Re: Social Liberal Origin of “Islamofascism”
On May 8, 2007, at 3:42 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
There is thus no significant ideological brake inside the North on the so-called War on Terror.
Except exhaustion with war, perhaps?
I’m never sure what your point is in these denunciations of “social
liberals” and “secular elitists.” We should embrace social
conservatives? They’re a hell of a lot more likely to support the
GWOT than are your current targets. If you’re going to play political
etymology, the term was coined by Reagan and revived by Bush.
Meanwhile, two presidential candidates think the GWOT is incoherent,
as Carrol Cox might say.
Doug
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0507/3850.html
Biden wages war on ‘war on terror’ By: Ben Smith May 4, 2007 06:01 PM EST
John Edwards won praise on the left and criticism from the right
when, at the first Democratic presidential candidates debate last
month, refused to raise his hand to say he believed in the existence
of a “global war on terror.”
The man to Edwards’ immediate left on the stage, Senator Joe Biden,
didn’t raise his hand either.
And while Edwards’ opposition to the phrase crystallized recently –
references to the terror war were removed from his own website only
after the debate — Biden has been waging what has appeared, at
times, to be a quixotic war on “the global war on terror” for years.
“The President continues to talk about ‘the war on terror.’ That is
simply wrong,” Biden, who now chairs the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee said in a speech at the National Press Club last September.
“Terrorism is a means, not an end, and very different groups and
countries are using it toward very different goals. If we can’t even
identify the enemy or describe the war we’re fighting, it’s difficult
to see how we will win.”
The notion of a “war on terror” dates back in American politics at
least to a 1986 speech by Ronald Reagan, but it was President Bush
who formalized it soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks, turning
the Global War on Terror — or GWOT, as its known in military and
White House circles — into a technical term referring to American
operations around the globe.
Critics, including foreign policy “realists” with a more nuanced,
case-by-case view of foreign policy, like former National Security
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, objected, as did some senior military
officials, but the phrase spilled over into both common speech and
congressional language.
Senate Republicans “used to put in stuff like ‘a resolution
complimenting so and so and helping us in the Global War on Terror,’”
Biden said. “It’s a dangerous notion — it allows them under that
rubric to include everything and it allows them to ignore other things.”
So Biden instructed his staff to fight to take the language out of
bills coming through the Foreign Relations Committee, something
congressional staffers on both sides of the aisle said he did with
some success, though the phrase still sometimes slipped through.
“Biden’s staff has preferred other phrasing and there has not been a
problem with that,” said Andy Fisher, a spokesman for the committee’s
senior Republican, Richard Lugar.
And how does Biden explain how he kept the phrase out of legislation
when the Democrats were in the minority?
The Republicans “would want to get whatever it was passed, and they
knew I’d be the bastard at the family picnic who wasn’t afraid to
take the heat being ‘weak on terror’ — I’d go in and rip them up,”
he told the Politico.
Biden isn’t alone on the Hill in his objection to the phrase. In
March, the House Budget Committee banned “global war on terror” from
the 2008 budget.
And even President Bush and his former Defense Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, at times backed away from the broad brush.
Since staking his claim to that fight, Edwards has been the most
visible opponent of the phrase.
“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and
that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to
do,” Edwards told Politico’s Mike Allen in a Time Magazine column.
But other leading Democratic presidential candidates — Senators
Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — all raised their
hands to indicate they buy into the idea, as did New Mexico Governor
Bill Richardson.
Biden has a theory about why many of his Democratic rivals put their
hands up.
“I think that the whole political establishment of both parties has
been either confused or a little intimidated by the president’s
jargon when he talks about terror,” Biden said.
Biden argues that the blanket notion of fighting terrorism has
damaged American interests not only in Iraq — where he sees an irony
in the emergence of strong Islamist enemies only after the American
invasion — but also elsewhere in the world, notably in the restive
Russian republic of Chechnya.
“Terror is a tactic. Terror is not a philosophy,” Biden said. “The
war in Chechnya is a war of liberation — it engaged in terrorist
activities, but it it is fundamentally different.”
Bush’s insistence on seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, and other conflicts as
fronts in the same war, Biden said, is “the reason why [Russian
President Vladimir] Putin’s gotten away with murder.”
Biden declined to criticize his Democratic rivals, but said that it’s
his coherent foreign policy views that make him the best choice for
the White House.
“The whole point here is that it’s kind of hard, unless you’ve really
spent a lot of time thinking about it, to figure out exactly where
you think America’s place in the world is, what its role is,” he said.
“And the next president ought to be at least as smart as his advisors.”