Hillary Clinton is ready to go to war… against language. In a highly anticipated speech on national security on Thursday, the prohibitive candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination got specific about what her administration would do to roll back the Islamic State. She also explained her refusal to call civilization’s adversary by what it calls itself, and in doing so she has undermined a much broader struggle not just against one terrorist militia but against an ascendant ideology.
The self-consciousness the left displays when asked to repeat the phrase “radical Islam” was on full display in the last Democratic presidential debate. Every candidate on that stage was repeatedly asked whether or not the civilized world was in conflict with “radical Islam,” and every candidate tortured the question to death. “I don’t think we at war with all Muslims,” Clinton replied to a question that existed only in her head. “I don’t think the term is what’s important,” Bernie Sanders added. “I believe calling it what it is, is to say radical jihadis, that’s to call what it is,” Martin O’Malley insisted.
Clinton revived this issue in her national security address. “The obsession in some quarters with a clash of civilization or repeating the specific words radical Islamic terrorism isn’t just a distraction,” Clinton insisted. “It gives these criminals, these murderers more standing than they deserve.”
The former secretary of state added that the world’s priority shouldn’t be debating what to call its enemy but defeating it. But the only group debating what to call radical Islam, and agitating for that debate, are liberals. The West long ago settled on a clear and concise definition for the threat to emanating from the Muslim world, whether liberals appreciate that history or not.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration and its advisors were perhaps as cautious as Clinton in the effort to avoid confusing the war on radical Islamic terrorism with a war on the Muslim religion. Not only were they concerned that the Islamic world might be further radicalized if the administration did not carefully parse its terminology, but they were equally eager to limit through rhetoric their area of operations. A “war on terrorism” is about as limited in its scope as a war on “extremism” or “violence.” Nor is terrorism a phenomenon native to the Middle East and North Africa.
Indeed, the Bush administration’s rhetorical restraint earned rare plaudits from Clinton in last Saturday’s debate. “That was one of the real contributions, despite all the other problems, that George W. Bush made after 9/11, when he basically said, after going to a mosque in Washington, we are not at war with Islam or Muslims,” Clinton said. “We are at war with violent extremism; we are at war with people who use their religion for purposes of power and oppression and yes we are at war with those people. But I don’t want us to be painting with too broad a brush.”
This is a selective and self-serving reading of history. President Bush and the members of his administration were not shy about characterizing the clash of ideologies that defined the war on terrorism as a civilizational struggle. George W. Bush branded Islamic terrorists “evil” from the first minute; a label that continues to vex urbane center-left Americans for whom such a notion is embarrassingly pedestrian. Yahoo’s Olivier Knox recently reexamined the rhetoric that characterized the Bush-era and noted that the 43rd President’s linguistic caution began to dissipate by his second term in office. In 2006, Bush began openly referring to his battlefield targets as “Islamic radicals” and “Islamic fascists,” although the latter classification was poorly received and not widely applied.
It is not coincidental that this rhetorical shift accompanied a change in tactics. A successful modification of the president’s counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq occurred at almost the same time. It was a strategy characterized by the identification and courting of Sunni leaders in Iraq, who were eventually moved to abandon their support for the anti-Shiite insurgency tearing that country apart. The work that yielded the “Anbar Awakening” has since been sacrificed. Anbar is very much asleep again, and it will take a substantial commitment from the next administration to revive George W. Bush’s successes. The next administration will not, however, have the luxury of confining its courting efforts to a handful of Iraqi provinces. Quite unlike al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State has tailored its appeal to a global audience, and the nascent plague of lone wolf radical jihadists executing deadly and paralyzing attacks in Western nations is a testament to its success.
The first task before this administration will be to successfully combat a far more appealing brand of Islamic radicalism by clearly identifying it. No ideology can be defeated if its opponents refuse to recognize it. Similar to the 20th Century’s defunct ideological adversaries, radical Islam is a competing theory of social organization. The Islamic State demonstrates as much. Like communism, radical Islam inspires insurgents around the world to take up arms. Like fascism, this is a source of global instability that is incompatible with its democratic republican counterpart. Radical Islam of the sort practiced in Raqqa, Ramadi, and Mosul is incompatible with the free societies in the West. As we understand them, one or the other will perish.
It is true that a military component alone cannot defeat the Islamic State – there will need to be a multi-pronged approach that includes diplomatic, propagandistic, and covert operations to dismantle this ideology both from without and within. This is why it is so critical to clearly identify the civilized world’s adversary. How can an ideology be defeated unless its internal dissidents are mobilized? How can an ideology be rolled back if its pillars of intellectual support are isolated and demolished? How can an ideology be discredited if its adherents are impossible to recognize? The West cannot wink and nod its way into inspiring a backlash against apocalyptic Islamic radicalism.
This is not an academic argument; philosophy is a critical component of any successful campaign. Perhaps Hillary Clinton, like President Barack Obama, is more comfortable waging domestic fights against her political opponents than she is in combating civilization’s enemies abroad. The likely Democratic presidential nominee will be forever living down her decision to ingratiate herself with her party’s primary voters by noting the “enemy” she was proudest of making over the course of her career were “Republicans,” even ahead of the theocrats in Tehran. But that is not a fair interpretation; most of Clinton’s speech was substantive and a productive contribution to the effort to settle on an effective anti-ISIS strategy.
Clinton’s instincts are defensible if only because they are widely shared. Maybe she truly believes that to call the Islamic radical enemy by its name is a counterproductive exercise. But the former American president who Clinton heaped praise upon for his linguistic policing efforts also warned that the war against radical Islamic terrorism would be a generational struggle. George W. Bush admonished those hungry for quick and relatively bloodless victory and observed that this war would take on many forms and be conducted in a variety of theaters. Finally, he observed that it was a war that would have not only a military but a cultural component. The very first step toward waging a total war on radical Islam is to characterize it as such. To achieve victory, “victory” must first be clearly defined. It is today clear that some are prepared to wage this campaign the way it must be waged while others will never be.