To win at war, you have to identify your enemy clearly...

Joseph Myers calls our poor efforts to define our enemies and aims in the current war to be a "strategic collapse." I'm not ready to call it a collapse so long as Gen. David Petraeus can define our enemies to his command. Nonetheless, I must agree that we will have to throw in the towel if we as a nation continue to dodge the fact that certain types of people in this world are perfectly willing to kill us, and they have already declared war.

Historically, the success of the USA in war is tied to the ability of the political leadership to define the enemy and the threshhold of victory. A full review would be tedious, but a fast one might be helpful. During the Revolutionary War, we knew we had to defeat any Loyalist and Crown forces within the thirteen colonies. No more and no less. In the War of 1812, however, we could define our goal no better than "Spank the British!" We suffered from disunity and lack of focus and were lucky to obtain a draw.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln defined the Union goal to preserve the Union, if necessary by abolishing slavery. Despite great Confederate determination and terrible Union mistakes, the Union prevailed precisely with its war aims. The Union would not have won, despite its advantages, if Lincoln had either failed to define the enemy (i.e., armed secessionists) or defined the enemy so broadly as to provoke Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, England, or France into supporting the Confederacy.

During World War I, Woodrow Wilson said we were trying "to make the world safe for democracy," and we won neither a clearly decisive victory in France nor a lasting peace. During World War II, we demanded total military victory and achieved it, even if Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms did not prevail at the peace table.

During the Cold War, most of us recognized that communism was an existential threat to free peoples anywhere, and we prevailed through armed preparation, long-term economic and cultural advantages, bipartisan resolve, and ultimately the moral bankruptcy of an ideology foreign to human nature.

I am not saying that America is a nation of saints. As G.K. Chesterton once said, "'My country, right or wrong,' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" Some, perhaps most, of our wars have been caused by our own hubris and mistakes. Nonetheless, it is morally and physically devastating to lose a war, even if you think you will be able to blame George W. Bush from the comfort of your office until the day you die. Against Muslim fascists, losing this war would be life-threatening, even to those who have opposed everything done by the U.S. government since 9/11. Don't think Sharia law is going to be merely inconvenient for America's chattering classes, or even to our pacifists.

Today some think we can rally the West to fight Muslim fascists, Islamists, Islamicists, jihadists, etc. while using linguistic disinfectant to sterilize the terms we have for our enemies. We might as well call the town rapist "an imbalanced hormonal male." In a war for cultural survival, it's better to stereotype your true enemies and win than to avoid offending your marginal allies and lose. I'm not advocating the use of the modern equivalent to old standbys such as "Huns," "Krauts," etc., but so much as our fear of offending ethnic sensitivities prevents us from defining our enemies, we are shooting our own toes.

I believe "jihadic fascist" is the best term for our current mortal enemies for the following reasons:

(1) "Jihadic fascists" specifically describes those Muslims who propagate war upon non-Muslims in the name of Allah without insulting Islam and the hundreds of millions of Muslims who wouldn't raise a weapon to protect killers and cut-throats. ("Muslim extremists" is no better than "bad guys." "War on terror" is even more ambiguous than "war on poverty.")

(2) "Jihadic fascism" describes an ideology which merges an oversimplification of Islam with nationalistic socialism, anti-Western thought, anti-Semitism, faux conservativism, faux chivalry, and violent illiberalism.

(3) We cannot win this war by insulting all followers of Islam, so we ought to focus our efforts, military and moral, to defeating the minority of Muslims which wants to kill us as a matter of policy and impose a Muslim apocalypse upon our children.

(4) Good Muslims know that not every believer in Islam is a fascist but that Muslims can be fascists.

(5) Fascism has never been discredited adequately in the Muslim world, despite the defeat of the Nazis, the uncovering of the Holocaust, and the Nuremburg trials. Baathism, and to a lesser extent, revolutionary Shiism, are built on fascist ideas.


(6) The English-speaking world and most of the West knows the dangers of fascism and is by habit and instinct anti-fascist. We need someone of Charlie Chaplin's talents to step up and make fun of an ideology which provides for the untempered control of a minority to interpret the rights and lifestyles of the majority. We will win this war decisively and soon if cinematic comedy effectively mocks jihadic fascism. What if Curly, Moe, and Larry infiltrated Al Qaeda? Peter Sellers is dead, but perhaps Leslie Nielsen can come out of retirement.

Have they forgotten in Hollywood how to make money? A well-written and well-acted comedy mocking jihadic fascists would be popular all over the world.




[Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.]