The new Cold War

On Veterans Day, President Bush spoke before the nation. The topic of his speech was, perhaps unavoidably, Iraq and his "War on Terror." Our president decided to use the opportunity to formalize what seems to be our new cold war.\nPresident Bush spent about a third of his speech directly comparing what he terms "Islamic radicalism" with communism and the regimes of Maoist China, Soviet Russia and the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. He went to great lengths to tie the ideology of al-Qaida and affiliated organizations with the ideology of our cold war nemesis. Even setting aside what I believe to be errors in the president's assessment of the situation, I find characterizing this conflict as "Cold War II" to be deeply problematic. \nOne could assume from the president's speech that the United States' objective in the Cold War was ultimately to destroy any vestige of the communist ideology. The president argued that the destruction of ideology should be our goal in the struggle we find ourselves in now.\nThe problem with this paradigm is that, not only is it not very helpful, it's also dangerous. The first danger inherent in it is that we are not fighting "terror." We are fighting a specific insurgent movement. And unlike the idea of "terror," which is so nebulous and abstract as to be nigh impossible to deal with, our opponents have both a coherent strategy and a specific list of grievances. Fighting "terror" reduces our foe to an unthinking and unfeeling force only suitable for annhiliation. Dehumanizing them like this is what makes things like Abu Ghraib possible.\nThe second problem with this paradigm is that it is conceived as a "war." On one level, that is fine as an analogy. We've declared war on drugs, poverty, illiteracy and a host of other ideas. As a slogan, it's fine. The problem is, though, we're not fighting an idea. Again, we're fighting an actual foe. The use of the war analogy tempts us into viewing the struggle as being one between armed forces, which I believe our last three years or so demonstrates is largely an unhelpful approach. Iraq has shown us the weakness of fighting this foe with our military might.\nBush tried to respond to this criticism that his conception, which led to the invasion of Iraq, is strengthening our enemy by observing, "I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001." True, but also beside the point. The Iraq invasion has strengthened our enemy. Polls have shown that we lost popular global support when we invaded. I would argue that global cooperation and goodwill for America is a far more valuable tool in fighting al-Qaida than occupying a country that al-Qaida refused to work with in the first place and is, as the attacks in Jordan suggest, creating for us more and not fewer enemies.\nOur president seems unwilling or unable to recognize errors that the vast majority of his people believe he has made. Our president seems trapped by his pride. As many have intoned before, "Pride comes before the fall." God spare us should we fall because of one man's hubris.