As a historian, I always prepare for some sad (and/or outraged) head scratching when opinion makers and politicians attempt to use facile historical comparisons to support what they want to do. It's not unlike when the so-called Christian Right quotes very selectively from the bible while entirely missing the larger point. One prominent particularly laughable example, of course, is the current administration's repeated attempts to link the War on Iraq and its putative reconstruction to World War II and the Marshall Plan.

So it is particularly frustrating to see this often tendentious technique repeated by our supposed allies, such as Peter Beinart of the "Even the Liberal" New Republic. (Article here, subscription required.)

Beinart attempts to claim that the dilemma facing Democrats today is precisely the same as that they faced after World War II: either to dismiss the totalitarian threat as insignificant, or develop a principled and well-articulated liberal anti-Communist/anti-Terrorist message.

The problem, as it often is, is in a word: in this case the word totalitarian. Beinart uses it without any attempt to define or contextualize it, and this leads to all sorts of problems. As often is the case, a seemingly well-argued comparison falls apart entirely due to one assumption, acknowledged briefly but just as quickly dismissed at the end of his article:

Obviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the same. The USSR was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had mercifully little access to the instruments of state power.

But herein lies the crux of the difference, and also the place to begin a deconstruction of Beinart's use of the word "totalitarian," which lies at the heart of this specious comparison.

In fact, Kevin Drum, despite his own hawkishness, has sensed this fallacy already:

Subsequent to 9/11, virtually no Americans have died from terrorist acts. Rather, American deaths have been caused by our own war of choice in Iraq — a country that has turned out to possess no WMD and have virtually no serious connection to al-Qaeda.

For all his tough talk, the president of the United States has tacitly admitted that he doesn't feel this war is important enough to require any sacrifice on the part of the American citizenry.

The Republican party has made it as clear as it possibly can that the war on terror is not vital enough to require either bipartisan support or the support of the rest of the world. They've treated it more like a garden variety electoral wedge issue than a world historical struggle.

Things like Tom Ridge's sales pitch for duct tape, along with the transparently political color coded terror levels, have made the war on terror fodder for late night TV. It's entirely predictable that anyone who was even a bit skeptical in 2002 now views the war as trivial at best, and comical or Machiavellian at worst.

I would say even more succinctly: the reason that the Islamic totalitarian threat is not at all comparable to the Soviet Communist totalitarian threat is that it isn't at all clear (even and especially in Beinart's analysis) what exactly he means by Islamic "totalitarianism." In fact, it is a contentless word, as ill-suited to explaining the terrorist threat as the wingnut favored "Islamofascism."

Historians -- and even many historians of the Soviet Union -- are reluctant to use the term totalitarian precisely because of the fact it is so often abused. But nonetheless there is a basic understanding that it applies precisely to a regime and one that does not only have "access to the instruments to state power" but in fact controls them absolutely. Such a regime will use these instruments most of all for the purpose of staying in power, controlling the population, and, often enough, imperial expansion.

Now, of course, Al Qaeda not only does not have direct access to instruments of state power, but also, as Kevin Drum suggests, has limited if any imperial designs. This is precisely why so many liberals have questioned Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror -- the way it is framed very much does suggest that we are facing an enemy bent on world domination, and it is not at all clear that this is the case.

Going back to Beinart's piece, I want to look more specifically at what his loose usage of vocabulary allows him to do. What does he want to say?

As I've suggested, the phrase "Totalitarian Islam" must be applied carefully if at all. The most appropriate usage would be in reference to the Taliban, and if you want to argue that the war on Afghanistan was a war against "Islamic totalitarianism," well then you are closer to the mark. (Which, by the way, is not at all accidentally connected to the fact that many more liberals, myself included, were willing to support the Afghan war, if not how it was conducted.)

Where Beinart's unfortunate sloppiness becomes most apparent is when he switches adjectives. He isn't just talking about "Totalitarian Islam," but dictatorship "in the Muslim World." Aha! There it is: the usual fast and loose conflation, by both Republicans and Hawkish Democrats, of Islamic fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's definitively secular totalitarianism. Yes, totalitarianism: Iraq under Hussein (a great admirer of Joseph Stalin) very closely fit the bill. And one can make the case that liberals must demand the removal of all such totalitarian regimes, wherever they might arise. But this is another quesiton entirely -- and has little, if anything, to do with the so-called War on Terror.

It was precisely the argument of many liberals, myself included, that the reason why the War on Iraq was so misguided was that his secular totalitarianism had nothing to do with the fundamentalist Islamic threat. Both were/are despicable, yes, and both deserve unequivocal condemnation. But Beinart's continued conflation of these two distinct evils is either disingenuous or reveals a continued confusion in the minds of those who continue to shift quickly from discussions of one to the other.

Kevin Drum has expanded on his response in several subsequent posts. In the first of these, he says that Beinart does not criticize those who opposed the War on Iraq. I disagree. While he may not specifically do so, he clearly follows the usual rhetorical device of talking about both in one breath, and in so doing suggest that they are part and parcel of the same battle. Also, a bit of an argument has developed among prominent liberal bloggers -- including Drum, Atrios and Matthew Yglesias -- over the question of liberal opposition to military force, but this is the subject of another post, which hopefully I will get to in the near future.

Democrats :: Foreign Policy :: Iraq :: Terrorism | Link