To What War Are You Referring?

As the definition of torture has been dumbed down to include activities practiced daily in every junior high school in America, so has the meaning of the word “war.” The war on poverty, and the war on drugs are two examples. In the eighties we learned that “business is war” and business people who travel a lot are “road warriors.” I’ve been told that the first few minutes of Saving Private Ryan are a fair representation war. It’s not “just saying no” to something. It is a literal fight for your life against people who wish to kill you for policy reasons. But because the word has been so misused over the years that it now seems meaningless, we are now actually fighting one without having first defined the enemy. In “A war that isn’t” Diana West describes the Struggle to Make Everyone Think We’re Swell.

Once upon a time, “We the People” were crass enough to have repelled German blitzkrieg, defied Japanese sneak attack and even to have combated Soviet disinformation. Now, “We the Peoples” are enlightened to the point where we send armies out for years to fight generic terror — no matter how specifically Islamist that terror is.
There are many reasons why this matters, not least of which is that without understanding the religious nature of jihad, along with its sister institution of dhimmitude (inferior status of non-Muslims under Islam), there can be no triumph over jihad and no avoiding dhimmitude. There can also be no understanding of the religiously rooted attitudes toward jihad movements among even non-violent Muslims, generally ranging from tacit ambivalence to wild adulation.
In fighting our war on terror, we have simultaneously fought against any such understanding. Maybe the reason goes beyond reflexive political correctness. Maybe we in the West simply don’t want any enemy at all; maybe we simply want to safeguard ourselves against terror. Maybe our elites believe that, in targeting only terror, the enemy will learn to like us, and terror will go away.

This phenomenon was recently illustrated by the Toronto Star, which was perplexed at what could cause 17 Canadians to unite and plan to attack Canada. We can’t win the war when we haven’t defined who we’re fighting. I understand the need to not declare war on a billion people, most of whom don’t especially want to fight us any more than we wish to fight them. The problem is that even though only a small percentage of people who declare themselves Muslim actively want to fight us because they say their faith compels it, the numbers involved are huge. For example, after the London bombings last summer, a survey of UK Muslims was taken. Only 5% thought that more attacks were justified. This sounds like great news until you do the math. Unfortunately 5% of Muslims in the UK means 80,000 people thought more attacks were justified. If only 5% of the 5% were actually willing to act on that feeling of justification, that’s still 4,000 jihadis in the UK alone. Considering how few managed to successfully attacks us on 9/11, I’d say that’s cause for concern.

Dan Simmons’ April Message (yes, I linked to it in Chickenhawk Christians too. I know that it’s fiction, but it’s extremely instructive. Go read it already!) diagnoses the problem clearly:

“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”

It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”

I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”

The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”

God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.

“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.

Linked to Conservative Cat, Blue Star Chronicles, Is It Just Me?, Bloggin’ Outloud, Third World Country