Know Your Enemy

27 Dec. Washington Times Op-Ed / Book Revew - Know Your Enemy by Gary Anderson.

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WAR FOOTING: 10 STEPS AMERICA MUST TAKE TO PREVAIL IN THE WAR FOR THE FREE WORLD
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr
Naval Institute, $27.95, 320 pages

... The book addresses grand strategy, not merely military strategy for winning militarily. In describing their strategy, the authors talk in terms of the application of all elements of military power to include diplomacy, information operations and economic tools as well as military power; the acronym that the military uses for this melding is DIME.

The first step that the authors describe is to "know the enemy." Here, the enemy is described not as radical Islam, but as fascism disguised as Islam or Islamofascism, which the authors see as a political movement attempting to legitimize itself through religion. The book portrays the main villains here as the Wahhabist sect of Islam, primarily centered in Saudi Arabia. Although they do not go so far as to claim that the Saudi government formally sponsors al Qaeda and its offshoots, the authors clearly see the Saudi government as an enabler, and they fully feel that Saudi oil money is the root cause of the evil.

The book then goes on to address a holistic approach for defeating the enemy abroad, at home and in the area of world perceptions. Some of the suggestions put forward in this volume include such commonsense economic advice as diversifying our oil reserves and changing our policies for resourcing homeland-defense assets on the basis of real need, not political factionalism. That particular argument comes at a time when many in Congress are attacking the Patriot Act without suggesting positive alternative approaches...

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Council member Zenpundit - Islamists vs. "Islamofascists".

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A desultory debate on the extent of totalitarianism within Islamism has reemerged in the blogosphere due to President Bush saying " Islamic Fascist" in reference to Islamist terrorist groups. There's a lot of objections to that term on pragmatic as well as technical grounds ( some Islamists are quietists, others accept democracy, some are "moderate" authoritarians, some are takfiri extremists with scores to settle against "apostate" Muslims) or the utility of the analogy.

Twentieth century totalitarianism in its Marxist, Nazi and Fascist manifestations have some commonalities with radical Islamism, notably opposition to liberal democracy, as well as important fundamental differences, radical atheism being a noteworthy example. Juan Cole's assertion that Fascism is incompatible with Islamism because Islamists reject the nation-state ignores the fact that Nazis emphasized not the state ( that was Mussolini's version) but the "Aryan race". Hitler himself was emphatic on that point, that the German state was an inconsequential thing before the wellbeing of the German" racial community". "Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer" puts the state at the bottom of the pyramid.

Quite frankly, the most radical Nazis looked forward to a postwar, de-Christianized, Judenfrei, European racialist superstate that incorporated all "teutonic" nationalities under Nazi dominion. State, race, religion - fascism is a collectivistic and exclusivist creed and religion is probably at least as durable an emotive basis for Fascism as nationalism or racism. While some radical Islamists have been " eucumenical" in their desire to build a united, Islamist, Ummah others like the psychopathic Zarqawi took a violently takfiri and exclusionary approach to Caliphate-building.

Nevertheless, "Islamic Fascism" as a term has a number of problems given the diverse, at times inchoate and dynamic nature of radical Islamist movements...

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