First, President Obama jettisoned the admittedly empty and useless phrase “war on terror,” a label which pleased pretty much no one, primarily because it didn’t specify an enemy; it’s often been pointed out that the phrase was like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg.” Next, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoided even mentioning the word “terrorism” in her first congressional testimony. Now the Department of Justice has announced it is dropping the legal designation “enemy combatants,” which referred to suspected terrorist detainees. The aim of all this muting of the language in the War with No Name is twofold: for the Obama administration to distance itself from George W. Bush’s “politics of fear,” and to whitewash a plain fact that liberals are suicidally reluctant to acknowledge – that we are at war with radical Islam.
Earlier this year the members of MoveOn.org identified liberals’ top ten priorities for 2009 in a poll. Their agenda is very revealing: nowhere among the list of usual suspects – stopping climate change, ending the war in Iraq, “restoring” civil liberties, holding the Bush administration “accountable” – is there any mention of national security or any acknowledgement that the United States even has an enemy – unless, of course, you count climate change and the Bush administration, two threats that the left has no problem confronting fiercely.
There is no priority in the poll about countering violent jihad – whether Mumbai-style, low-tech terrorism or the threat of a WMD unleashed on American soil – or pushing back against what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilizational jihad” – the hidden dangers of Islamic finance, “creeping sharia,” or the assault on our rights and liberties such as the threat to free speech in the form of Islamist pressure on the United Nations. In the minds of liberals, to admit that we are at war on many fronts with radical Islam would be to buy into “the politics of fear” generated by the despised Bush cabal. In that sense they truly believe we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
The refusal to acknowledge the enemy isn’t just an Obama failing; it’s a congenital blind spot of the left in general. In the New Hampshire presidential debates of a year ago, all four Democratic candidates referred to Islamic terrorism by name a whopping total of zero times – by contrast, their four Republican counterparts mentioned it twenty-two times. This underscores the fact that one party in this country has at least a partial grip on the threat we face – and the other party, the one now in power, prefers either attempting to placate the enemy by “making nice,” or pretending it doesn’t exist.
“Our administration does not believe in a clash of civilizations,” Vice-President Joe Biden announced at his February address in Munich, referring to the now-famous title of Samuel Huntington’s prescient 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations. Well frankly, I don’t believe in it either; I believe instead that we’re embroiled in a clash of civilization versus barbarism, and that it is the defining conflict of our time.
Unfortunately, Obama/Biden in particular and the left in general think the conflict is just one big cultural misunderstanding which can be resolved by reassuring fundamentalist Muslims (like the mythical “moderate Taliban“) that we’ll sit down with them, listen to their so-called grievances, and make whatever concessions are necessary (like throwing Israel under the bus) to move forward as mutually respectful partners in a brave new world of prosperity and inter-faith pablum.
“My job to the Muslim world,” Obama said in his very first interview as President, which he gave to the Arabic-language news network Al-Arabiya, “is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.” Too late, Mr. President – Muslim extremists have been hammering home the point for decades, all across the Muslim world, that America, the Great Satan, is the enemy. Believing he can defuse Islamist hostility by being more “respectful,” by engaging them in still more “dialogue,” and by offering to make their grievances right – all of which the Islamists consider signs of weakness – is a fantasy.
There are a couple of gaping holes in this Kumbiyah theory of international relations. First, as much as Islamists would like us to believe this clash is about American foreign policy, it isn’t about their grievances, though their skewed perspective on our foreign policy sometimes provides them with useful recruiting points. In the words of a former Hezbollah leader: “We are not fighting you because we want something from you. We’re fighting you because we want to destroy you.”
And it certainly isn’t about poverty and economic opportunity, a favorite theme of Obama’s. The ranks of al Qaeda and every other Islamist group you can name are packed with moneyed, college-educated professionals; conversely, impoverished non-Muslims worldwide aren’t taking out their frustration by strapping on explosives and targeting Westerners and Jews.
Second, we’re not dealing with an enemy that thinks the way we do in the West or that wants the same things out of life. “In all my travels throughout the Muslim world,” Obama intoned on al-Arabiya, “what I’ve come to understand is that. . . regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.”
Actually, they don’t. In the U.S. and the rest of the West, we’re generally content to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In stark contrast, our Islamist enemies love death more than life, reject freedom in favor of absolute submission to a totalitarian ideology, and won’t be happy until the world is entirely Islamic. They cannot be swayed from their goal by promises of economic prosperity and peaceful coexistence with infidels.
The left’s plan for convincing these monsters to change their scimitars into plowshares is to get the whole world to “like us” again, since we were apparently such boors during the Bush years. Should that be the primary goal of a country? To be well-liked? What would that really mean, if America were liked by everyone? It would mean our European allies wouldn’t resent us cowboys anymore because we’ll finally be just like them: weak-willed, enervated and conciliatory. It would mean our enemies would like us more because we’ll have rendered ourselves impotent to stop them from blitzkrieging right over us.
Getting the rest of the world to “like” us means dismantling America as a pillar of moral, economic, and military strength in a world that desperately needs us to lead the way. It means unbolting the gate of civilization’s last line of defense, against an enemy that is waving the banner of an openly supremacist, totalitarian ideology and doesn’t care if the rest of the world likes them or not. The Islamists have thrown themselves into war with us with all the abandon of medieval Berserkers, and meanwhile we’re busy trying to win a popularity contest.
When asked about the “war on terror” phrase by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Obama said, “Words matter in this situation because one of the ways we’re going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds.” Indeed, words do matter, which is why Obama should call the “situation” and the “struggle” what it is – a war. And if he wants to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world, here are some words to keep in mind from Osama bin Laden himself: “When people see a weak horse and a strong horse, they naturally gravitate toward the strong horse.” The strong horse in this clash will be the one that is not hamstrung by cultural self-doubt, that is not mired in apologetic self-abasement, that is not burdened by historical guilt induced through decades of politically correct indoctrination, and that burns with a will to win, no matter how long it takes or what it costs.
Right now radical Islam is that strong horse. We will win those Muslim hearts and minds, and this war, not by pretending there is no conflict, but by showing the world that we are the stronger horse.