[lit-ideas] Defining the enemy

A couple of weeks ago we discussed Ian Baruma’s review of Norman Podhoretz’ 
World War IV, The Long Struggle against Islamofascism. I subsequently bought 
the book and have just read the prologue.
On page 13, Podhoretz writes, ". . . contrary to complacent assessments . . . 
it can plausibly be argued that they [the Islamofascists] are even more 
dangerous and difficult to beat than their totalitarian predecessors of World 
War II and World War III. ‘After defeating fascists and communists, can the 
West now defeat the Islamists?’ asks Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum. ‘On 
the face of it,’ he acknowledges, our ‘military preponderance makes victory 
seem inevitable. . . . Islamists have nothing like the military machine the 
Axis deployed in world War II, nor the Soviet Union during the cold war. What 
do the Islamists have to compare with the Wehrmacht or the Red Army? The SS or 
Spetznaz? The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for that matter, to Auschwitz or gulag?’
"Nevertheless, Pipes goes on, ‘Islamists deploy formidable capabilities . . . 
that go far beyond small-scale terrorism.’ Such as: 
A potential access to weapons of mass destruction that could devastate Western 
life
A religious appeal that provides deeper resonance and greater staying power 
than the artificial ideologies of fascism or communism
an impressively conceptualized, funded, and organized institutional machinery 
that successfully builds credibility, goodwill, and electoral success
An ideology capable of appealing to Muslims of every size and shape, from 
Lumpenproletariat to privileged, from illiterates to PhDs, from the 
well-adjusted to psychopaths, from Yemenis to Canadians . . .
A huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10 percent to 15 
percent of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million 
persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, 
who ever lived."
". . . Unlike World War II, which just about everyone in America wholeheartedly 
supported, but like World War III, when the domestic political scene seethed 
with angry conflicts (especially during Vietnam and its aftermath), World War 
IV has given rise to a war of ideas on the home front. It is a war in which 
those of us who see Islamofascism as the latest mutation of the totalitarian 
threat to our civilization and who insist on the correlative necessity of 
meeting and defeating it, are pitted against those who think that the threat 
has been wildly exaggerated and does not in any case require a military 
response. In its own way, this war of ideas is no less bloody than the one 
being fought by our troops in the Middle East. . . ."
"The question of whether and to what extent the American people of this 
generation can or will discharge the responsibility that 9/11 imposed on us 
will ultimately be answered by the outcome of this great war of ideas at home – 
a war so ferocious that some of us have not hesitated to describe it as nothing 
less than a kind of civil war. . . ."
When not in the heat of our "civil war," I have attempted to present both 
arguments. I have on occasion listed the books I’ve read that have come down on 
one side (the side emphasizing the seriousness of the threat) or the other (the 
side saying the threat is not a serious one). Podhoretz is clearly on the side 
of the former. They are a threat; so let’s define who they are and what exactly 
is going on. Pipes’ points are interesting. And he provides one more input 
about the size of the threat – lower than the 30% I’ve previously seen but even 
so, "a far greater total than all the fascists and communists, combined, who 
ever lived."
Podhoretz also makes the point that many have made before him, that Bush’s 
greatest failure was in not defining this war correctly. He was afraid that it 
would seem that we were declaring war on all of Islam rather than the 10-15% 
Pipes describes. "Understandable though this decision may have been, the loss 
of clarity and focus it entailed would cost Bush dearly in the political wars 
at home that were destined to go hand in hand with the military campaigns 
abroad. The price would prove especially heavy in the acrimonious debate over 
Iraq. For the president’s failure to call the enemy and the struggle by their 
true names would allow his political opponents to rip the battle for Iraq out 
of its proper context as only one front or theater in a much broader conflict 
and then to portray it instead as a self-contained with no connection to 9/11 
or anything else. . . ."
Why is it important to emphasize the "fascist" element in Islamism, or 
"Islamofascism" as Podhoretz prefers as a term more accurately describing our 
enemy? Years ago I read Youssef M. Choueiri’s Islamic Fundamentalism which 
described in detail the debt Sayyid Qutb owed to Fascism and the near-Fascism 
of Communism. Podhoretz quotes Bernard Lewis to show that this influence wasn’t 
peculiar to Qutb:
"In the year 1940, the government of France surrendered to the Axis and formed 
a collaborationist government in a place called Vichy. . . .[This] meant that 
Syria-Lebanon – a French-mandated territory in the heart of the Arab East – was 
now wide open to the Nazis. The governor and his high officials in the 
administration in Syria-Lebanon took their orders from Vichy, which in turn 
took orders from Berlin. The Nazis moved in, made a tremendous propaganda 
effort, and were even able to move from Syria eastwards into Iraq and for a 
while set up a pro-Nazi, fascist regime. It was in this period that political 
parties were formed that were the nucleus of what later became the Baath party. 
The Western Allies eventually drove the Nazis out of the Middle Eat and 
suppressed these organizations. But the war ended in 1945, and the Allies left. 
A few years later the Soviets moved in, established an immensely powerful 
presence in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and various countries, and introduced 
Soviet-style political practice. The adaptation from the Nazi model to the 
communist model was very simple and easy, requiring only a few minor 
adjustments, and it proceeded pretty well. That is the origin of the Baath 
party and of the kind of governments that we have been confronting in the 
Middle East in recent years."
Lawrence

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