The Frightening New Enemy

Oh my God, we better vote Republican or we will be overrun by Communism . . ., uh no, that's mostly dead.

Um, the Axis of Evil, . . . no that's Bush's line . . . besides North Korea is no longer in it, Iran is many years away from being a credible nuclear threat and Iraq never had the Bomb.

Wait! What's that dynamite phrase John McCain threw out on Sunday on FACE THE NATION? "Transcendant Islamic Jihad!"

That is so 21st century! Like the twentieth century's fascism and communisim, "transcedent Islamic jihad" gives us a mega-enemy vague enough to use to scare everyone and with just enough vivid pictures thanks to the televised beheadings.

Well, for a nation that does not seem to want to be without someone to hate and fight wars against (I mean Gays? Ha! Who can work up going to war against homosexuals because they live next door and the collateral damage would be us).

Now we have a concept that can be pushed by the Republicans that will satisfy the ones who think in black and white terms and who don't like browns either! Collateral damage will be the non-white folks who live overseas. We can just put the ones here in the US into concentration camps as we did the Japanese during World War !! (Gotta keep those young disenfranchized Arabs from Michigan or New York from planting a bomb among us white good folks.)

Sorry if I went over the top there . . . . I am so afraid of how this concept of the "Enemy of the 21st Century" will be used. I lived at the time of the internment camps and know some who lived in them. I was afraid of the Bomb and knew to cover my head and duck under my desk at school. I saw Joe McCarthy in action. I've watched how the fear of Communism led to our slaughter of Vietnamese and Laotians. And this war against the Axis of Evil has led to the death and maiming of too many of our kids and maybe a million Iraqi deaths with two million already spreading into Jordan, Iran, and elsewhere (not the US so much . . . because we won't let them in!) as refugees.

Is there a danger from the Wahabi sect which has schools in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Yes. Some graduates from those schools are among the volunteers that are going to Iraq and other places in the Middle East to be the suicide bombers for Al Quaida. I do not think they have infiltrated Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Sunni and Shia insurgents in Iraq but are involved with the Taliban.

The Wahabi (begun in the 1700s) have been especially active for decades. So their influence has grown, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Their mindset, as I understand it, is the most militant. They scare the Sunni nations and are apparently seen as competition among the Shia more than as allies.

This "national security estimate" of mine means to remind us all that there is a danger and that it is complex and has many competing elements in the Islamic world. If we let anyone (particularly Republicans in this day and age) build their political platform on fear of Islamic jihadists and use that the same way we saw 20th century "isms" used, we will repeat the same mistakes and further separate ourselves from the rest of the world.

Thanks to the Bush Administration, and to those Democrats who subscribe to helping international corporations, the military-industrial complex, and Israel have their own way, the threat of long term conflicts with the Islamic world's many factions is very real.

But with a lot of wisdom and a lot of squelching of demagoguery, we may be able to keep the conflicts at the level of policing as it is in Europe and is so far here in the US.

Finally, let me remind everyone that whenever there is a threat, we have to quantify it. How many are there who are real threats? Where are the Wahabi and how strong are they? Do we need to gear up large military forces or can we actually just enhance our law enforcement capabilities? Can we develop competent onsite intelligence, something so dreadfully lacking in the Middle East? Should we be establishing "peace" offensives such as Peace Corps, economic development, water purification and renewable energy that even the Third World poor can afford, etc.?

If the politics of fear of "transcendent Islamic jihad" takes over, it's going to be a very long twenty first century. . . .