Those who are convinced that this is indeed a "war" should take the first indispensable step toward "the Victory" for which they long by at least understanding who "the Enemy" is and what "the war" is about.
In a recent article, I pointed out that, far from its providing an occasion for all self-styled "conservatives" to rejoice, President Obama's identification of our relationship with "al Qaeda" as one of "war" is in fact a decisive reason for them and all self-professed lovers of liberty to lament, for to as great and, indeed, greater an extent than any other crisis that a state can encounter, war — any war — imperils freedom. And when the "war" in question is as unconventional and intractably open-ended as the one that our current President — an unqualified devotee of socialism who has overtly, unabashedly, and repeatedly expressed his ardent desire to radically transform the United States from what it has been into what he and his fellow leftists would like for it to become — sees himself as waging, the apostles of liberty should be filled with dread.
In anticipation of the predictable criticism from the usual suspects, let me be clear: I am well aware of the fact that there are untold numbers of murderous Muslims who will stop at almost nothing to realize their shared aspiration to destroy as many Americans as possible. Moreover, I firmly believe that we should stop at nothing to destroy them before their efforts bear fruit. My point is simply that we should resist the urge to refer to this as a "war," for given the nature of our enemies, and unlike the wars of the past, this "war" is in principle a war without end.
But this point aside, all of those who insist that we are at "war" ought, at least, to be clear, then, as to who the Enemy is. Until they are ready to fully shed the "politically correct" straightjacket by which they have bound themselves, until, that is, they are willing to recognize that the contemporary Western, secular lens through which they view the world is as much a piece of temporally and culturally constituted prejudice as the worldviews of the past and present that they subtly and not so subtly ridicule, anything remotely approximating Victory promises to be forever elusive. This no "armchair warrior" on either the Right or Left has even attempted to do.
We are not fighting "Islamic extremists." Nor are we in a battle with "Islamo-Fascists." Those terrorists and Jihadists who have us in our sights are not "insane," they are not "Islamists," "radicals," exclusively members of al-Qaeda, or (what is the most ridiculous of terms that I have yet heard to describe them) "Islamo-Nazis"; they are orthodox Muslims.
In other words, the Enemy is Islam. To be more exact, the Enemy is a particular strain or understanding of Islam, one that has a profoundly extended and, in some respects, most illustrious pedigree. Islam is not a "religion of peace" that has just as of late been "hijacked" by "extremists"; from the time of its inception until the present day it has been a religion of militancy, so to speak.
The prophet of all prophets, from the Islamic perspective — Muhammad — routinely raided caravans and ordered the beheading of his nemeses by the scores — after he had already disarmed them. Islam spread as rapidly as it did during Muhammad's time precisely because he was so masterful at employing the sword. In addition to this, the Islamic holy book, the Koran, is replete with passages enjoining Muslims to slaughter "the infidel" — i.e., anyone and everyone who is not a Muslim.
Hence, today's Islamic militants, whether we choose to call them "terrorists," "Jihadists," "militants," or "insurgents," far from deviating from the main thrust of their religious tradition, are entirely in keeping with it. This is not, however, to suggest that they are the only "true" Muslims. Not unlike any other tradition, religious or otherwise, Islam, containing, as it does, multiple currents of thought that it has acquired over its lengthy life span, is anything but fixed or finished; latent within it are various possibilities that its practitioners can explore in potentially fruitful ways. There are doubtless other interpretations of Islam of comparable and perhaps even superior plausibility to that imposed upon it by our adversaries — it is, after all, a 1,400-year-old religion with approximately one billion adherents spread throughout the world — but the one thing that even the most cavalier of observers of it can not say is that theirs is not genuinely faithful.
Our enemies, then, are in fact, Islamic Fundamentalists, or, if you will, Koranic Literalists. Their understanding of their faith may be less sound, and it is certainly less productive of prosperity and hospitality toward outsiders than other, more moderate and modern approaches, but it is no less Islamic than that of the latter. That this is so can easily be seen when we analogize Islam with Christianity: there remain disciples of Christ to this day who are utterly devoid of sympathy with any scientific theory that contradicts their belief in an Earth that is so many thousands of years old, a belief rooted in their literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account which most Christians — myself included — find preposterous. But I would not, on this ground, have the slightest warrant to judge that they are any less Christian than anyone else for holding it.
All of those who are determined to continue using the language of "war" in connection with our conflict with our enemies must recognize that this is a holy war. This, at any rate, is how Muslims regard it because, given their age-old vision of the world, they can't but regard it otherwise.
Neoconservatives, then, must abandon their foolish habit of referring to Koranic literalists as "fascists" and "Nazis." It is understandable that they should resist mightily this prescription, for "Fascism" and "Nazism" were the two formidable ideologies against which the United States fought in World War II, the war that in the popular imagination is remembered as "the good war": by ascribing the same names to our current enemies that once belonged to our enemies in "the good war," neoconservatives reinforce both the notion that we are in a war and the idea that we are in another "good war." But Fascism and Nazism were secular ideologies. Hence, by relating Muslim terrorists with these militantly atheistic ideologies, neoconservatives, notwithstanding the inexhaustible series of reminders they've issued that "Defeat is not an option," obscure the religious essence of this conflict and, thus, guarantee that the goal of Victory recedes ever further beyond the horizon.
Neoconservatives are not the only armchair "warriors" who defeat themselves — and the rest of us — by underscoring the fundamentally wrong-headed idea that this is not a religious or "holy war." When leftists of the Obama variety continually identify "poverty" and other depressed material conditions as "the root causes" of terrorism — Obama earlier this month felt the need to mention that Yemen, the country in which the Christmas Day bomber was trained, is mired in grinding poverty — they too obscure ever further the nature of "the war" they insist we are in by perpetuating the concept, a fiction that would be laughable if it wasn't so invidious, that Muslims could be engaged in any conflict that wasn't first and foremost religiously inspired.
Finally, paleoconservatives and libertarians, who have spared no expense over the last nine years or so attempting to disabuse people of the belief that we are or even could be in a "War on Terror," similarly exacerbate our vulnerability by stressing the political or material causes for the anti-Western and virulently anti-American animus of Middle Eastern Muslims. Whether it is our support for Israel, our popular culture, our military bases in the Islamic world, or anything else, these right-leaning critics of the (predominantly) neoconservative attitude to terrorism, only further this gross misunderstanding of the nature of the threat that Islam poses to the West, a misunderstanding that they share with their political rivals.
I stand by my position that the application of the term "war" to our relationship with those who desire our destruction can and will prove our undoing before any Islamic terrorists will. This, of course, doesn't mean that we shouldn't do all that we can to insure that they don't get that chance. But for those who are convinced that this is indeed a "war," if they are truly serious, they should take the first indispensable step toward "the Victory" for which they (presumably) long by at least understanding who "the Enemy" is and what "the war" is about.
For many Americans, it is very difficult, even impossible, to entertain the idea that believers in a religion would think in terms of waging war against those who do not believe in that religion. "Religion" is for most Americans, regardless of ideology, almost by definition focused on peace, love, and other virtues. Americans can think this way because, both in this country and across much of Europe, religion has been thoroughly domesticated. There was, of course, a time several centuries ago when Protestants and Catholics waged brutal war against each other, depopulating parts of Europe in the wars that resulted from the Reformation. Supporters and opponents of infant baptism killed each enthusiastically over what a modern American would regard as a triviality, to put it mildly.
Conservatives do not often understand that political liberalism emerged in large part as a reaction against the 'holy wars' this period in Europe. Thoughtful men who sought peace developed the idea of (1) separating religious authority from political authority and (2) trying to persuade Christians to understand their religion as essentially personal and private, a matter, as Americans love to say, between the individual and his God. I call this the "privatization" of Christianity, because Christianity had been a public religion, permeating all aspects of society, including government, as Islam still does. The 'public' character of Christianity has not died, of course, as the religious Right's agenda makes clear, but even these religious conservatives do not embrace jihad against nonbelievers.
Islam and Christianity, however, have waged war for centuries. Muslims often cite the Crusades today, but conveniently overlook their own centuries of expansion by means of war that brought them to the frontiers of France and the gates of Vienna at various points in their efforts to conquer Christian Europe for Islam. Of course it is correct that there other ways of understanding Islam that do not require war against nonbelievers, but it is important for Americans to understand that what we call "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Koranic literalism" simply is Islam as that religion has been traditionally understood by its adherents.
It is also necessary for Americans to understand that Islam has neither a "church" nor a "state," and we absolutely should not expect Islamic societies to develop and believe in concepts that arose over lengthy periods of time in European history. Governing, for a devout Muslim, is inseparable from his religion. That's why we should not expect all Muslims to even understand why Westerners think that the Dutch cartoonists were exercising some sort of basic right of free speech or expression. NO such right can be framed intelligibly within Islam. As for shari'a, the devout Muslim sees no reason why he should be required to live under the merely man-made law of the country to which he has moved when he has available to him the law of God in the form of shari'a.
At a very basic level, the nominally Christian world is at war with the Islamic world. Not all Muslims are, or will be, committed to winning this war, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking of our enemies as some small coterie of fanatics.
I have taught about Islamic political philosophy for nearly 40 years, and find a concept drawn from Machiavelli especially useful in understanding it. Machiavelli's concept of "effectual truth" is that what often matters in politics is the inner core or essence of a position, and not simply the public expression of that position. The "effectual truth" of Islam is precisely what confronts us now, and almost all shades of ideology, left and right, still don't want to see this. Some knowledge of history might help, but few Americans, and–what continues to astonish me–even relatively few conservatives, who should be saturated in history,–don't want to think outside their own boxes. I believe we no longer have that luxury.
We know the name of the enemy; indeed it is Islam. We know Islam's intent to gain power in America and to eventually dominate. But the question that is never asked in these articles is "What do we do about Islam?".
It is high time that, if the West is to be saved from Islam, we begin to turn the Islamic tide back to whence it came. It is time that we clearly state that Islam is absolutely incompatible with our way of life and that Muslims in large numbers do not belong in the West. We must stop allowing them into our countries. We must cease all immigration of Muslims and begin sending them back to their Muslim countries. And we must cease and desist our involvement in Muslim lands as well.
Here is a sensible policy:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/012935.html