We Know We're Fighting--

But, do we know what we are fighting for? Or, even, what we are fighting against?

Americans have been in combat, fighting and dying for the best part of seven years now. The outgoing president committed the blunder of declaring that the US and other countries were waging a global war on terrorism. Anyone with so much as a glimmer of intelligence knew back then that the notion of a "Global War on Terrorism" was not merely a malapropism but an affront against reality.

Now, seven years and over five thousand American lives later, the war against an unnamed enemy for an undefined goal continues. It is long past time for a change. It is long past time that the US government and We the People take a firm grip on just who or what the enemy is and for what better state of peace the war is being fought.

It is long past time for us to return to the basics. In order for a war to be waged to a successful outcome two minimal requirements must be met.

The first is seemingly self-evident (although it appears to have eluded not only the Deep Thinkers of the outgoing administration but the denizens of the chattering classes generally.) There has to be an enemy.

That means a real enemy. Not a tactic of war which is what terrorism constitutes. A war cannot be waged against a tactic as many have observed. Imagine how silly it would have been had FDR demanded on 8 December 1941 that the US declare war on "unexpected sea-launched air attacks not preceded by a declaration of war or ultimatum" rather than on the Japanese Empire.

Had the outgoing administration possessed even the rudiments of realpolitik it would have announced that the US would wage retaliatory war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan which harbored it. That would have been a legitimate and realistic appraisal of the nature of the enemy.

The neocon ninnies of the Bush Administration failed to properly define the enemy.

This initial failure assured that a second would quickly follow. Keep in mind that wars are waged in the expectation that a better state of peace will follow. Had the enemy been narrowly and properly defined seven years ago, then the task of characterising a better state of peace would have been simple and straightforward.

A better state of peace (from our perspective at least) would come about as soon as al-Qaeda and Taliban were removed as potential threats to American national security. Period. The simple removal of these two entities--including by implication at least their leadership cadres-would make the world a better and safer place.

There would have been no need nor impetus for the disastrous mission lurch in Afghanistan which has resulted in the progressive destabilizing of that country but of Pakistan as well. There would have been neither need for nor impetus to the brainless High Minded cant concerning the building of a secular, pluralistic democracy in Afghanistan.

The failure (or unwillingness) of the outgoing administration to realistically and narrowly define the enemy and the desired better state of peace before launching the attacks on Afghanistan left the door wide open for the single most disastrous blunder in US foreign policy--the invasion of Iraq.

Our participation in Iraq may be winding down and the outgoing president may have admitted that possibly democracy as we Americans know it will not take firm root in Iraq, but there has been no redefinition of the enemy, no reassessment as to the nature of the better state of peace hoped to ensue when (and if) the guns and bombs are silenced.

To this day neither the government nor the military services of the United States are willing to say just who or what the enemy in the current "long war" might be. Worse, there is ample evidence that both the civilian and military command echelons have been totally resistant to appreciating let alone studying the sources of our enemy's conduct and identity.

Not to put too fine a point on the dagger of reality, the enemy over the past seven years has been Islam. To err on the side of total accuracy, the enemy is those Muslims who seize upon and exploit features of Islam which have served for centuries to make that religion the faith of warriors, the belief system of conquerors.

Make no mistake about it. Islam and nothing but Islam in the mouths of charismatic leaders propelled a scruffy amphyctony from the sands of Arabia to the South of France and later transformed another bunch of scurvy nomads into the Great Turkish Threat whose waves lapped at the walls of Vienna before finally receding to the harems of Istanbul.

Not even the Christianity of the First Crusade could begin to match Islam as the most sublime Warrior Faith. As several noted Egyptian clerics have commented lately on TV as they sought to encourage martyrs for Gaza, the Muslims of the past loved death more than the crusaders and others loved life.

Not even the distorted Shintoism of the Japanese Empire before and during World War II could make that statement.

At an ever accelerating rate over the past fifty years, the sleeping Warrior Faith has been awakened by politically ambitious and ever-more-potent clerics and others to motivate Muslims to die (and kill) in pursuit Islamic Revival. That means revival not as a religion per se but as a political force on the global stage.

There is the enemy. Not terrorism. Not "asymmetrical warfare." Not even one specific group such as al-Qaeda. Not even a specific country such as Iran.

The enemy is the Warrior Faith of Islam enlisted in pursuit of power on the world historical stage.

This enemy is implacable. This enemy is not one with which compromise is possible--even thinkable. This enemy is potentially far more threatening, far more potent than were the secular enemies of Nazism or Communism. This enemy may have been quiescent for centuries, caught in the backwater eddies of human experience, but it is alive, active and growing stronger by the day.

To defeat this enemy, this combination of a warrior faith without peer and expansionist ideology, we must study it, dispassionately and closely. We do not serve ourselves or our future well by pretending that political Islam is either a "misunderstanding"of the Quran and Hadith or that it is some sort of passing perversion caused by economic grievance or political marginalization.

We must read and parse both the sacred literature and the history of Islam as once we did the history of Russia and the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao. We must know the sources of our enemy's conduct and goals.

But, understanding our enemy is not enough. On its own, the understanding of the enemy will not allow us to bring about a better state of peace no matter how long the war continues.

We must understand what we are fighting for. This task is, if anything, harder than identifying and knowing the enemy.

The fact that knowing ourselves, understanding what we are fighting for, what would constitute a better state of peace, is ironic.

Why? You ask.

The irony comes from our own history. It comes from the internal divisions which mark the landscape of the United States today. Not simply the division between elite and hoi polloi. More it depends upon the split, the deep fissure of more than one hundred and fifty years standing, which caused the surface split between those who think of themselves as members of the elite and those who don't.

More of that in the next post.