Today, the National Journal reported that a senior State Department official has announced, “The war on terror is over.”
“Now that we have killed most of al Qaida,” the source said, “now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.”
The article itself describes the Obama administration’s new vision of foreign policy, which admits no enemies. Everyone, in this view, is a friend. Islamism, says the Obama administration, is just fine, so long as it does not openly support terrorism.
This, of course, is utter foolishness. Islamism is a religious ideological movement that brooks no real alternatives – so while the State Department proclaims “a legitimate Islamism,” it fails to acknowledge that Islamism, “legitimate” or not, is deeply intolerant of any other modes of expression. Not only that, but Islamism works hand-in-glove with terror groups around the world. Simply because a regime does not openly house al Qaida does not mean that the regime doesn’t support al Qaida; just because a regime pretends at democracy doesn’t mean that it has real democratic values.
Obama has created the brave new Middle East – a Middle East that assumes that every human heart has the desire to vote, but not to be truly free; a Middle East that oppresses women and gays and minorities, but pretends at liberalism; a Middle East that despises America but hides that hate behind a façade of multiculturalism, even as it disposes of its internal dissenters.
In truth, Obama isn’t declaring an end to the war on terror – terrorism continues unabated each day in Egypt and the Palestinian territories and Iraq and Afghanistan and Sudan and Yemen and Syria and Lebanon and a dozen other hotspots around the globe. Obama is truly declaring an end to the war on Islamism. He has made his peace; he has surrendered. In doing so, he has condemned broad swaths of the world to darkness, and more immediately, he has condemned America to a defensive position in the world. Now there is no proactive America shaping the world to her own ends. Now there is only an atomistic world, a series of billiard balls, in which America waits to be struck before bouncing back.
To Obama, the war on Islamism may be over. For Islamists, the war on America is far from over.
Big Peace
