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What Hawks Mean When They Talk About “Islamofascism”

I assume Will Wilkinson is joking when he writes this: The entire leadership of Iran is deranged by false religion, and thus Iran itself amounts to a country-sized suicide bomber ready to embrace total self-destruction not so much to win, but just to give the infidels what we have coming. You can’t negotiate with that! […]

I assume Will Wilkinson is joking when he writes this:

The entire leadership of Iran is deranged by false religion, and thus Iran itself amounts to a country-sized suicide bomber ready to embrace total self-destruction not so much to win, but just to give the infidels what we have coming. You can’t negotiate with that! There’s nothing to do but defeat this sort of evil, which is to say, to overpower it. The problem is, what do we do then? We overpowered the Taliban in Afghanistan, for a while. Now what? The Soviets made sense. Sexy spies make sense. We won the Cold War making better blue jeans. That was great. If only we could come to understand Al Qaeda’s game, or the Iranians’ game, as we understand the glamourous Anna Chapman’s game, we might one day come to understand what it would mean to win it.

This is a pretty good paraphrase of Santorum’s more far-out comments on the threat from “Islamic fascism.” Wilkinson overlooks that Santorum tries to have it both ways when he talks about this. In the same breath that Santorum insists that the Iranian government is fanatically irrational and obsessed with becoming martyrs, he will argue that the same tactics of subversion and support for internal dissidents should be employed, as if it were the Cold War again and Iran were no different from the USSR. When certain anti-jihadist ideologues talk about “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism,” they aren’t just being ignorant or intellectually lazy. For many of them, modern jihadism really is related to and comparable to the secular hyper-revolutionary nationalism that appeared in Europe between the world wars, and they assume that combating jihadism is comparable in scale and significance to fighting against Nazi Germany and opposing the Soviet Union. Similarly, they believe that jihadism can be defeated in much the same ways that fascism and communism were defeated, which means that they haven’t really recognized what makes jihadism significantly different from the secular ideologies to which they so often compare it.

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