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Yielding The Initiative

Doug Bandow notes another tiresome “1938ist” article, this time by Michael Novak, and asks the obvious question: who cares if the jihadis believe Iraq is the “central front,” and why should we fight the war on their terms?  Letting your enemy decide when and where to fight is ultimately self-defeating–so much for the lie that […]

Doug Bandow notes another tiresome “1938ist” article, this time by Michael Novak, and asks the obvious question: who cares if the jihadis believe Iraq is the “central front,” and why should we fight the war on their terms?  Letting your enemy decide when and where to fight is ultimately self-defeating–so much for the lie that this administration and its supporters want to “take the fight to the enemy.”  They have, in fact, yielded all initiative in this war, which is something that all of the misdirected fury of the “pre-emption” in Iraq has obscured from view.  Invading Iraq was not so much the product of an aggressive, ‘forward policy’ that will put the enemy on the defensive as it was a phenomenally unwise campaign that walked straight into the trap the jihadis were hoping we would walk into. 

This is much the same as what I asked a few weeks ago when I cited The Economist‘s observation of the creepy parallelism of the jihadi and neocon narratives about the war.  Back on 1 September I said:

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.

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