretary of state, believed the Soviets controlled communist movements in every country. This contradiction came back to haunt Truman's successors, who assumed that, because the Viet Cong were communists, they were Soviet agents, and thus a threat to the United States.
But if the cold war was imprecise, it was a marvel of clarity compared with the war on terrorism. First, in the days after September 11, we were fighting "terrorism." But that put us at war with Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers and Spain's Basque separatists, both of which blow up civilians for political gain. Terrorism, a thousand critics noted, is not an opponent; it is a tactic. So, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush turned his attention to the "axis of evil": Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and their terrorist minions. Except that Iraq and North Korea didn't really have terrorist minions, and Iran's were not those who attacked us on September 11. Now North Korea--a diversity pick from the beginning--has fallen off the list. And the president is suggesting that our enemy has something to do with Islam after all. We are fighting "Islamofascism."
"Islamofascism" has become widely popular on the right, which is ironic given that it was primarily designed to appeal to the left. When Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens popularized the concept, they were trying to prevent their fellow leftists from investing Osama bin Laden with anti-imperialist legitimacy. To the contrary, they argued, fighting Al Qaeda was part of the left's grand anti-fascist tradition. It was a noble effort, but there were problems. At its core, fascism involves worship of the nation. Bin Laden, however, isn't an ultra-nationalist; he's an ultra anti-nationalist. He sees Middle Eastern countries as insidious, Western impositions that must be abolished so Muslims can reunite under a theocratic caliphate.
Berman and Hitchens also applied the epithet to Saddam Hussein, and here they were on stronger ground, since Saddam's Baath ideology was not merely violent and lawless, but hyper-nationalist as well. But, while Saddam may have been a species of fascist, he wasn't an Islamo-fascist. Baathism's prime theoretician, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian, and Saddam ran one of the most secular regimes in the Middle East. Just as Mussolini was an Italian fascist, not a Christian one, Saddam's fascism deserved not a religious modifier but a (pan) national one: Arab. ...
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But if the cold war was imprecise, it was a marvel of clarity compared with the war on terrorism. First, in the days after September 11, we were fighting "terrorism." But that put us at war with Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers and Spain's Basque separatists, both of which blow up civilians for political gain. Terrorism, a thousand critics noted, is not an opponent; it is a tactic. So, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush turned his attention to the "axis of evil": Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and their terrorist minions. Except that Iraq and North Korea didn't really have terrorist minions, and Iran's were not those who attacked us on September 11. Now North Korea--a diversity pick from the beginning--has fallen off the list. And the president is suggesting that our enemy has something to do with Islam after all. We are fighting "Islamofascism."
"Islamofascism" has become widely popular on the right, which is ironic given that it was primarily designed to appeal to the left. When Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens popularized the concept, they were trying to prevent their fellow leftists from investing Osama bin Laden with anti-imperialist legitimacy. To the contrary, they argued, fighting Al Qaeda was part of the left's grand anti-fascist tradition. It was a noble effort, but there were problems. At its core, fascism involves worship of the nation. Bin Laden, however, isn't an ultra-nationalist; he's an ultra anti-nationalist. He sees Middle Eastern countries as insidious, Western impositions that must be abolished so Muslims can reunite under a theocratic caliphate.
Berman and Hitchens also applied the epithet to Saddam Hussein, and here they were on stronger ground, since Saddam's Baath ideology was not merely violent and lawless, but hyper-nationalist as well. But, while Saddam may have been a species of fascist, he wasn't an Islamo-fascist. Baathism's prime theoretician, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian, and Saddam ran one of the most secular regimes in the Middle East. Just as Mussolini was an Italian fascist, not a Christian one, Saddam's fascism deserved not a religious modifier but a (pan) national one: Arab. ...