Andrew McCarthy's most recent NRO piece is a breathtaking study in how to get current events wrong from a right-wing perspective. The essence of what is going on in the Global War On Terror (GWOT) is that with freedom winning (and it is winning), all the various strains of tyranny have come to the conclusion that if they don't hang together, they'll hang separately. This has both made individual strains of geopolitical evil both individually more desperate and daring and more willing to cooperate with their erstwhile competitors in the despotism game.
So one of the biggest leaders of secular arab socialism regularly donates blood over the course of years in order to write a koran in that blood. Radical islamists pinch and borrow from long dead (and discredited) socialists of both right and left to rev up their own ideology. We are witnessing the creation of a fusionism of evil in response to the destruction of communism by freedom.
The original fusionism was a mixing of several strands of american conservatism around the core of anti-communism. It was both the threat of communism to all the separate strands of the eventual coalition and communist ideology's direct and indirect popularity among the dominant elite intellectual sphere all over the world that led to the necessary coalition building among groups that usually didn't want to have much to do with each other under normal circumstances.
Today's fusionism of evil is driven by the same fear of ultimate ideological death by a rising tide of mutual enemies, liberty, freedom, and individual human dignity. Each strand, arab socialism, european fabian socialism, neo-naziism, juche, islamism, earth and animal fetishism, and the thousands of splinter movements that collectively form the new "new left" all are in deep trouble. They are all threatened with the spread of the functioning core of human society and the deepening of human freedom in the core. This spread of freedom both threatens their individual hold on various non-integrating gap nations and where such movements have heretofore survived in the core, they are threatened by the lack of external enemy to distract attention away from their work.
This evil fusionist coalition (EFC) has not done us the favor of holding public conferences and announcing an axis so we can conveniently label our enemy. Instead, their cooperation is negotiated and carried out in the dark, in secret meetings in unlikely places. This has meant that we have to do the job of labeling for them. Thus was born the "axis of evil" label and the GWOT.
Contrary to Andrew McCarthy's assertion, the GWOT is not a foolish label as terrorism is not just a tactic. It is a tactic that is underlied by a particular intellectual framework shared as components of most of our enemies' ideologies in the axis of evil and beyond. It is the intellectual framework that permits the most horrific acts imaginable in warfare but also the most horrific forms of government brutality outside of warfare too. These expressions of this common intellectual framework widely vary in expression but one widely spread marker feature is toleration, support, and even exaltation of terrorism.
To "fix" the problem of a regime like Saddam's and to leave the intellectual framework in place is to guarantee that we'll be back, again and again, flying over the same territory and dropping ever smarter bombs to take out different above ground manifestations of the underlying intellectual framework. This repeat visit trap is not just a theoretical argument but a historical fact. The Pentagon's New Map grew out of the observation that repeat visits is what the US armed forces do over a period of decades. How many times have we visited Haiti? Why did we have to revisit the problem of an aggressive Germany in WW II? Why haven't we had to do it again since?
The idea that we're just dealing with Islam just doesn't fit the facts. The assassination of Pim Fortuyn by an animal rights terrorist was not an isolated incident of animal rights extremism. Terrorism in that movement has existed for quite some time. But why was Pim Fortuyn killed? He was not noted for any particular animus to animal rights. In fact, his big contribution to the political scene was immigration analysis, especially the societal danger of unassimilated muslim immigrants to Holland. Does the "war on militant Islam" formulation of some on the right like Andrew McCarthy have any reasonable framework of explaining why he was killed by an animal rights activist?
The relationships are there, the connections are there. While there may be some other bit of commonality in the EFC besides terrorism that would better suit our purposes, we need to identify it and present it as a better label. For lack of a 'sufficiently' good label we should not deny the existence of the EFC and leave so many of our enemies unrecognized, unaddressed.
Posted by TMLutas at September 25, 2004 08:19 AM