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[Michael Butler]

Bill Swiggard, a Tribal Civic Editor gave us this MUST READ

Do These Two Have Anything in Common?
President Bush has equated Islamic radicalism with communism. Is the
comparison sound? Is it wise?

By Zbigniew Brzezinski
Sunday, December 4, 2005; B02

In a series of recent speeches to the American people, President Bush
has sought to equate the current terrorist threat with the 20th-century
menace of communist totalitarianism. His case is that the terrorist
challenge is global in scope, "evil" in nature, ruthless toward its
foes, and eager to control every aspect of life and thought. Thus, he
argues, the battle against terrorism demands nothing "less than a
complete victory."

In making this case, the president has repeatedly invoked the adjective
"Islamic" when referring to terrorism and he has compared the "murderous
ideology of Islamic radicalism" to the ideology of communism.

Is the president historically right in his diagnosis of the allegedly
similar dangers posed by Islamic extremism and by totalitarian
communism? The differences between the two may be more telling than
their similarities. And is he wise to be expounding such a thesis?

By asserting that Islamic extremism, "like the ideology of communism . .
. is the great challenge of our new century," Bush is implicitly
elevating Osama bin Laden's stature and historic significance to the
level of figures such as Lenin, Stalin or Mao. And that suggests, in
turn, that the fugitive Saudi dissident hiding in some cave (or perhaps
even deceased) has been articulating a doctrine of universal
significance. Underlying the president's analogy is the proposition that
bin Laden's "jihad" has the potential for dominating the minds and
hearts of hundreds of millions of people across national and even
religious boundaries. That is quite a compliment to bin Laden, but it
isn't justified. The "Islamic" jihad is, at best, a fragmented and
limited movement that hardly resonates in most of the world.

Communism, by comparison, undeniably had worldwide appeal. By the 1950s,
there was hardly a country in the world without an active communist
movement or conspiracy, irrespective of whether the country was
predominantly Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist or Confucian.
In some countries, such as Russia and China, the communist movement was
the largest political formation, dominating intellectual discourse; in
democratic countries, such as Italy and France, it vied for political
power in open elections.

In response to the dislocations and injustices precipitated by the
Industrial Revolution, communism offered a vision of a perfectly just
society. To be sure, that vision was false and was used to justify
violence that eventually led directly to the Soviet gulag, Chinese labor
and "reeducation" camps, and other human rights abuses. Nonetheless, for
a while, communism's definition of the future bolstered its
cross-cultural appeal.

In addition, the intellectual and political challenge of the communist
ideology was backed by enormous military power. The Soviet Union
possessed a huge nuclear arsenal, capable of launching in the course of
a few minutes a massive atomic attack on America. Within a few hours,
upwards of 120 million Americans and Soviets could have been dead in an
apocalyptic mutual cross-fire. That was the horrible reality.

Contemporary terrorism -- though nasty and criminal, whether Islamic or
otherwise -- has no such political reach and no such physical
capability. Its appeal is limited; it offers no answers to the novel
dilemmas of modernization and globalization. To the extent that it can
be said to possess an "ideology," it is a strange blend of fatalism and
nihilism. In al Qaeda's case, it is actively supported by relatively
isolated groupings, and its actions have been condemned without
exception by all major religious figures, from the pope to the grand
mufti of Saudi Arabia.

Its power is circumscribed, too. It still relies largely on familiar
tools of violence. Unlike communist totalitarian regimes, al Qaeda does
not use terror as an organizing tool but rather, because of its own
organizational weakness, as a disruptive tactic. Its members are bound
together by this tactic, not by an ideology. Ultimately, al Qaeda or
some related terrorist group may acquire truly destructive power, but
one should not confuse potentiality with actuality.

But in the meantime, is Bush smart to be making this comparison?

The analogy to communism may have some short-term political benefit, for
it can rekindle the fears of the past while casting the president in the
mold of the historic victors of the Cold War, from Harry Truman to
Ronald Reagan. But the propagation of fear also has a major downside: It
can produce a nation driven by fear, lacking in self-confidence and thus
less likely to inspire trust among America's allies, including Muslim
ones, whose support is needed for an effective and intelligent response
to the terrorist phenomenon.

It is particularly troubling that Bush has also relied heavily in his
recent speeches on what to many Muslims is bound to sound like
Islamophobic language. His speeches, though occasionally containing
disclaimers that he is not speaking of Islam as a whole, have been
replete with references to "the murderous ideology of the Islamic
radicals," "Islamic radicalism," "militant jihadism," "Islamofascism" or
"Islamic Caliphate."

Such phraseology can have unintended consequences. Instead of mobilizing
moderate Muslims to stand by our side, the repetitive refrain about
Islamic terrorism may not only offend moderate Muslims but could
eventually contribute to a perception that the campaign against
terrorism is also a campaign against Islam as a whole. They may note
that the United States, in condemning IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland
or Basque terrorism in Spain, does not describe it as "Catholic
terrorism," a phrase that Catholics around the world would likely find
offensive.

Bush's recent speeches also stand in sharp contrast to his mid-September
address to the United Nations, in which he not only refrained entirely
from labeling terrorism in any religious terms but also spoke
thoughtfully of social "anger and despair" as contributing to the rise
of terrorism. He stressed that the war against terrorism "will not be
won by force alone. . . . We must change the conditions that allow
terrorists to flourish and recruit." By contrast, Bush recently has
dismissed altogether the notion that there could be any "set of
grievances that can be soothed and addressed" in order to eliminate the
sources of terrorism.

It should be cause for concern to U.S. policymakers that only one major
foreign statesman comes close to emulating Bush's rhetorical emphasis on
the Islamic aspects of the current terrorist threat, and that is Russian
President Vladimir Putin. Putin has deliberately seized upon the theme
of Islamic terrorism to justify his relentless war against the Chechens'
aspirations for self-determination. That war has the dangerous effect of
generating rising tensions with Russia's sizable Muslim population.

It certainly is not in the United States's interest, especially in the
Middle East, to prompt a fusion of Muslim political resentments against
America with a wider and stronger sense of Islamic religious identity.
When the president talks of Iraq as "the central front" in the war
against Islamic terrorism, he links Iraqi and Arab anti-American
nationalism with outraged Muslim religious feelings, thereby reinforcing
the case for bin Laden's claim that the struggle is, indeed, against
"the crusaders."

That fusion could endow terrorism with fanatical intensity, compensating
for the weakness that it suffers in comparison to the organizational and
military threat posed earlier by communism. Indeed, the limitations of
al Qaeda and similar organizations could change, especially if the
president fails to pursue policies that aim at isolating terrorist
groups as well as undercutting their recruitment campaigns.

Unfortunately, the military character of our presence in the Middle East
may be helping to bring this change about. Robert A. Pape, a political
science professor at the University of Chicago, has analyzed the
motivations of contemporary suicide-attackers. He demonstrates that in
the majority of cases, the attackers' basic impulse has been hostility
toward foreign invaders, and he concluded a recent TV interview by
observing that "the longer our forces stay on the ground in the Arabian
Peninsula, the greater the risk of the next 9/11."

America would be better served if Bush avoided semantic traps that
create uncertainty about our true motives or fuel the worst suspicions
regarding U.S. strategy in the Middle East. Neither Islamophobic
terminology nor evocations of the victorious struggle with communism
help generate a better public understanding of what policies are needed
in order to pacify the Middle East and to speed the fading away of
terrorism, whose origins lie mostly in that region of the world.
Americans need to hear more of what Bush was saying not long ago to the
United Nations and less of what he has been propagating lately in the
United States.

Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy
Carter. He is a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins
University's School of Advanced International Studies and a trustee of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies.