More like Nazis than Commies
The proper analogy for our terrorist enemies
Adam Wolfson
The Weekly Standard
12 November 2001 - Vol. 7 No. 9
IT
IS SAID THAT GENERALS are always fighting the last war, and this is no
less true of politicians and policymakers. As the first war of the new
century begins, America's leaders have been reaching back to the two great
struggles of the 20th century, against communism and fascism, to
understand this one. Some, like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, think
that the appropriate comparison is to the Cold War. Rumsfeld has said that
today's war will be waged more as we fought the Communists than the Axis.
On October 4, in Cairo, he declared:
"For it undoubtedly will prove
to be a lot more like a cold war than a hot war. In the cold war it took
50 years, plus or minus. It did not involve major battles. It involved
continuous pressure. It involved cooperation by a host of nations. And
when it ended, it ended not with a bang, but through internal collapse. .
. . It strikes me that might be a more appropriate way to think about what
we are up against here, than would be any [other] major conflict."
In contrast, Rumsfeld's commander in chief seems to have uppermost
in his mind the struggle against Nazism. In his address to the joint
session of Congress on September 20, President Bush declared: "By
abandoning every value except the will to power, [the terrorists] follow
in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism."
Which
should be our guide (if either) -- the fight against communism or against
fascism? This is more than an academic question. Nazism and communism were
dissimilar regimes, of different historical and philosophic lineages, and
exhibiting distinct political profiles and contrasting international
conduct. The response of the United States to each threat was also quite
different. Thus whether our reference point is to Nazism or communism will
have enormous policy implications.
U.S. foreign policy towards
communism was mapped out in George F. Kennan's (or Mr. X's) famous
article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs in
1947. Kennan argued that to counter Soviet conduct, one must first come to
grips with "the political personality" of Soviet power, which he diagnosed
as a product of Communist ideology and historical circumstance. The
interplay of these two factors, in his view, caused the Soviet Union to be
highly flexible and responsive to outside pressures in pursuit of its
goals. The Soviet Union was, in a sense, a rational actor, which, in
Kennan's memorable words, "can be contained by the adroit and vigilant
application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and
manoeuvres of Soviet policy."
It was a brilliant piece of
political and psychological analysis, which accurately forecast nearly the
entire future course of the Cold War. For almost 50 years, we fought a
series of wars along the periphery to check Soviet expansion, aided and
funded anti-Soviet proxies, and engaged the Soviets in intricate
arms-control negotiations and propaganda one-upmanship. Never did we
directly engage them on their own soil, nor they on ours. This containment
strategy fit the Soviet Union's political personality -- malevolent but
rational, ill-intentioned but cautious -- like a glove.
But such a
policy, as Kennan implied in his article, would never have succeeded
against a power like Nazi Germany. Kennan contrasted the leaders of the
Soviet Union with Napoleon and Hitler, who were deaf to anything but their
own megalomaniacal dreams of world conquest. Nazism was irrationalist and
anti-Enlightenment to its core, while, as an outgrowth of the
Enlightenment -- an extreme outgrowth, to be sure -- Soviet communism was
amenable to the persuasion of the carrot and the stick.
And
indeed, our foreign policy during World War II was very different from
what it was during the Cold War. In his war address of December 8, 1941,
Franklin Roosevelt flatly declared, "We will not only defend ourselves to
the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall
never endanger us again."
And several years later, in a speech before
Congress, FDR declared our war aims to be "unconditional surrender,"
meaning "the end of Nazism and the Nazi party -- and all of its barbaric
laws and institutions." In the Soviet case, we applied a policy of
calibrated counter-force; in the Nazi case, we sought the total
destruction of fascism as a political entity and ideology. It was a war
fought not over decades and by proxy, but swiftly and furiously, by our
own arms and men, and ultimately with atomic bombs.
If we are to
respond effectively to September 11, it will be necessary to investigate,
as Kennan once did, the "political personality" of our foes. Certainly,
the president's analogy to Nazism is imperfect -- most obviously, Nazism
had no roots in religion, whereas the terrorists consider themselves to be
acting in the name of one of the world's great monotheistic religions.
Nonetheless, as a political phenomenon, the terrorists do have more in
common with fascism than with communism. They are at war with the
Enlightenment and modernity. In particular, they reject the liberal
principles of separation of church and state, toleration, and the rights
of the individual. They view the United States and other liberal
democracies as weak and corrupt, and have nothing but contempt for a way
of life dedicated to commerce and the pursuit of happiness. The terrorists
instead take a nihilistic delight in blood and destruction. We "look
forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living," said one al
Qaeda leader. And finally, the terrorists harbor an insane,
all-encompassing hatred of Jews (indeed, much of their anti-Jewish
propaganda is borrowed directly from the Nazis).
The political
character of the terrorists is also revealed in their September 11 assault
on the United States. Had they flown planes only into the Pentagon and
other military targets, a peace party probably would have emerged in the
United States. Liberal Democrats (and some Republicans as well) would have
argued that the terrorists only meant to send a message about our Middle
East policy and that we can reason with them, perhaps appease them with a
more "neutral" policy. But the terrorists' savage attack on civilians in
the liberal state of New York, wantonly killing people as they sat at
their desks in the World Trade Center, made any such argument absurd on
its face and turned even Senator Hillary Clinton into a war hawk. "There
is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its
east. Thank God for that,"
said bin Laden after the assault. Not our
policies but our very existence enrages the terrorists.
THE
FAILURE OF THE COLD WAR analogy to capture today's threat can be grasped
most simply from how our enemies characterize us. It's one thing to be
called "bourgeois," quite another to be called an "infidel."
Perhaps President Bush had none of this in mind when he likened
the terrorists to Nazis. Some pundits have suggested that he compared them
to fascists rather than to Communists only to avoid alienating China. Or
he may have meant nothing more concrete by the comparison than did the
first President Bush in his fight against Saddam Hussein. That President
Bush boldly declared that the war against Iraq was akin to the war against
Nazism, and then, after a brief military campaign, implemented a policy of
containment instead. Similarly, George W. Bush has invoked a fascist-like
threat to national security, and yet his policies, like those of his
father, seem closer to how the United States fought the Cold War than
World War II. George W. Bush's carefully calibrated use of force in
Afghanistan, his emphasis on coalitions, and his proposal to create a
"moderate" Taliban regime, all suggest a policy of containment, not
unconditional surrender. The decision to attack Afghanistan rather than
Iraq is representative of Cold War thinking: Concentrate on the periphery,
not the source. The problem is that such a containment-oriented policy
does not match the Nazi-like threat that the president has repeatedly
warned the American people they now face. FDR never spoke of "moderate
Nazis."
In all likelihood the analogy to either Nazism or Soviet
communism will prove inaccurate, and thus neither a policy of
unconditional surrender nor one of containment will alone be adequate.
Rather, we will need to think broadly and deeply about the political
personality of this new enemy. And in so doing, everything should be
placed on the table, from religion's role in this war, to the influence of
fascist and nihilistic modes of thought, to the fifth-column question, to
the Iraqi menace.
We must also reconsider whether so-called
moderate states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are any less inimical to our
national security than rogue states such as Iraq. The carnage of September
11 was the work not of an Iraqi missile but of 19 hijackers, 15 of whom
were Saudi nationals, and it was masterminded by the Saudi bin Laden and
the Egyptian Mohamed Atta. U.S. foreign policy will have to confront both
sorts of regime -- those that are openly at war with us, and those that
claim to be our allies but export suicide bombers to our shores.
The souls of men, Plato taught, are reflections of the regimes
that raise them. In the Islamic world, where liberal democracies are
scarce, so too are liberal democrats. In contrast, anti-American sentiment
is rife, and while mass murderers like bin Laden and Atta remain a
minority, they are cheered by the thousands in the street, lauded by the
government press, incited by imams, and winked at (when not openly
encouraged) by their rulers. If the terrorists are to be defeated in their
war against the United States, the regimes that nurture them will have to
be held strictly accountable, not merely "contained." In some instances,
the only solution will be ending, as FDR did, "barbaric laws and
institutions." Only then will we regain our peace and security.
The original artical appeared in The Weekly Standard of 12 November 2001.