Dulce et Decorum Est

What’s frustrating about the Bush Administration’s approach to the recent killing of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, aside from the inevitable media-driven obsession over largely pointless minutia, is that they still think they’re fighting the Second World War. In yet another example of salesmen believing their own bullshit, America’s war leaders seem to genuinely believe that getting at the leadership–Zarqawi or Goebbels, Saddam or Hitler–they win the war.

But they’re not fighting an expansionist nation-state; they’re fighting an ideology, and you can’t destroy an ideology with guns and bombs. The total defeat of the Third Reich didn’t do away with Nazism, and the neo-Nazis’ inability to re-create Hitler’s success is due as much to the fact that their beliefs require the concept of a nation-state as to their own unpopularity.

Militant Islam does not require a nation-state. As we have seen, it is able to thrive in Indonesia and Iran, the Sudan and Spain, in Saudi Arabia and the U. S. as well. But, being largely ideology-driven itself, the current occupiers of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue cannot accept the truth about their enemies because that would acknowledge al-Qaeda is very much like they are. Both tend to weasel their way into power by less than legitimate means. Both represent a small fraction of their constituency and are allowed to exist largely because of the fear and anxiety of the masses. Both believe in an extreme version of the notion that the ends justify the means. The ends, jihad or democratization, purifying the Holy Land of the Infidel or fighting terror, justify in their minds
treating human beings as a means to achieve those ends. It’s no matter that these people are soldiers or suicide bombers. It makes no difference if they are civilians or “enemy combatants.” They are still the means by which the ideology purportedly unfolds.

This is why the commander of the U.S. concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay can, without apparent irony, claim that he is the victim of the inmate suicides there, and that when they hanged themselves it was “an act of asymmetrical war.” And he may be right: those who committed suicide were just as ideologically self-justified as their captor.

That neither side understands the basic futility of their tactics indicates we’re all in for more war–until people on both sides decide their lives are not the means for the follies of their leaders but ends in and of themselves.

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