05 Sep 2006
Warring on Ideas

The writeback dialog on one of yesterday's posts really set me to thinking about war, and the habit we've gotten into of declaring war on ideas. The post in question was about the former Iranian president being admitted to this country and making some disparaging remarks (doh!) about our foreign policy. I asked why we admitted a representative of an arguably "Islamo-fascist" regime when we were supposedly at war with "Islamo-fascism".

Thudfactor took me to task over the term "Islamo-fascism". I think our exchange inspired his well thought out essay of this morning. In point of fact, we ended up by both being largely right: "Islamo-fascist" has become a virtually meaningless propaganda term, despite there being a strong strain of classical fascist ideology in the current Islamic fundamentalist movement and the regimes it embodies, notably Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

It's reached this point both by overuse and by non-specific use: anyone who's a Muslim and who opposes current US policy in the Middle East is called an "Islamo-fascist". This isn't the first time we've seen this: George Orwell wrote a wonderful little essay in 1944 entitled What is Fascism? bemoaning the fact that "fascist" had become a nearly meaningless insult term, rather than a rather precise ideological identifier.

But World War Two wasn't a "War on Fascism" - we never invaded Franco's Spain, or the fascist regime in Portugal: both survived until the 1970's. The war was against Germany, Italy and Japan. And it was won, hands down, by military force.

So if our current enemies aren't "Islamo-fascists", and no longer have a supporting state infrastructure, who are they? Well, wouldn't they be terrorists? After all, aren't we're fighting a "War on Terror"?

But "terror" and "terrorist" are even more nebulous terms than "Islamo-fascist"! Part of our problems in cooperation with Russia in this war is our policy on Chechnya: we don't really view the Chechen rebels as terrorists, and insist on a "political settlement", whereas to the Russians the Chechen rebels are terrorists pure and simple and deserve (and get) no quarter.

To the British, the IRA and Sinn Féin have always been terrorist: to a large portion of the Irish population they're been freedom fighters intent on liberating their homeland from British occupation.

So who are our enemies in this "War on Terror"? Why, they're whoever we say they are, of course! And, I might add, whatever we say they are. Terrorism is an idea,a tactic and a strategy, not a group of people or a nation. Because this is a war on an idea, and both the "war" and the "idea" are completely defined by the protagonist.

This isn't the first time we've done this, either. In fact, the last time we had a real war, against a defined enemy ensconced in a national structure was World War Two. Interestingly enough, that was the last time Congress actually passed a declaration of war, as per the Constitution. Our many military actions since that time have been "police actions", "treaty obligations", "coalition building" and other terms - but never with a declaration of war from the Congress.

But we've had at least three declared wars since World War Two. And in all three cases "war" was "declared" by the Executive alone or with the general consent of Congress without an actual declaration. Because all three wars have been wars on ideas.

Following his reelection in 1964, Lyndon Johnson "mobilized" his "Great Society" for a "War on Poverty". To the best of my knowledge, no one ever declared this war as over, or won. Poverty has not declined significantly, but it hasn't exactly boomed, either. At best, this war has been a stalemate. Of course, the poverty line has moved over the years, and the whole definition of poverty has changed somewhat, but hey: when you're fighting a concept, what do you expect? Trying to win is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree: an exercise in futility.

The second of our idea wars is of course the War on [Some] Drugs. Unlike the War on Poverty, this battle has involved the military, often in ways that make them very uncomfortable. There's something about sending highly trained killing machines into fields with machetes and torches to burn down plants that is just a bit incongruous.

The War on [Some] Drugs has reached epic proportions in spending and resources. And all to no avail: how could we ever win a war against plants and the human propensity to eat and smoke them? And we will never win this war - it's simply not possible. But we will continue to expand it: before my lifetime's over I'll guarantee that tobacco will be added to the plants worthy of our war efforts.

Which brings us, of course, full circle, and back to the War on Terror. We can't win that, either. It's a fiction, an imagination, a political catchphrase of the worst sort, designed to keep reaching into our pockets for protection money against some ill defined but utterly consuming fear.

I wholeheartedly supported the efforts after 9/11 in Afghanistan - my only wish was that Congress would find the good sense to offer a formal declaration of war against the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, because they were a "state" player and had arrayed their forces against us and attacked. But we tried to pry the Taliban away from the state apparatus of Afghanistan, and include it with their "guest", Osama bin Laden as "terrorists", and then proceeded to lump in every one of our other enemies with them into an "Axis of Evil" (note the World War Two reference in "axis"). Somehow, North Korea became a terrorist state, rather than a simply an enemy state with nukes, and Iran was conflated into the whole mish-mash as well. We forgot the Chechens, but hey! we didn't spend seventy years opposing the old Soviet Union for nothing, now did we?

Going into Iraq as part of this "War on Terror" was the ultimate sham: Saddam was a bully, a dictator and a thug, but Osama and the rest of the current crop of "Islamo-fascists" hated him as much as they hated us, and he even fought a war with our support against the Iranians in 1980's.

The War on Terror, like the The War on [Some] Drugs and the War on Poverty, will never be over, and will never be won. You can't "win" if your enemy is an idea. You can only hope to hold such ideas in check - the best result is a stalemate, and a constant threat. These "wars" aren't wars at all: they're simply excuses for the expansion of State power and prerogatives. My fear is that they will be seen by future historians as marking the transition point between the American Republic and the American Empire.

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

06:38 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link