The War on Noone In Particular

And it's one, two, three, Who are we fightin' against?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn
Next stop's gonna end in "-stan"

Let's stop being stupid about this. Or coy. Or polite. Whatever it is we're being when we use meaningless, couched rhetoric to describe the current state of worldwide conflict. Because as long as we do this, we're not gonna win.



Start by pointing out the obvious - that there's no such thing as a war on terror. How can there be? You can't shoot at terror. You can't find terror on the map and drop bombs on it. You can't torture it, imprison it, apply sanctions to it or blockade it. Most importantly - you can't ever really say you've beaten it. So declaring a war on terror is like declaring a war on bullets. Stupid. Silly. Nonsensical. Of course, that doesn't stop us from talking about it all day long.

Even Donald Rumsfeld has figured this out. For the first time that I can recall in his overstayed, miserable career, he is correct. He has been trying to get us to stop calling this conflict "The War On Terror" for a while now, unsuccessfully. He's tried unsuccessfully to invoke several stupid euphemisms for this war, and his latest is that he wants to call it "The Long War". Certainly that is a more accurate label for this mess. Notice however that the salient piece is still missing. That would be the "Who", Horton. You need a WHO.

The effects of not indenfying the enemy as part of the public consciousness are insidious. Witness the Shakespearian confusion over "Dubai or not Dubai". We scratch our heads and wonder if it is not an outlandish proposition to let an Arab government-owned company come in and manage our container shipments. Hmmm. Aren't we at war with those guys? We're not? Who are we at war with, anyway? Oh, that's right. Terror. Well then. Are the United Arab Emirates "terror"? Damned if I know. No wonder we can't make an informed decision on something as basic as who should or should not control container shipments to our ports.

A while ago we had "The Cold War". But the name stuck because we all knew the WHO. You could ask anybody - Who is the enemy in this Cold War? Well, the fucking Commies, that's who. And we knew where they were. In Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba. They were all a part of the Evil Empire. We knew exactly where the bombs would need to be dropped and where they'd be coming from if it ever came down to it. There was no way the East German government was ever going to get a contract to manage US seaports while the Cold War was going on.

So who exactly is the enemy in this "Long War"?

It's not Iraq. We've conquered Iraq. (Even before we conquered Iraq, the enemy was not Iraq.) We have military bases there and we've set up a new democratic self-government. Sort of. Sometimes we refer to the war IN Iraq, but we're always careful to express our deep respect and admiration for the Iraqi People in the same breath. Since it's not the Iraqi people, or the Iraqi government we're at war with, this "war in Iraq" must be against some other people who happen to be in Iraq. Some "insurgents" maybe. But it's not just in Iraq, right? After all, we're fighting and dropping bombs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too. So there must be some other people we don't like then, or who don't like us.

Could be the Extremists.


These Extremists. They're so.......EXTREME. GOD, HOW WE HATE EXREMISTS. This is a war on Extremism.

No it's not.

Listen. When we fought against Communism, we didn't go around saying -

Communism is not bad, really. In fact, Communism is actually quite benign. We've got nothing against Communism. Lotsa great people are communists right? I've hung out with several communists in my day and they have just been the nicest, most hospitable folks you ever could meet. How unfair is it to brand them all as evil? Totally. It's just a few communist EXREMISTS who are mucking things up. You know, the ones who are advocating violence and trying to spread communism throughout the world. Not that there's anything WRONG with communism, we just don't think it's right for them to be spreading it around like that.

We didn't go around saying stuff like that because that would have been utter bullshit. Communism, as it was being practiced, was everything Democracy and Capitalism was not. It was antithetical to our values of individual freedom and self-determination. The spread of communism was a threat to the American way of life and we said so from the highest pulpits.

And now so is the spread of Islam.

That's right folks, whether we want to admit it or not, there is no war on terror, there is a war on Islam. As with communism, we are at war with an "ism", an ideology. The difference is, this particular ism is also a religion. And therein lies the dilemma. You see, we Westerners believe in freedom of religion. We all agree that it's not appropriate to ban or even restrict any religion - that is contrary to our values. But what happens when we are faced with a religion that is not just a religion, but also an ideology that is inherently anti-democratic?

More on this in the next blog.