Conservatives tend to see the United States, Western culture, and even civilization itself under assault from a barbaric totalitarian force in some way connected to Islam. They perceive a cosmic struggle — reminiscent of those in World War II and the Cold War — over the future destiny of mankind.

Liberals tend to have a far more relaxed view of the situation, as symbolized by John Kerry’s 2004 comment calling terrorism a “nuisance” and comparing it to gambling and prostitution. Liberals widely accuse conservatives, for self-interested reasons, of exaggerating the threat. ~Daniel Pipes

Liberals may be self-interested, and it is likely that they have misunderstood several aspects of the conflict, but who couldn’t honestly say that your average conservative talking head or columnist has exaggerated the threat?  In some ways, they have done nothing but exaggerate it, making the enemy into a new “fascism” and constantly drawing parallels with WWII, laughably comparing fourth-rate dictatorships with a world-class power that fought what was nonetheless an inevitably losing war against all the other great powers of its time.  The words apocalypse and Armageddon fall from pundits’ lips with a frequency that would be embarrassing if it were not so disturbing.  

Might Pipes be exaggerating the threat when he describes the conflict as a “cosmic struggle…over the future destiny of mankind”?  To be such a struggle, one would have to believe that either side has a reasonable chance of actually defeating the other and that the destiny of mankind will be significantly different depending on the outcome.  This seems to bear no resemblance to the conflict the United States are in (is the destiny of most of mankind at stake here, or is it in fact the destiny of the Islamic world that is really being decided?), and there seems to be some kind of defective thinking that concludes that we have to be fighting such a “cosmic struggle” in order to make it seem sufficiently important to be worth fighting.  It is as if an ordinary political struggle lacks the drama for people raised with sci-fi expectations of starkly divided opposing forces (which makes me wonder why the Trekkies at The Corner have not suggested Islamoborg as the appropriate name to be used for the jihadis).  It is as if some people simply cannot accept that there can be large numbers of embittered Islamic fanatics who are intent on pursuing their agenda for power and influence and equally intent on killing those who get in their way, while also acknowledging that this does not constitute WWIII or some similarly grandiosely-titled Cosmic Struggle.  Arguably only in the sense that this is a continuation of the old fight between Cross and Crescent is it in any sense a “cosmic struggle,” and even then this exaggerates the significance of this particular war, which at best only forms a part of the long-running conflict between the two worlds. 

Perhaps this need to exaggerate the conflict’s significance is a result of the sudden shock of being confronted with the threat from jihadis, since their methods and message are old news in most of the other nations where they have struck.  Unaccustomed to this very old threat, and doubly unaccustomed to fighting against a terribly religious enemy, some Americans reach for the immediate precedents in our national experience and try, however clumsily and confusedly, to construct some kind of explanation that will fit our familiar scheme of enemies.  Because there are no insults in our political lexicon more damning than totalitarian and fascist, these are the words that some will use, and because they can think of no enemy more horrid than the Nazis they will inaptly compare jihadis to them.  These comparisons and this use of the “fascist” label have nothing to do with description and everything to do with moral condemnation: by calling them fascist, I prove that I absolutely despise them; by comparing them to the Nazis, I have firmly declared my opposition.  It is time-honoured method of labeling heretics and deviants, and like those time-honoured methods it is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to describing who the people so labeled actually are. 

These same people who use this sort of rhetoric will continue to describe the conflict not as one against religious fanatics but against political ideologues–continuing to insist that the two realms cannot ever really be mixed, almost comically dutifully maintaining the compartmentalisation of religion and politics that we find in our own society.  Indeed, our own ideologues are much more comfortable thinking of jihadis as political ideologues, since  it makes them slightly intelligible to other political ideologues.  Any kind of religious mind, as I have suggested before, remains a foreign and terrible place that these people cannot penetrate or understand.  This is a tremendous liability in fighting an enemy that is principally and undeniably religious in its motivations–and one that gives the broadest possible scope to what their religion encompasses.  In this sense, yes, they are totalitarian, but even this word somehow fails to capture the all-encompassing ambition of the idea.  Perhaps the word seems lacking because secular totalitarians tend to be monists and so dictate religious observance mostly by forbidding or constricting it and offering no real replacement, whereas a religious fanatic insists upon a positive and specific application of his religious law to every field of endeavour.  Superficially, this may seem similar, but the religious fanatic is actually making a much stronger claim on the regulation of everyday life.  It is also a claim of domination on behalf of the “Lord of both worlds,” that is, the earthly and the heavenly, which is even more totalising than the purely immanentist claims of the secular totalitarian.  It is the supreme irony that Bin Laden calls us “crusaders,” since surely Crusaders would understand the religious dimension of this conflict far better than most of us do.  The jihadis may indeed view this as a “cosmic struggle,” because they are likely to view every conflict in this way–but just as our official rhetoric has started to mirror the alarmist rhetoric of the jihadis, our definition of the struggle has been similarly exaggerated to match that of the vision of religious fanatics.     

These points likely make no sense to people who insist on treating this conflict simply in ideological terms.  Thus we have Frank Gaffney telling us: “While it purports to be about faith, as with previous totalitarian movements, it is really about power.”  There is nothing more damning to say about a religious person in our secular society than that he is only really interested  in power, as if every society shared our aversion to mixing the two and as if every religion shunned the acquisition of power for the glory of its god.   

What a quaint post-Enlightenment view of things!  As if real faith had nothing to do with power of any kind, when for most of Christian history the two have been almost inextricably bound up together, to say nothing of their far more intimate relationship in the history of Islam.  Because most of us look back on our own history with a jaded eye and the conviction that the relationship of faith and power was generally a bad one, some of us seem almost constitutionally unable to describe their confluence without cynicism and qualifications that try to separate the real religion from the pursuit of power.  What the mildly religious or secular ideologue cannot fathom is that religious faith is itself a kind of power, that in many forms religious faith can and will seek temporal power (some of them are obliged to do so), that this is not necessarily a perversion or distortion of the religious faith in question and that the two often cannot be separated.  This does not necessarily apply to every kind of religious faith, and it applies to some more than others, but for those who are intent–for whatever reason–on maintaining the fiction that “any and every kind of faith is good and apolitical and so cannot have anything to do with the pursuit of power” these distinctions are meaningless.  

Just as some rather naively assume that “everyone wants to be free”–by which they mean “be free just as we are free”–so they rather naively think that every good Muslim who is obviously not one of these fanatics cannot also really be interested in establishing shari’a or discriminating against non-Muslims or waging jihad.  This is not to make our present conflict into a war against all Muslims–which, besides being unnecessary, would be phenomenally unwise–but to acknowledge that these sorts of things are not simply the fruit of some wild-eyed fringe or merely a product of the most extreme revivalist movements.  They are not an ideological departure into the world of power-seeking, but integral elements in traditional Islam that are taken up with special zeal by fanatics.  In a religion with no final normative, interpretive authority that defines the boundaries of “true” Islam, the Islam of these fanatics is really no less authentic than that of the most inoffensive and law-abiding Muslim.  That does not mean that all Muslims hold identical beliefs, which obviously is not the case, but that each Muslim has claims to representing Islam that are as equally plausible as any other Muslim’s.  Arguably jihadi methods may violate certain prescribed Islamic codes of conduct, but in this they are in principle really no different from those Christians who talk about just war principles in one breath and make apologies for Hiroshima in the next (while hinting at pre-emptive nuclear attacks against still other countries).  You can always find people who are willing to find loopholes in moral standards or justify atrocities in light of extraordinary circumstances or on account of the perfidy of the enemy.  In any case, each attempt to separate the fanatics’ religiosity from their desire for power makes it that much harder to understand and combat them.  

Incidentally, it is surely a curious thing that people who use terms such as “Islamic fascist” and “Islamofascist” believe that they are helpfully distinguishing the jihadis from ordinary Muslims, while most ordinary Muslims seem to reject the label instantly as one that insultingly labels all Muslims as fascists, which throws into doubt the value of such terms for effectively separating the violent fanatics from other Muslims and makes these terms about as counterproductive in the Islamic world as can be imagined.  If the goal is to combat effectively the influence and spread of jihadi ideas and methods, insulting every Muslim on the planet is probably not the wisest course of action.  If the goal is quite different–to lump together many different kinds of Muslim groups and regimes that have no connection to one another–it is successful after a fashion.  However, it is exactly this lumping together that makes the word’s overtly propagandistic purpose only too clear and makes it worth less than nothing as a descriptor.    

Taking the long view, Christian civilisation has been at war with the Islamic world for close to 1,400 years–and they have been undoubtedly losing for the last four hundred (in some places, they have been losing for as long as six hundred places).  By every political and military measure there is, the last two hundred years have been an age of unmitigated failure and defeat for the Islamic world.  As neocons love to remind us, it is this failure and the resentment it breeds that have led to the modern forms of Islamic revivalist and fundamentalist violence, directed against the perceived (and sometimes real) agents of their humiliation.  But, quite frankly, to call this a “cosmic struggle” is to insult cosmic struggles.   

Except when we and the Europeans let Muslims into our countries (and America has let in almost another million in the last year), they cannot take an inch of our territory and have no chance of establishing any form of shari’a anywhere in the West.  The jihadi threat is serious, as we cannot help but remember today, but it is all the same far short of epochal, global struggles that really possess the potential to engulf the entire world.  This so-called “WWIII” that Mr. Gingrich keeps going on about is, in practical terms, almost entirely limited to the confines of the Islamic world.  Over half of mankind is largely or entirely untouched by it, and 90% of the world’s nations have no strong interests in the conflict.  The jihadis‘ potential for growth and success is strictly limited by the expanse of Islam, since it has literally no meaning for anyone outside of the Islamic world.  Insofar as we and other Westerners are deeply involved in the politics of the Islamic world, it is the main political conflict of our time, but those who believe that national survival or the fate of the world is at stake are verging on being certifiably delusional.  We should take that into account whenever we are assessing their arguments for future interventions or policies.