Matt Zeitlin

Jeffrey Herf is an intellectual historian of Islamism, and has written books and article after article connecting the dots between the two great totalitarian movements of the 20th century — Fascism and Communism — and Islamism. And while the connections may very well be there, and the writings of Sayyid Qutb are chilling, reactionary and scary, it seems like a stretch to really see Islamism as a threat on that level.

Communism reigned supreme for 45 years between Siberia and Berlin. Fascism had Germany and Italy, with an affiliate in Japan. Islamism has an amorphous non-state group whose leaders are constantly being killed by drones; Iran; and quasi political terrorist organizations in Hezbollah and Hamas. And it’s unclear what the relationship between the first one of those and the last three are.

But still, Herf wants Obama to stop all this pansy “engagement” with the Muslim world and make it clear that we have an ideological battle with Islamism to fight:

And the Islamists’ response has been as follows. Iran has made a mockery of “negotiations,” which it is clearly using to play for time as it continues to seek the bomb. It has also sent tens of millions of dollars and tons of weapons, including longer-range missiles, to Hezbollah and Hamas, placing larger areas of Israel in jeopardy. In Iraq, Iran has managed to exert influence over the Maliki coalition government. Islamists in Pakistan keep the Taliban afloat and threaten the political stability of Pakistan itself. Al Qaeda’s efforts to attack the West continue unabated, as indicated by the recent terrorism alerts in Germany and in this country—as well as the arrests in Sweden, Denmark, and Britain. Islamists continue to slaughter their fellow Muslims in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and have now added Iraqi and Egyptian Christians to the list of those they are eager to murder.

In truth, since the attacks of September 11, the U.S. government has refused to call a spade a spade and has not waged a full-scale war of ideas against the Islamists and against radical Islamist ideology. What Obama’s predecessor called a “war on terror” and what he calls a fight against “the forces of organized extremism” is in reality a war against terrorists and terrorist regimes inspired by varieties of an ideological tradition called radical Islamism. It really is the third great totalitarian tradition in world politics after Nazism (or fascism) and Communism. Like its two famous predecessors, it too emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. It drew bits and pieces from both—more from the Nazis than from the Communists—but it is the one that has persisted while the other two have largely lost their inspirational power. It is an autonomous ideological tradition with its own internal compass, and passions that are not primarily a reflexive response to what the president of the United States does or does not do. This is why Obama’s gestures of goodwill and empathy are met with the Islamists’ contempt and hatred.

I want to put aside the bigger questions about how many Muslims are actually blood-thirsty Islamists who respond to American engagement with “contempt and hatred” and just deal with the more concrete claim about how big a threat political Islam, and Islamic-inspired terrorism, is to the United States. Herf, while trying to show how salient a concern Islamism and Islamic terrorism are, actually gives away the game.  Although we obviously prefer a stable Pakistan to an unstable one, Herf doesn’t actually have an argument that the Pakistani Taliban is going to seize the government and their nuclear weapons anytime soon. And while Iran seems to be pretty desirous of a weaponized nuclear capacity, its actual weapons program isn’t going anywhere fast. And, most importantly, as Herf points out, Western law enforcement and intelligence agencies are doing a good job stymieing actual terrorist attacks! It’s not the efforts that matter, it’s the actual sucesses, which appear to be few and far between.

Fascism and Communism were not bad not because, as ideas, they were uniquely terrible ones (even though they were). They were bad ideologies because they were the presiding ideologies of large alliances of nations who wanted to expand their power over the globe, which in one case precipitated a global war that lead to some 50 million deaths, and in the other case, a huge portion of the world’s population living under dictatorship for nearly half a century, and, again, tens of millions of deaths due to state violence in Ukraine, the Gulags, China and Cambodia.

Intellectual history is interesting and important, but it’s capabilities that matter.