If there's one thing to take away from Ben Smith's piece about how the right is now fully embracing a conflict of civilizations between the West and Muslims -- and it's not "Islam," but Muslims -- it's that the right is now rejecting a large component of the national-security strategy of the previous administration that they believe "kept us safe for eight years."
Think of the three key planks of the right's new national-security strategy with regards to terrorism -- pro-torture, pro-Gitmo, anti-Muslim -- these are all things that Bush rejected by the end of his administration. It was under Bush that "enhanced interrogation" ended -- although it was legally banned under Obama. Bush wanted Gitmo closed, although Obama actually made significant moves in that direction. Though he sometimes winked at Islamophobes in his own party, Bush's approach was to marginalize extremists and empower moderate Muslims -- now the right wants every Muslim treated as a potential enemy. Obama noticeably took the marginalize/empower strategy to another level, but this was still in some sense a continuation of a good policy developed during the Bush administration. He's also kept other Bush-era policies I don't like, such as the hybrid legal system for trying suspected terrorists -- and he's escalated others, like the use of targeted killings.
Denying al-Qaeda the religious legitimacy it craved, however, was part of the strategy since the planes hit on 9/11. So let's be clear -- this isn't just a break with Bush; it's a break with a key part of the strategy Republicans said they were so proud of, the one they said "kept the country safe for eight years." It's also not sudden -- the idea that all American Muslims are not entitled to First Amendment rights is the rational conclusion to the logic that denies Fifth and Eighth Amendment rights to Muslims accused of terrorism. I hope we never see the bottom of this slippery slope.
The now official Republican approach of demonizing Muslims and riding a popular wave of suspicion against them is a national-security disaster. An America that treats Muslims at home as second-class citizens will be an America that will find its allies abroad unwilling to take risks on its behalf, it will find itself unable to exploit divisions between rival factions in conflicts overseas, it will find fewer family members willing to warn the authorities that their children are being radicalized, and it will produce fewer American Muslims who want to use their cultural knowledge of Islam and the Arab world in service to our military and law-enforcement institutions. Perhaps most important, singling out Muslims for scorn short-circuits what has always been one of America's strongest defenses against radicalism -- its ability to quickly assimilate new cultures.
Now, instead of fighting a war with a handful of extremists, the right wants a fight with more than a billion people worldwide. It's important to understand how unsustainable as policy this approach truly is -- if we are at war with "Islam," we might as well be at war with the American backed governments in Kabul and Baghdad that American soldiers are fighting and dying to defend.
What the Bush administration ultimately understood -- and what the Obama administration understands, is that the West will ultimately not defeat al-Qaeda, because ideas cannot be defeated through kinetic warfare. It is Muslims, who must and ultimately will destroy al-Qaeda if it is to be destroyed, through their wholesale rejection of its ideology and worldview. The right's baffling decision to embrace al-Qaeda's vision of a "clash of civilizations" makes victory against al-Qaeda that much harder to achieve.
