Mr. President: War Is Not A ‘Struggle’ Or ‘Situation’

First, President Obama jettisoned the admittedly empty and useless phrase Next, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoided even mentioning the word “war on terror.”“terrorism” in her first congressional testimony. Now the Department of Justice has announced it is dropping the legal designation “enemy combatants.”

The aim of all this muting of the language in the War with No Name is twofold: for the Obama administration to distance itself from George W. Bush’s “politics of fear,” and to whitewash a plain fact that liberals are suicidally reluctant to acknowledge - that we are at [real, bloody, deadly] war with radical Islam... [snip]

The refusal to acknowledge the enemy isn’t just an Obama failing; it’s a congenital blind spot of the left in general. In the New Hampshire presidential debates of a year ago, all four Democratic candidates referred to Islamic terrorism by name a whopping total of zero times - by contrast, their four Republican counterparts mentioned it twenty-two times. This underscores the fact that one party in this country has at least a partial grip on the threat we face - and the other party, the one now in power, prefers either attempting to placate the enemy by “making nice,” or pretending it doesn’t exist... [snip]

And it certainly isn’t about poverty and economic opportunity, a favorite theme of Obama’s. The ranks of al Qaeda and every other Islamist group you can name are packed with moneyed, college-educated professionals; conversely, impoverished non-Muslims worldwide aren’t taking out their frustration by strapping on explosives and targeting Westerners and Jews.

Second, we’re not dealing with an enemy that thinks the way we do in the West or that wants the same things out of life. Obama intoned on al-Arabiya;

“what I’ve come to understand is that. . . regardless of your faith, people all have certain common hopes and common dreams.”

Actually, they don’t.

In the U.S. and the rest of the West, we’re generally content to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In stark contrast, our Islamist enemies love death more than life, reject freedom in favor of absolute submission to a totalitarian ideology, and won’t be happy until the world is entirely Islamic. They cannot be swayed from their goal by promises of economic prosperity and peaceful coexistence with infidels. [snip]

“Our administration does not believe in a clash of civilizations,”

Vice-President Joe Biden announced at his February address in Munich, referring to the now-famous title of Samuel Huntington’s prescient 1998 book The Clash of Civilizations.

Well frankly, I don’t believe in it either; I believe instead that we’re embroiled in a clash of civilization versus barbarism, and that it is the defining conflict of our time...

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