What to Do About It?
Kevin Drum, commenting on a Weisberg's "Lamont is a disaster" piece in Slate: And yet, much as I'm reluctant to agree with him, Weisberg has a point: aside from kvetching about Bush's policies, the liberal blogosphere has chosen to almost unanimously sit out any substantive discussion of the fight against radical jihadism and what to do about it.
Now, isn't this weird? Even Kevin Drum can be pulled into these narratives. To this day, I remain convinced that there has never been a "fight against radical jihadism," certainly not any such fight that involves, say, you or me. Now, on September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by a specific group, called al Qaeda (remember them?). And no one, to my knowledge, in the blogosphere has "sat out" any discussion of what to do about al Qaeda . . . although I'm never sure how "substantive" such discussions are. Since September 11, there has never been any question in my mind that we should pursue al Qaeda's leadership and operational capacity with all available resources (and within constitutional limits, of course). That included the invasion of Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban.
This fight against al Qaeda is, or should have been, a limited operation. That's not to say that it would have been easy to, say, capture bin Laden at Tora Bora, or to actually rebuild Afghanistan. But we didn't do those things. And, we also know what really happened. The administration's "Big Thinkers" wanted to use the tragedy of September 11 for their own ends, and we ended up with a Big War, which Kevin now calls "the fight against radical jihadism."
Say what you like about Saddam, but he was not a "radical jihadist."
The reason bloggers don't have much to add to this "discussion" is that the discussion has never made any sense, and to try to engage it is to get stuck in its terms. To admit, incorrectly, that there is a problem called "radical jihadism" that needs to be addressed, as opposed to specific issues and groups that should be the focus of our attention.
Moreover, I'm not sure how much "substance" the discussion can even have. The correct choices post-September 11 were pretty obvious: Track down bin Laden and his close associates and either kill them or bring them to justice in a court of law; destroy al Qaeda's operational capacity on the ground, wherever it was; and cooperate with friendly nations in preventing the group from coming back. If you wanted to do something else, well, then, you were just wrong.
Maybe the argument is that we are in a "fight against radical jihadism" now, whether we should be or not, and that we have to have a strategy now. I don't buy this, either. The war in Iraq is a mess, but I'm convinced that continued U.S. occupation isn't the solution. The war between Israel and Hizbollah is a completely different situation, only part of this "fight against radical jihadism" because that's the frame the administration's allies put on it.
Any substantive discussion of these topics, in other words, has to be about these topics, and not about the imaginary frame.
posted by Number Three @ 6:12 AM
2 Comments:
Radican jihadism is not today's equivalent to international communism. It is only endorsed by a handful of fringe groups (many of whom don't even agree with one another), and it has little appeal around the world. (The US's mindbogglingly counterproductive response to 9/11 has, unfortunately, greatly increased that appeal.)
But think back to international communism as an ideology. Now that was a powerhouse, capturing the imaginations of generations of scholars and activists. Al Qaeda's restoration of the Islamic Caliphate has nothing like this appeal, no remotely equivalent intellectual apparatus.
It is beneath the dignity of the United States and the so-called "West" to define itself in opposition to the lunatic ideology of Al Qaeda.
Besides, as I'd also say to Drum, the war against "Islamic Jihadism" doesn't even exist. It was never anything more than grandiose rhetoric to dress up the stupid Iraq War. It was necessary to abstract-ify the enemy in order to pull off the giant bait and switch to transfer public anger away from Al Qaeda and onto Saddam--who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, 9/11, or even Islamofascism.
There's another reason that the Rovatistas focused on the "war against terror," aka "radical jihadism". It has to do with the waning fortunes of the conservative movement in the post-Cold War era.
Conservatism isn't a cohesive philosophy. Beginning with Frank Meyer and Bill Buckley in the 1950s, the dominant brand of movement conservatism has been the "fusionist" variety, fusing together moral traditionalists and economic libertarians with anti-communism as the glue. Reagan's "evil empire" rhetoric sealed the alliance and brought the movement into the promised land, but it fell apart once the Wall fell, and the GOP lost three straight presidential elections. Rove originally thought he could rebuild the coalition with radical "anti-tax" policies, but that wasn't working very well. Then 9/11 fell in his lap. They turned a narrow battle against Al Qaeda into a "Global War on Terror" (or as many GOP pundits now casually call it, "World War III") because it served their partisan interests, and just as Buckley backed McCarthyism in the 1950s, Rove has unleashed the "Dems are weak on terror" baiting of the current era to dramatize the stakes.
So this was not some accidental misunderstanding or misdescription on their part. It was a conscious effort to save the flagging power of right-wing politics by manufacturing a global crisis for which the GOP would be the only solution, since, having invented the crisis, they were the only ones who were prepared to "fight" it.
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