Jihadists are skilled at weaving the “resistance” in Palestine, Lebanon, Kashmir, Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan into a single narrative of persecution by the infidel.

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To the secular mind, the jihadists’ notion that the faith is everywhere under attack looks absurd. How can conflicts as different as those in Palestine, the Caucasus, Kashmir and the Balkans, even East Timor, be interpreted as parts of a seamless conspiracy against Islam? In Kosovo, for goodness sake, NATO intervened to protect Muslims from Christians, not the other way round. And yet a troubling recent development is the emergence in America of an equal and opposite distortion. This is the idea that it is the West and its values that are everywhere under attack, and everywhere by the same seamless front of what Mr Bush has taken to calling “Islamic fascism”, as if this conflict is akin to the second world war or the cold war against communism. “We are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war,” Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, said in July.

It is wrong to look at the post-September 11th world this way, as if every local conflict is part of a civilisational clash. Mr Gingrich was speaking about the Lebanon war. But not every Islamist movement is inspired by the ideas that animate al-Qaeda. In Palestine Hamas is a pious (and vicious) version of a national-liberation movement with local goals, not another front in a global fight. Ditto, more or less, Hizbullah, except that it is also a tool of Iran. And Iran itself is better understood as an assertive rising (and dangerous) power that happens to have a theocratic constitution than as an ally of al-Qaeda, whose ideas come from a separate strand of Islam. ~The Economist

It is leaders like these that make me pleased to have renewed my Economist subscription earlier this week.  This is not simply because The Economist happens to agree with part of my objections to the stupid phrase “Islamic fascism” and its even less intelligent cousin, Islamofascism, but because they seem to have recovered some of the basic skepticism and reasonableness that used to make The Economist worth reading when it wasn’t getting carried away with its Serb-bashing or democracy-spreading enthusiasms.  They make a vital connection here that most critics, myself included, have neglected to make. 

So preoccupied with the facile and laughable nature of the phrase “Islamic fascism,” I have neglected to discuss this other significant problem: imagining a seamless, unified “Islamic fascist” enemy replicates the Al Qaeda jihadis‘ own conception of the war and works to their advantage by fighting the war on their terms.  We are not fighting them where they are, which is what we should do, but fighting them as they would like us to be fighting them (with the added bonus of toppling a dictator whom they hated).  You even see neocons citing statements from Al Qaeda leaders about the fighting in Iraq today as some sort of “proof” that Iraq is vital to our war.  It is vital to someone’s global war, but it isn’t ours–vital to their war, because it gives them exactly the kind of fight they want.  By collapsing every discrete and distinct case of Islamic militancy (or, in the case of Syria and Iran, simply regimes that Washington despises) into the generic and misleadingly named “Islamic fascism,” the administration and its hangers-on daily lend credibility to the jihadis‘ propaganda that this is a generalised war against almost any kind of Muslim nation, be it Sunni or Shi’ite, secular or theocratic, authoritarian or partly democratic.  That works to their advantage, not ours, particularly if it causes us to commit ourselves to more conventional wars and occupations of Muslim nations, thus providing them with new fields for the jihadi harvest.