TGA Longs for Jihad

In light of the Democrats' victories in both houses on Tuesday, we should wonder what changes will take place in the war on terror? In last week's Los Angeles Times, Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash gives us some idea of where liberal sentiments lie on that topic. Ash claims that, whereas "most Democrats don't challenge the central concept of the war on terror," most Europeans do. Yet his argument is a peculiar one, focusing exclusively on opposing the term "war on terror." He puts forward what seems to amount to a simple re-branding of the war on terror, as if use of the term "war" itself begat the violent nature of the enterprise. Ash explains, "it wasn't a good term to start with...What would we lose by dropping it? However, then we need an alternative."

It seems that, according to Ash, we need an alternative term not an altogether different political project. The purpose is either a more palatable-sounding war on terror (but he must surely remember that the Bush Administration tried that already, recall last year's "global struggle against violent extremism") or to further the hope that we can transform the nature of the project semantically.

Ash would like to suggest "struggle," but for the unfortunate connotations in German. Apparently, if we think of it as a "struggle" (a jihad, perhaps?) rather than a "war", we can alter the focus to "a long-term struggle against multiple threats to free and open societies." Of course, as is common today, Ash is unwilling to jettison the project itself. He too is guilty of not challenging the war on terror's central concept.

In fact, the alternative that Ash poses is quite telling. Along with a host of others, from the neo-cons to Peter Beinart, liberal Ash seems to be longing for a "long-term struggle" over the essence of our society, and moreover, one that can come to encompass all issues we consider important, including prevention of natural disasters and ethnic cleansing. The appeal of the war on terror (or of the long-term struggle) is precisely this two-fold character, both an epic, morally unambiguous battle, and a malleable, ill-defined project that can be deployed in the face of whatever concerns us on a given day. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Ash has happened upon the very term to define the war on terror, "struggle", that Bin Laden has been claiming for several years now ("jihad"). Bin Laden has an equally incoherent grab-bag of concerns: at times the corruption of Middle East states, at other times the Western military presence in Muslim lands, on occasion the Palestinian cause. His "jihad" addresses itself incoherently to whatever is the ailment of the day, a struggle so ill-defined, so cosmic, that it could theoretically encompass any passing grievance of modern life.

What makes such seemingly incoherent sets of "struggles" compelling, or at least unopposable, to such a broad and differing range of people? This is a question we all need to examine these days. However, simply dropping the term "war on terror" will not bring us closer to the truth, and instead risks obscuring the underlying dynamics that have led to the seeming interminability of a rather unpopular political project. Avoiding the war on terror, either as a term or an issue, actually diminishes our ability to address it front and center, to understand what gives it strength and hopefully, to transcend it.