March 6, 2006
Fighting the Ideological War
By Jed
Babbin
We aren’t fighting a war against terrorists to win the hearts
and minds of the Middle East. We are fighting it to end the threat
of terrorism. Victory can’t be achieved with bullets and
bombs alone. This is, at its core, an ideological war. Just as
we defeated communism by defeating the communists’ ideology,
we need to attack and destroy that of the radical Islamists.
To do that,
we first have to understand that radical Islam – the Islam
of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Usama bin Laden and the rest – isn’t
a religion. It is an ideology that cobbles totalitarianism together
with a messianic vision of religious nationalism. Radical Islam
(unlike the actual religion) tolerates no other religion, and
demands that its adherents give up the basic human freedoms enshrined
in our Bill of Rights. No freedom of speech, no free press, no
fair trials by a jury of your peers, only enslavement. Like the
Nazis, the radical Islamists play on the sense of persecution
and cultural inferiority that many people in underdeveloped nations
have because they are truly oppressed. And, like the Nazis, the
Islamists have convinced their followers that the problems of
their world are the fault of others. The Islamists blame every
ill of their world on America, the West, the Jews and Israel.
Like the Soviets, the Islamists believe that their enslavement
of the world is inevitable (though, unlike the Soviets, they believe
it is God’s will that they must succeed). Its adherents,
like the Nazis and the Communists before them, believe their victory
is both inevitable and irreversible. That is a powerful ideology
which we have yet to engage with the necessary weapons.
We fought
the Soviet ideology from 1946 to 1989. In those years, we rode
our own ideological roller coaster. For many Americans –
and many more Europeans, Africans and others around the world
– the only weapon in that ideological battle was self-criticism.
They were willing to confuse healthy criticism of our own system
of government with praise for the Soviet counterparts. They were
even willing to deny the horrific repressions, mass murder and
subjugation by force of other peoples.
The Soviet
ideology was defeated, and the Cold War won, by the Soviets’
self-imposed poverty, our military buildup, and by the fact that
we proved to the world – by objective comparison –
that their enslavement of people was inferior to our freedoms.
It was neither fashionable nor even polite conversation to say,
as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did relentlessly, that
our system of freedom was objectively superior to Soviet oppression.
That constant ideological pounding, coupled with the physical
courage and intellectual mastery of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and
Lech Walesa, won the ideological battle of the Cold War. We have
to do the same in this war, and in much the same way.
Our military
– comprised of many of the best people our country has ever
produced – is winning every fight it enters. But it can’t
win the war alone. Our politicians have to do that by fighting
the ideological war. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter
Pace, understands this better than any of our pols. In his “guidance”
to the Joint Staff, published right after he took the job, Pace
said that, “Our enemies are violent extremists who would
deny us, and all mankind, the freedom to choose our own destiny.
Finding this distributed, loosely networked enemy is the greatest
challenge we face. We must find and defeat them in an environment
where information, perception, and how and what we communicate
are every bit as critical as the application of traditional kinetic
effects.” So how do we do it?
President
Bush needs to lead us in the ideological fight just as Ronald
Reagan did in the Cold War. We need to hear from him – and
the rest of our leaders – the kind of blunt comparisons
we heard from Reagan. Radical Islam enslaves people. It robs them
of the inalienable rights endowed by their creator that our Declaration
of Independence described, and our Constitution protects. Our
society is as prosperous as any in the world, and that is a direct
result of the freedoms we enjoy. Radical Islam condemns its adherents
and its slaves to poverty and suffering. And the nations that
support it are our enemies.
We have the
ability to tell right from wrong and good from evil and there
is no need for us to apologize for that. Nor should we twist our
relations with other countries to suit some false moral equivalence.
Those who say, for example, that if India or Israel can have nuclear
weapons why shouldn’t Iran are guilty of illogic. It is
permissible for us, and the rest of the free world, to say that
some countries are evil and others are not, and to condition our
relations with them all on the basis of our own judgment. To deliver
that judgment, and act upon it, is the job of the president.
In time of
war, the President of the United States has to be the boldest
spokesman for freedom in the world. President Bush needs to be
fighting this ideological battle with all the energy and relentlessness
of a Marine sergeant assaulting a bunch of terrorists holed up
in a cave. In the Cold War, Ronald Reagan stood fast, and spoke
clearly without fear of offending the enemy because he knew that
a war between ideologies cannot be fought with soft words and
euphemisms. What was true for the Cold War is no less true today.
It’s not enough to say that we fight tyranny. It is essential
to say that we fight for what is right, and what is by any measure
better than the enemy will ever deliver to even its most loyal
followers.
Mr. Babbin is a former Deputy UnderSecretary of Defense (Bush
41) and now Contributing Editor of FamilySecurityMatters.
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