NAZI! Communists! Hippies!

Its easy to hate and focus on someone when you have a nice quick, short name for them. Lashing out against “Nationalist Socialist”, “Total Socialist System under Centralized Planning” and “Free Spirited non-Conformist” is not easy to do. (And yes, I know some of my descriptions are not absolutely accurate and I included hippies as a joke.)

But same goes for what we are fighting against in this “Global War on Terrorism”. Just who are the bad guys? And what makes them different from the other past bad guys?

I think there is a true strategic and psychological weakness on our side to accurately name our adversary. The guys on the other side can do it easily, condemning us as secular, western, infidels, non-believers and so on. But what are they? How can we fight an enemy when we cant even describe them.

Islamists? “Those that hate our freedom”? Salafist? Global Guerillas?

Islamist or Muslim Fundamentalist sound fine, but we are not fighting some national Muslim Brotherhood movement. We are fighting 1000s of Islamicly inspired groups with a diverse range of immediate goals, motivation, tactics, doctrines…but a common enemy - the West.

There is a constant struggle to define our enemy (which is more of a “swarm” than a singular organizational entity) and we are unable to even define a name for it. This leaves us intellectual and conceptual vulnerable to the enemy.

In my future postings, I’ll dive through this issue deeper and try to offer some suggestions. It will definitely take some time for me to write on this.

This posting was inspired by a commenter on this blog who asked me why I used the word “Islamofacist” and by Dan Darling and John Robb who touched on this issue this week.