Dangerous Redefinitions

As Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the latest New Yorker, the language of President Bush's war has always been, one could say, stuck in a morass of mixed meanings, unintentional double-entendres, and rampant vagaries. But this lack of terminological acuity is not simply another instance of incompetence and a failure to comprehend. It is a major strategic failure.

Hertzberg writes, "One of Al Qaeda’s goals has been to frame the conflict as a holy war between Muslims and infidels. In calling it a war, Bush emphasized its seriousness, but at the cost of granting its criminal perpetrators the dignity of warriors. Calling it a war against Islam, even radical Islam, grants them the other half of their wish."

And yet this debacle makes up only a fraction of the dangerous ground we now occupy. The cartoon controversy and its effects, the conviction and imminent extradition to the US from Britain of the convicted "militant cleric" Abu Hamza, the West's reaction to the elections in Palestine, and the currently shapeless, directionless, and toothless diplomatic acrimony over a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran each present an opportunity for the "war on terror" to be further redefined as a "war on Islam".

The danger is not just that moderates in the "Muslim world" will increasingly see it that way, making the struggle for stability even closer to impossible than it is now. The danger is also very real that Westerners will begin to drop the word "radical" from President Bush's State Of The Union re-re-definition of the war as a "war on radical Islam."

If that comes to pass, and the war is defined on all sides as a holy war, the idea that any progress will come from its resolution, of any kind or for anyone, will be a fantasy that is finally--and tragically--put to rest.