The War on Fundamentalists

I'll return to my main subject when I get back from work later, but for now I want to comment on the War on Terror. In the New Republic Peter Beinart argues that liberals should take the War on Terror more seriously. We should follow in the footsteps of our forbears Harry Truman and John Kennedy, and repudiate the heirs of Henry Wallace. Kevin Drum and Bull Moose concur.

My response? Sure, so long as we properly define who the enemy is. Many people have objected to the War on Terror because you can't make war on a tactic. The problem with our efforts to combat terrorism is that they mis-diagnose the problem. The enemy isn't terrorism, it's religious fundamentalism. Not islamic fundamentalism, but religious fanaticism in general. Bush has resisted this formulation and continued to attack a vague "terror threat" not only to frighten us into electing him but because the more obvious description of the threat could easily be applied to him.

One of the dirty secrets of American political history is that the Republicans were so virulently anti-communist not because of principle but because the issue allowed them to lose the label of appeasers they earned because of their isolationism during WWII, and gave them a club to beat liberals over the head with by implying liberals were all proto-communists (see my post of a few days ago).

I think we should return the favor. The real threat to America is the ideology of the Holy War, or religious authority that is politicized and uses force and oppression to pursue its aims. We have our own fundamentalists here at home. We must combat this un-American ideology wherever it surfaces, we must use all the resources at our disposal: our schools, our courts, our army, our diplomats, and our allies, to remove the taint of religious extremism at home and abroad. We will not let those people take the world back to the middle ages, where men were taught to accept their suffering and women that they should know their place.

Eat that, Jerry Falwell.