Naming the Enemy

It is sometimes hard to name the real enemy.  For World War II we picked the Nazis and not the Germany People who supported them.  It made the post-war effort easier.  We did some de-Nazification and then everything was OK.  Well, we did all get together and agree that Euthanasia was bad and forced sterilization of the mentally deficient was bad and killing of the handicapped was bad, but that was a long time ago.  And we never called the Nazis by the name of their party, the National Socialists.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer talks about the Obama Administrations "naming problem" in a column in Friday's Washington Post.

Mr Krauthammer starts with Attorney General Eric Holder responding to Rep Lamar Smith (R-Tx) asking about our enemy in the war on terrorism like he (Holder) was a nominee for the US Supreme Court.  In the end, General Holder said:

There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

As Mr Krauthammer notes, that is in stark contrast to Mr Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, who proclaims that he was acting as a Muslim soldier.  Says Mr Krauthammer:

Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

Mr Krauthammer then follows up by saying:

Instead, President Obama's National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy—how else do you define those seeking your destruction?—"a loose network of violent extremists." But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don't, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

The key point I took away from the article was that we are dealing with people who have a very specific "jihadist vision in whose name they acted."  It is not a nominal view of jihad, but a very specific vision and that vision has consequences.  Until we have a fundamental understanding of that vision we will be dealing with the Long War from a position of intellectual weakness.  What we are doing now is like fighting Nazi Germany but saying that the German People are just suffering from the problems of a bad peace treaty after World War I and the results of hyperinflation in the early 20s.  They don't really mean us harm.  They are just not seeing clearly.

The fact is that our enemies in the long war see very clearly.  It is time we look through their eyes.  This will do two things.  First, it will allow us to distinguish between Islam the religion, on the one hand, and, on the other, this very small and specific group, with a jihadist mentality based upon a very specific, heterodox, understanding of Islam. Secondly, we will then be able to fix our own approach to resisting this specific group and then defeating them, or at least driving them to irrelevance.

The current approach just leads to Americans thinking it is all of Islam, when it is not.

Regards  —  Cliff