This NYT analysis looks at how the U.S. is framing the current series of conflicts with Islamist groups.
SOON after the British police announced last week that they had broken up a plot to blow up aircraft across the Atlantic, President Bush declared the affair “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”
British officials, on the other hand, referred to the men in custody as “main players,” and declined to discuss either their motives or ideology so that they would not jeopardize “criminal proceedings.”
The difference in these initial public characterizations was revealing: The American president summoned up language reaffirming that the United States is locked in a global war in which its enemies are bound together by a common ideology, and a common hatred of democracy. For the moment, the British carefully stuck to the toned-down language of law enforcement.
A critical debate in America today — among political candidates and among national security experts — is whether five years of war declarations and war-making have helped to make the United States more secure. Or, even in the absence of a major attack on American soil since 9/11, has this strategy created greater danger by providing terror groups with exactly what they crave: the sense that they are a unified army of jihadists? And has the strategy radicalized large swaths of the Muslim world in ways that were not imaginable as recently as 2003? ...
Dick Cheney and company sneered at the law enforcement approach of the Clinton administration to terror threats. They accused the Clintonians of failing to hit back hard enough.
The test of American willpower, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush have insisted, is in Baghdad, which explains why they stick to the language that it is the “central front” in the war on terrorism and domino that America cannot let fall. Defeat there, they warn, would give the jihadists a victory and empower them to move on to the next country — maybe Pakistan, maybe Saudi Arabia, maybe Lebanon.
The question is whether that approach — and the language that goes with it — creates a trap for the administration.
“I think that what is happening is that everything is getting magnified,” said Stephen Cohen, a Mideast scholar at the Israel Policy Forum. “Just like every small crisis around the world was part of the cold war, every one is now part of the struggle between militant Islam and the United States. And that makes individual conflicts harder to solve,” and an inspiration for jihad.
Mr. Cohen cited the American approach to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. If that conflict were once again regarded as just another chapter in a long-running regional dispute, the stakes would be lower in Washington, making it easier for the United States to play a more traditional peace-making role.
Ah, but it's not! It's just one more battlefront in the war with the Islamic fascists!
Dubya has talked of the "long war," and got mocked by The Daily Show for trying to shift the message to "a long war against extremism."
In the current issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows argues that the imagery of the “long war” — one that has already lasted longer than the Korean conflict — is self-defeating. “An open-ended war is an open-ended invitation to defeat,” he wrote. “Sometime there will be more bombings, shootings, poisonings and other disruptions in the United States.” Some will be the work of Islamic extremists, some not. He added: “If they occur while the war is still on, they are enemy ‘victories,’ not misfortunes of the sort that great nations suffer.”
For Mr. Bush, however, dropping the talk of a “long war” would be to send a message that America can go back to sleep. Thus, each terrorist attack or threat is woven into the bigger picture of a global struggle.
It helps explain the recent redeployment of American troops to the streets of Baghdad: to pull out early would be a return to the failed approach of the 1990’s. It would be another Somalia, another Beirut. The problem is whether staying may give the jihadists something else: A narrative of never-ending conflict, in a war to be fought in Baghdad, in Lebanon and in economy class over the wing of a 747.