Good posts, Xingu. I just finished reading Tom Rick's book on Iraq, "Fiasco". Have you read it? We can't get out according to him. Because of our early failures in the war, we are doomed to stay for a very long time. The closing chapters are gloomy as hell about what would happen if we pick up and leave. He gives several cogent scenarios and I am convinced he is right. Bush has gotten us into a morass that the military warned about and were proved correct. I can remember discussing this on Able before we went in about the tribal factions centuries old that would be present. Now we are weakened with an Iran that is very aware with a nuclear capability to come. Sigh....
August 15, 2006
Iraqi Death Toll Rose Above 3,400 in July
By EDWARD WONG and DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 ?- July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new Iraqi government has failed.
An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.
The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control and seem to bolster an assertion that many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.
The numbers also provide the most definitive evidence yet that the Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14 has not quelled the violence. The plan, much touted by top Iraqi and American officials at the time, relied on setting up more Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie movement by insurgents. Those officials have since acknowledged the plan has fallen far short of its aims, forcing the American military to add thousands of soldiers to the capital this month and to back away from proposals for a withdrawal of some troops by year's end.
The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than half of the total deaths recorded in the country. The morgue tally for July was an 18 percent increase over June.
The American ambassador said in an interview last week that Iraq's political leaders had failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government are stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.
"I think the time has come for these leaders to take responsibility with regards to sectarian violence, to the security of Baghdad at the present time," the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said.
The American military in recent weeks has been especially eager to prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the streets and take a more active role ?- in effect, a repudiation of earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis.
The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade. Under a new security plan aimed at overhauling Mr. Maliki's efforts, some of the city's most violent southern and western areas are now virtually occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces, with entire neighborhoods transformed into miniature police states after being sealed off by blast walls and concertina wire.
When the tally for civilian deaths in July is added to the Iraqi government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations, the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 a month.
The Health Ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were injured outside the city in July, a 25 percent increase over June.
United Nations officials and military analysts say the morgue and ministry numbers almost certainly reflect severe undercounts, caused by the haphazard nature of information in a war zone.
Many casualties in areas outside Baghdad probably never appear in the official count, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington. That helps explain why fatalities in Baghdad appear to account for such a large percentage of the total number, he said in a recent report.
The United Nations has been tracking civilian casualty figures by collating numbers from the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue. Last month, it announced that the Iraqi government's numbers indicated that 3,149 violent deaths had occurred in June, or an average of more than 100 a day. The statistics were significantly higher than previous civilian death tolls, and indicated that the news media had drastically underreported the level of violence in Iraq. The United States government and military have declined to release any overall figures on Iraqi civilian casualties, or even said whether they are keeping count.
But Iraqi and American officials agree that civilian deaths had been much lower before wide-scale sectarian violence erupted in the wake of the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra, and has only gotten worse since..
In recent weeks, Ambassador Khalilzad and the top generals have warned that Iraq could slide toward full-blown civil war, especially if the capital continues fragmenting into ethnic or sectarian enclaves controlled by militias, as has been happening for months.
Much of the responsibility rests on Iraqi politicians, many of whom have ties to militias, Mr. Khalilzad said. "I believe that there have been forces associated with people in the government from both the Shia and Sunni sides that have participated in this," he said of the violence.
Iraqi politicians are furiously lashing out at each other. On Monday, the speaker of Parliament, a conservative Sunni Arab, said he was considering stepping down because of animosity from the Kurdish and Shiite political blocs.
The move to oust the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, appears to have thrown the main Sunni Arab bloc he belongs to, the Iraqi Consensus Front, into disarray. On Tuesday, a senior member of the bloc, Khalaf al-Elayan, said it rejected any call for Mr. Mashhadani's resignation. Another Sunni leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said in an interview that Mr. Mashhadani should step down. Mr. Dulaimi is considered a possible replacement.
On Tuesday, Shiite gunmen and Iraqi military forces exchanged gunfire in Karbala for several hours near one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines. Witnesses said the fighting forced the Iraqi Army to block entrances to the city and impose a curfew, prohibiting all cars and warning residents not to carry guns.
In Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives, killing at least five civilians and wounding nearly 50 near the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani.
One of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks took place in southern Baghdad on Sunday night, when bombs, mortars and rockets killed at least 57 people in a Shiite neighborhood, according to Iraqi officials. The American military said Tuesday that the death toll had grown to at least 63 Iraqis and that the cause had been identified: two car bombs that ignited a gas line.
A day earlier, the American military said the deaths were caused solely by a gas main explosion and not by any attack, but now says that conclusion was based on "incomplete information."
The well-organized attack on Sunday came despite the fact that American and Iraqi troops have flooded areas of southern Baghdad. The combined operation has focused most visibly on regulating traffic at checkpoints and searching for weapons at every home and building in troubled areas.
The American military said Tuesday that Dawra, the first area searched, was being sealed off with concrete barriers and blast walls. It added that the number of roadside bombs found in the area each week since the operation started Aug. 7 has decreased to 4 from 25.
Sahar al-Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
Now the British government's confidential briefings on Iraq have been leaked too - and they are markedly at odds with the official line.
William Patey's telegram does not depart from the official formula that civil war is neither imminent nor inevitable. But he does say it is probably the more likely outcome, at this stage, along with the break-up of Iraq.
Even what he witheringly refers to as President Bush's lowered expectations for Iraq - of a government that can sustain and defend itself - must "remain in doubt".
Reality
To be fair to the British ambassador, he does write that the situation is not hopeless, but he warns that the next five to 10 years will be "messy and difficult". No wonder he describes himself as a pessimist on Iraq.
These thoughts have gone to the UK prime minister, foreign secretary, defence secretary, and senior military commanders.
But the judgment that the Iraqi government cannot defend itself, still less defend Iraqis, only reflects the reality on the ground.
It sometimes feels as if Baghdad is descending into madness. Over the past seven days, within sight of our bureau, we have seen a simultaneous suicide, rocket and mortar attack and a car bombing.
Last night in Baghdad, a bomb was planted under a football pitch to kill children as they played.
Sectarianism spreads
An Iraqi man, Ahmed Muktar, told me a typical story of these times. His family fled sectarian violence in the suburb of Dora. But his brother-in-law returned to check on his house. He was kidnapped.
The police, the hospitals, the morgues - none had any official record of the missing man. So his family went to the dumping ground for bodies on the edge of Dora.
There they found him, amid a pile of 50 corpses, hands tied behind his back, shot in the head.
They had to recover him while under constant automatic fire, the police and troops nearby too scared to help.
Mr Muktar is an academic with the rather unlikely specialism in the minor Scottish poets. He is a civilised, gentle man, but - as a Shia - he says his family now rejoice in the deaths of Sunnis.
All of this is why the coalition - quite at odds with the stated strategy - is about to massively reinforce Baghdad.
Meanwhile, Shias like Mr Muktar are turning to the so-called popular committees for self-defence now being formed in Baghdad.
That is another reason to worry, as ambassador Patey does, that civil war is the likely outcome in Iraq.
Good posts, Xingu. I just finished reading Tom Rick's book on Iraq, "Fiasco". Have you read it? We can't get out according to him. Because of our early failures in the war, we are doomed to stay for a very long time. The closing chapters are gloomy as hell about what would happen if we pick up and leave. He gives several cogent scenarios and I am convinced he is right. Bush has gotten us into a morass that the military warned about and were proved correct. I can remember discussing this on Able before we went in about the tribal factions centuries old that would be present. Now we are weakened with an Iran that is very aware with a nuclear capability to come. Sigh....
NYTimes
Quote:August 15, 2006
Iraqi Death Toll Rose Above 3,400 in July
By EDWARD WONG and DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 15 ?- July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue, reinforcing criticism that the Baghdad security plan started in June by the new Iraqi government has failed.
An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.
The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control and seem to bolster an assertion that many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.
The numbers also provide the most definitive evidence yet that the Baghdad security plan started by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki on June 14 has not quelled the violence. The plan, much touted by top Iraqi and American officials at the time, relied on setting up more Iraqi-run checkpoints to stymie movement by insurgents. Those officials have since acknowledged the plan has fallen far short of its aims, forcing the American military to add thousands of soldiers to the capital this month and to back away from proposals for a withdrawal of some troops by year's end.
The Baghdad morgue reported receiving 1,855 bodies in July, more than half of the total deaths recorded in the country. The morgue tally for July was an 18 percent increase over June.
The American ambassador said in an interview last week that Iraq's political leaders had failed to fully use their influence to rein in the soaring violence, and that people associated with the government are stoking the flames of sectarian hatred.
"I think the time has come for these leaders to take responsibility with regards to sectarian violence, to the security of Baghdad at the present time," the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said.
The American military in recent weeks has been especially eager to prove that Baghdad can be tamed if American troops are added to the streets and take a more active role ?- in effect, a repudiation of earlier efforts to turn over security more quickly to Iraqis.
The American command has added nearly 4,000 American soldiers to Baghdad by extending the tour of a combat brigade. Under a new security plan aimed at overhauling Mr. Maliki's efforts, some of the city's most violent southern and western areas are now virtually occupied block-to-block by American and Iraqi forces, with entire neighborhoods transformed into miniature police states after being sealed off by blast walls and concertina wire.
When the tally for civilian deaths in July is added to the Iraqi government numbers for earlier months obtained by the United Nations, the total indicates that at least 17,776 Iraqi civilians died violently in the first seven months of this year, or an average of 2,539 a month.
The Health Ministry did not provide figures for people wounded by attacks in Baghdad but said that at least 3,597 Iraqis were injured outside the city in July, a 25 percent increase over June.
United Nations officials and military analysts say the morgue and ministry numbers almost certainly reflect severe undercounts, caused by the haphazard nature of information in a war zone.
Many casualties in areas outside Baghdad probably never appear in the official count, said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington. That helps explain why fatalities in Baghdad appear to account for such a large percentage of the total number, he said in a recent report.
The United Nations has been tracking civilian casualty figures by collating numbers from the Health Ministry and Baghdad morgue. Last month, it announced that the Iraqi government's numbers indicated that 3,149 violent deaths had occurred in June, or an average of more than 100 a day. The statistics were significantly higher than previous civilian death tolls, and indicated that the news media had drastically underreported the level of violence in Iraq. The United States government and military have declined to release any overall figures on Iraqi civilian casualties, or even said whether they are keeping count.
But Iraqi and American officials agree that civilian deaths had been much lower before wide-scale sectarian violence erupted in the wake of the Feb. 22 bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in the town of Samarra, and has only gotten worse since..
In recent weeks, Ambassador Khalilzad and the top generals have warned that Iraq could slide toward full-blown civil war, especially if the capital continues fragmenting into ethnic or sectarian enclaves controlled by militias, as has been happening for months.
Much of the responsibility rests on Iraqi politicians, many of whom have ties to militias, Mr. Khalilzad said. "I believe that there have been forces associated with people in the government from both the Shia and Sunni sides that have participated in this," he said of the violence.
Iraqi politicians are furiously lashing out at each other. On Monday, the speaker of Parliament, a conservative Sunni Arab, said he was considering stepping down because of animosity from the Kurdish and Shiite political blocs.
The move to oust the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, appears to have thrown the main Sunni Arab bloc he belongs to, the Iraqi Consensus Front, into disarray. On Tuesday, a senior member of the bloc, Khalaf al-Elayan, said it rejected any call for Mr. Mashhadani's resignation. Another Sunni leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said in an interview that Mr. Mashhadani should step down. Mr. Dulaimi is considered a possible replacement.
On Tuesday, Shiite gunmen and Iraqi military forces exchanged gunfire in Karbala for several hours near one of Iraq's holiest Shiite shrines. Witnesses said the fighting forced the Iraqi Army to block entrances to the city and impose a curfew, prohibiting all cars and warning residents not to carry guns.
In Mosul, a suicide bomber detonated a truck packed with explosives, killing at least five civilians and wounding nearly 50 near the offices of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party of President Jalal Talabani.
One of the deadliest attacks in recent weeks took place in southern Baghdad on Sunday night, when bombs, mortars and rockets killed at least 57 people in a Shiite neighborhood, according to Iraqi officials. The American military said Tuesday that the death toll had grown to at least 63 Iraqis and that the cause had been identified: two car bombs that ignited a gas line.
A day earlier, the American military said the deaths were caused solely by a gas main explosion and not by any attack, but now says that conclusion was based on "incomplete information."
The well-organized attack on Sunday came despite the fact that American and Iraqi troops have flooded areas of southern Baghdad. The combined operation has focused most visibly on regulating traffic at checkpoints and searching for weapons at every home and building in troubled areas.
The American military said Tuesday that Dawra, the first area searched, was being sealed off with concrete barriers and blast walls. It added that the number of roadside bombs found in the area each week since the operation started Aug. 7 has decreased to 4 from 25.
Sahar al-Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article.
Only slightly higher than predicted by some here, that number.
Cycloptichorn
Vietnamnurse wrote:Good posts, Xingu. I just finished reading Tom Rick's book on Iraq, "Fiasco". Have you read it? We can't get out according to him. Because of our early failures in the war, we are doomed to stay for a very long time. The closing chapters are gloomy as hell about what would happen if we pick up and leave. He gives several cogent scenarios and I am convinced he is right. Bush has gotten us into a morass that the military warned about and were proved correct. I can remember discussing this on Able before we went in about the tribal factions centuries old that would be present. Now we are weakened with an Iran that is very aware with a nuclear capability to come. Sigh....
I recently posted a leaked report that when planning our invasion of Iraq, his staff had to spend several hours explaining the hundreds of years of disputes between the Shiites and the Sunnis. Turns out Bush didn't know about that. He said he though all arabs were just muslims and was completely unaware of the competing factions and the tribal rivalry.
We have never had a president so ignorant of world history. He had never been a world traveler. He rarely reads books. He only thinks with his guts. What a loser!
BBB
ican wrote:Now I want to think about your proposal in terms of what its likely consequences are to the achievement of another objective: maintenance of the security of the USA's democracy. Winning in Iraq the way you propose may or may not be better for securing the USA's democracy than the USA remaining in Iraq and persisting in its attempt to make the Iraqi government become what is better for securing the USA's democracy.
The maintenance of our security will depend on our behavior toward other nations and cultures.
I agree! Either we are effective defending ourselves against those self-proclaimed Islamists who repeatedly proclaim they are murdering and will continue to murder infidels who are enemies of Islam (i.e., murder non-believers in Islam--much of humanity in general and many Americans in particular), or we are ultimately doomed to foist a "big brother" totalitarian government on humanity's posterity in general and American's posterity in particular.
...
What is happening to us today is mainly the fault of our arrogance and mistreatment of other smaller countries much like the European nations during the colonial times. No one is fighting us because they hate our democracy; they're fighting us because they hate our foreign policy.
I disagree! What is happening to us today is mainly the fault of those self-proclaimed Islamists who seek totalitarian power over us by murdering as many of us as is necessary to achieve their objective.
...
The question we should be debating is what is the best way to defend ourselves against those self-proclaimed Islamists who are seeking to foist a "big brother" totalitarian government on humanity's posterity in general and American's posterity in particular.
Xingu:
Agree with you on all points, especially about congress. I would love to discuss with you Tom Ricks book...especially the last chapter.
I will never forget discussing with my dear friend Mamajuana about the tribal factions in Iraq...both of us had educated ourselves about this before we went to war. This was not taken into consideration, but many of the generals knew and they acted wisely when others did not. The book is about those heros who knew how to deal with people with dignity and those who did not. That is one of the biggest reasons of our failure as it was in Vietnam. Not understanding the culture. The generals who did get it were either not listened to or demoted. Many left the service.
The congress has much to answer for, but Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, and General Franks and Meyers do also. And Tenet. Medals of Freedom, PUHLEEZE! Probably to shut them up....
Islamists who are seeking to foist a "big brother" totalitarian government on humanity's posterity in general and American's posterity in particular.
New assessments by the U.S. military and the intelligence community provide evidence that violence in Iraq is at its highest level yet.
Afghan opium cultivation hits a record By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 16, 2:28 PM ET
Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels ?- up by more than 40 percent from 2005 ?- despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press.
The increase could have serious repercussions for an already grave security situation, with drug lords joining the Taliban-led fight against Afghan and international forces.
A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season ?- up from 257,000 acres in 2005 ?- citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
"It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive topic.
Final figures, and an estimate of the yield of opium resin from the poppies, will be clear only when the U.N. agency completes its assessment of the crop, based on satellite imagery and ground surveys. Its report is due in September.
The U.N. reported last year that Afghanistan produced an estimated 4,500 tons of opium ?- enough to make 450 tons of heroin ?- nearly 90 percent of world supply.
This year's preliminary findings indicate a failure in attempts to eradicate poppy cultivation and continuing corruption among provincial officials and police ?- problems acknowledged by President Hamid Karzai.
Karzai told Fortune magazine in a recent interview that "lots of people" in his administration profited from the narcotics trade and that he had underestimated the difficulty of eradicating opium production.
The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimate that opium accounted for 52 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product in 2005.
"Now what they have is a narco-economy. If they do not get corruption sorted they can slip into being a narco-state," the U.S. official warned.
Opium cultivation has surged since the ouster of the Taliban in late 2001. The former regime enforced an effective ban on poppy growing by threatening to jail farmers ?- virtually eradicating the crop in 2000.
But Afghan and Western counternarcotics officials say Taliban-led militants are now implicated in the drug trade, encouraging poppy cultivation and using the proceeds to help fund their insurgency.
"(That) kind of revenue from that kind of crop aids and abets the enemy," Chief Master Sgt. Curtis L. Brownhill, a senior adviser to the head of the U.S. Central Command, during a recent visit to Afghanistan. "They count on having that sort of resource and money."
Afghanistan has seen its deadliest bout of fighting this year since U.S.-backed forces toppled the Taliban for harboring Osama bin Laden. Officials believe the insurgency, most vicious in the south ?- Afghanistan's main poppy belt ?- includes die-hard Taliban, warlords and drug lords and smugglers.
Fears of fanning the insurgency has constrained efforts to destroy the poppy crops of impoverished farmers ?- particularly in Helmand, where the area being cultivated for poppies has increased most sharply. The province now accounts for more than 40 percent of the poppy cultivation nationwide.
"We know that if we start eradicating the whole surface of poppy cultivation in Helmand, we will increase the activity of the insurgency and increase the number of insurgents," said Tom Koenigs, the top U.N. official in Afghanistan.
He said the international community needs to provide alternative livelihoods for farmers, but warned against expecting quick results. "The problem has increased, and the remedy has to adjust," he told reporters recently.
Since the fall of the Taliban, the international community, led by the U.S. and Britain, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to combat the drugs trade.
There have been some successes. Nangahar province, with the help of a strong governor and police chief, reduced opium output by 96 percent in 2005. Since March, anti-drug police units have raided 10 drug labs throughout the country, seizing 2,700 pounds of heroin and nearly 1,763 pounds of opium.
Next week, the Afghan government will present a wide-ranging anti-drugs strategy. Officials are moving to amend laws, train judges and prosecutors, build high security prisons and establish special courts for drug barons and senior drug smugglers.
This year's increased poppy cultivation follows a 21 percent drop the previous year, suggesting the government has not followed through on warnings to farmers against planting poppies. Although 37,065 acres of poppies were eradicated this year, according to the Ministry for Counternarcotics, a campaign by police to destroy crops fell short of expectation.
Gen. Khodaidad, a top official at the ministry, said virtually all cultivated land in Helmand ?- including government-owned land ?- has been planted with opium poppies.
"We expected a large number (crop) this year but Helmand unfortunately exceeded even our predictions," the U.S. official said.
What Is 'Islamofascism'?
A history of the word from the first Westerner to use it.
Daily Standard
08/17/2006 12:00:00 AM
This article originally appeared on TCS Daily.
"Islamic fascists"--used by President George W. Bush for the conspirators in the alleged trans-Atlantic airline bombing plot--and references by other prominent figures to "Islamofascism," have been met by protests from Muslims who say the term is an insult to their religion. The meaning and origin of the concept, as well as the legitimacy of complaints about it, have become relevant--perhaps urgently so.
I admit to a lack of modesty or neutrality about this discussion, since I was, as I will explain, the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context.
In my analysis, as originally put in print directly after the horror of September 11, 2001, Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology. This radical phenomenon is embodied among Sunni Muslims today by such fundamentalists as the Saudi-financed Wahhabis, the Pakistani jihadists known as Jama'atis, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In the ranks of Shia Muslims, it is exemplified by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the clique around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran.
Political typologies should make distinctions, rather than confusing them, and Islamofascism is neither a loose nor an improvised concept. It should be employed sparingly and precisely. The indicated movements should be treated as Islamofascist, first, because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form--German National Socialism.
Fascism is distinguished from the broader category of extreme right-wing politics by its willingness to defy public civility and openly violate the law. As such it represents a radical departure from the tradition of ultra-conservatism. The latter aims to preserve established social relations, through enforcement of law and reinforcement of authority. But the fascist organizations of Mussolini and Hitler, in their conquests of power, showed no reluctance to rupture peace and repudiate parliamentary and other institutions; the fascists employed terror against both the existing political structure and society at large. It is a common misconception of political science to believe, in the manner of amateur Marxists, that Italian fascists and Nazis sought maintenance of order, to protect the ruling classes. Both Mussolini and Hitler agitated against "the system" governing their countries. Their willingness to resort to street violence, assassinations, and coups set the Italian and German fascists apart from ordinary defenders of ruling elites, which they sought to replace. This is an important point that should never be forgotten. Fascism is not merely a harsh dictatorship or oppression by privilege.
Islamofascism similarly pursues its aims through the willful, arbitrary, and gratuitous disruption of global society, either by terrorist conspiracies or by violation of peace between states. Al Qaeda has recourse to the former weapon; Hezbollah, in assaulting northern Israel, used the latter. These are not acts of protest, but calculated strategies for political advantage through undiluted violence. Hezbollah showed fascist methods both in its kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and in initiating that action without any consideration for the Lebanese government of which it was a member. Indeed, Lebanese democracy is a greater enemy of Hezbollah than Israel.
Fascism rested, from the economic perspective, on resentful middle classes, frustrated in their aspirations and anxious about loss of their position. The Italian middle class was insecure in its social status; the German middle class was completely devastated by the defeat of the country in the First World War. Both became irrational with rage at their economic difficulties; this passionate and uncontrolled fury was channeled and exploited by the acolytes of Mussolini and Hitler. Al Qaeda is based in sections of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Egyptian middle classes fearful, in the Saudi case, of losing their unstable hold on prosperity--in Pakistan and Egypt, they are angry at the many obstacles, in state and society, to their ambitions. The constituency of Hezbollah is similar: the growing Lebanese Shia middle class, which believes itself to be the victim of discrimination.
Fascism was imperialistic; it demanded expansion of the German and Italian spheres of influence. Islamofascism has similar ambitions; the Wahhabis and their Pakistani and Egyptian counterparts seek control over all Sunni Muslims in the world, while Hezbollah projects itself as an ally of Syria and Iran in establishing regional dominance.
Fascism was totalitarian; i.e. it fostered a totalistic world view--a distinct social reality that separated its followers from normal society. Islamofascism parallels fascism by imposing a strict division between Muslims and alleged unbelievers. For Sunni radicals, the practice of takfir--declaring all Muslims who do not adhere to the doctrines of the Wahhabis, Pakistani Jama'atis, and the Muslim Brotherhood to be outside the Islamic global community or ummah--is one expression of Islamofascism. For Hezbollah, the posture of total rejectionism in Lebanese politics--opposing all politicians who might favor any political negotiation with Israel--serves the same purpose. Takfir, or "excommunication" of ordinary Muslims, as well as Hezbollah's Shia radicalism, are also important as indispensable, unifying psychological tools for the strengthening of such movements.
Fascism was paramilitary; indeed, the Italian and German military elites were reluctant to accept the fascist parties' ideological monopoly. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are both paramilitary.
I do not believe these characteristics are intrinsic to any element of the faith of Islam. Islamofascism is a distortion of Islam, exactly as Italian and German fascism represented perversions of respectable patriotism in those countries. Nobody argues today that Nazism possessed historical legitimacy as an expression of German nationalism; only Nazis would make such claims, to defend themselves. Similarly, Wahhabis and their allies argue that their doctrines are "just Islam." But German culture existed for centuries, and exists today, without submitting to Nazi values; Islam created a world-spanning civilization, surviving in a healthy condition in many countries today, without Wahhabism or political Shiism, both of which are less than 500 years old.
But what of those primitive Muslims who declare that "Islamofascism" is a slur? The Washington Post of August 14 quoted a speaker at a pro-Hezbollah demonstration in Washington, as follows: "'Mr. Bush: Stop calling Islam "Islamic fascism,' said Esam Omesh, president of the Muslim American Society, prompting a massive roar from the crowd. He said there is no such thing, 'just as there is no such thing as Christian fascism.'"
These curious comments may be parsed in various ways. Since President Bush used the term "Islamic fascists" to refer to a terrorist conspiracy, did Mr. Omesh (whose Muslim American Society is controlled by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) intend to accept the equation of Islam with said terrorism, merely rejecting the political terminology he dislikes? Probably not. But Mr. Omesh's claim that "there is no such thing as Christian fascism" is evidence of profound historical ignorance. Leading analysts of fascism saw its Italian and German forms as foreshadowed by the Ku Klux Klan in the U.S. and the Russian counter-revolutionary mass movement known as the Black Hundreds. Both movements were based in Christian extremism, symbolized by burning crosses in America and pogroms against Jews under the tsars.
The fascist Iron Guard in Romania during the interwar period and in the second world war was explicitly Christian--its official title was the "Legion of the Archangel Michael;" Christian fascism also exists in the form of Ulster Protestant terrorism, and was visible in the (Catholic) Blue Shirt movement active in the Irish Free State during the 1920s and 1930s. Both the Iron Guard and the Blue Shirts attracted noted intellectuals; the cultural theorist Mircea Eliade in the first case, the poet W.B Yeats in the second. Many similar cases could be cited. It is also significant that Mr. Omesh did not deny the existence of "Jewish fascism"--doubtless because in his milieu, the term is commonly directed against Israel. Israel is not a fascist state, although some marginal, ultra-extremist Jewish groups could be so described.
I will conclude with a summary of a more obscure debate over the term, which is symptomatic of many forms of confusion in American life today. I noted at the beginning of this text that I am neither modest nor neutral on this topic. I developed the concept of Islamofascism after receiving an e-mail in June 2000 from a Bangladeshi Sufi Muslim living in America, titled "The Wahhabis: Fascism in Religious Garb!" I then resided in Kosovo. I put the term in print in The Spectator of London, on September 22, 2001. I was soon credited with it by Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Dish, and after it was attributed to Christopher Hitchens, the latter also acknowledged me as the earliest user of it. While working in Bosnia-Hercegovina more recently, I participated in a public discussion in which the Pakistani Muslim philosopher Fazlur Rahman (1919-88), who taught for years at the University of Chicago (not to be confused with the Pakistani radical Fazlur Rehman), was cited as referring to "Islamic fascists."
If such concerns seem absurdly self-interested, it is also interesting to observe how Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, dealt with the formulation of Islamofascism as an analytical tool. After a long and demeaning colloquy between me and a Wikipedian who commented negatively on an early book of mine while admitting that he had never even seen a copy of it, Wikipedia (referring to it collectively, as its members prefer) decided it to ascribe it to another historian of Islam, Malise Ruthven. But Ruthven, in 1990, used the term to refer to all authoritarian governments in Muslim countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.
I do not care much, these days, about Wikipedia and its misapprehensions, or obsess over acknowledgements of my work. But Malise Ruthven was and would remain wrong to believe that authoritarianism and fascism are the same. To emphasize, fascism is something different, and much worse, than simple dictatorship, however cruel the latter may be. That is a lesson that should have been learned 70 years ago, when German Nazism demonstrated that it was a feral and genocidal aberration in modern European history, not merely another form of oppressive rightist rule, or a particularly wild variety of colonialism.
Similarly, the violence wreaked by al Qaeda and Hezbollah, and by Saddam Hussein before them, has been different from other expressions of reactionary Arabism, simple Islamist ideology, or violent corruption in the post-colonial world. Between democracy, civilized values, and normal religion on one side, and Islamofascism on the other, there can be no compromise; as I have written before, it is a struggle to the death. President Bush is right to say "young democracies are fragile . . . this may be [the Islamofascists'] last and best opportunity to stop freedom's advance." As with the Nazis, nothing short of a victory for democracy can assure the world's security.
