Wednesday, July 28, 2004

More Daniel Pipes on the 9/11 Commission Report

Daniel Pipes has some good things to say about the 9/11 Commission report:
"Finally, an official body of the American government has come out and said what needs to be said: that the enemy is 'Islamist terrorism--not just 'terrorism' some generic evil.' The 9/11 commission in its final report even declares that Islamist terrorism is the 'catastrophic threat' facing America.

"As Thomas Donnelly points out in The New York Sun, the commission has called the enemy 'by its true name, something that politically correct Americans have trouble facing.'

"Why does it matter that the Islamist dimension of terrorism must be specified? Simple. Just as a physician must identify a disease to treat it, so a strategist must name an enemy to defeat it. The great failing in the American war effort since September 2001 has been the reluctance to name the enemy. So long as the anodyne, euphemistic, and inaccurate term 'war on terror' remains the official nomenclature, that war will not be won.

"Better is to call it a 'war on Islamist terrorism.' Better yet would be 'war on Islamism,' looking beyond terror to the totalitarian ideology that lies behind it.

"Significantly, the same day that the 9/11 report was published, July 22, President Bush for the first time used the term 'Islamic militants' in a speech, bringing him closer than ever before to pointing to the Islamist threat."