Via Kevin Drum comes David Miliband, the UK's foreign minister, arguing that it's long past time to ditch the "war on terrorism" framework. Word. But people say this a lot, not realizing that conservatives largely ditched the term a long time ago. But they replaced it with something worse, and dumber.Remember John McCain's formulation: "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists." Terror, at least, is a crime. Islamic extremism isn't. And it's not one thing, either. Hamas is not Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is not the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is not Salafist Islam. But this wasn't a John McCain special. Mitt Romney got a lot of flack for saying:I don’t want to buy into the Democratic pitch, that this is all about one person, Osama bin Laden. Because after we get him, there’s going to be another and another. This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.But he was expressing a fairly common worldview among conservatives. The War on Terror is, in this understanding, too limited a conception of the threat. Rather, we're in a clash of civilizations. We're threatened by fundamentalist Islam in all its manifold incarnations. And though the conservative world view is in decline, that is what the Right's politicians are saying, what the talk show hosts are discussing, what the base believes. And you can see the appeal: It's simple. It's a way to understand Iran and Hamas and Lebanon and al Qaeda and Salafism and all the rest. It allows meaningless bits of trivia -- think of the "connection" between al Qaeda and Iraq -- to serve as crucial pieces of evidence. It's a very, very, very dangerous formulation. Much more so than even the disastrous "war on terror" meme. So I'd go further than Miliband: Obama doesn't just need to drop the GWOT phrasing. He needs to replace it. And he needs to entrench his definition.
