This man writes and saves me the hassle. You must read his latest piece. Here is a taste:
As stalwart as the Bush administration has been in the current conflict with Islamic jihadists, judging from the op-ed in last Saturday’s New York Times by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend, it still entertains dangerous illusions about the enemy we are facing.
Hadley and Townsend reprise the narrative the administration has used all along in making sense of our adversary. Those wishing to destroy us are enemies of freedom who espouse a totalitarian ideology akin to fascism and communism. As such, they are driven by a diseased passion for domination that will brook no dissent nor allow for ideals such as tolerance and human rights. And they gain traction from “conditions of despair and feelings of resentment where freedom is denied.” Thus America must promote democratic freedom and prosperity to remove those conditions, for “people everywhere prefer freedom to slavery and will embrace it whenever they can, because freedom is the wish of every human being.” Finally, since these terrorists are enemies of Islam as well, we must support those Muslims who “are speaking the truth about their proud religion and history, and seizing it back from those who would hijack it for evil ends.”
The key to this mistaken interpretation is the short shrift given to the power of spiritual needs — an omission surprising given how religious the media keeps telling us this administration is. That ignoring of spiritual reality is what makes the analogy with fascism and communism false. Both of those ideologies were anti-Christian: fascism was a species of debased Romantic neo-paganism, and communism was blatantly atheist. As such, both ran counter to the powerful Judeo-Christian forces that shaped European and Russian civilization, and so could not satisfy for long the spiritual yearnings of the people, yearnings denied their traditional expressions. Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.
July 26th, 2005 | Global War On Terror, Jihad Watch, Liberty