War for the free world

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. wrote in Townhall Let’s be honest. The so-called “Global War on Terror” is not going brilliantly just now. While our forces on the front lines continue to do their difficult missions with courage and competence, morale is sagging at home....

The war is going good where it is important? Would you prefer if it was going bad on the front lines, but everyone was cheering for it here? Just wait until the Constitution is approved on October 15, and then elections take place in December, and we begin bringing troops home in 2006.

That is because we are not, in fact, fighting a global war on terror. It is a global war, alright. But it should instead be called the “War for the Free World.”

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What is important is that whatever we call it, people understand it is a war against IslamoFascisist desire to control the entire world, and to kill everyone that opposes them.

Such a designation has the following advantages:

• It is accurate. We who love freedom are locked in a struggle to the death with totalitarian enemies who subscribe to ideologies that require our destruction. Sound familiar? The Nazis, Fascists, Imperial Japanese and Soviet Communists had in mind for us the same fate. We had to wage war effectively (using non-military as well as military means) on a global scale to defeat each of them in turn.
  
  Today, the immediate threat to the Free World comes from Islamofascism – yet another totalitarian ideology, this time masquerading as a religion. Most Muslims around the world do not subscribe to the Islamist agenda. They are increasingly being forced to embrace it, or at least go along with it, however, under threat of violence or other coercive techniques. By demonstrating our resolve to resist the Islamofascists and to help non-Islamist Muslim to do so as well, we can enlarge the Free World and secure the allies we will need to prevail.
• It makes clear that the war is about much more than Iraq and Afghanistan. Seductive as the idea sounds, withdrawing from such far-flung battlefields is no solution. Since the fight is about nothing less than whether there will continue to be a Free World – one in which we are able to speak, publish, assemble, vote and practice our religions as we wish – ceding ground to our enemies will only bring closer the day when we cannot do any of those things.
• It restores the moral clarity that Americans – and other democracies – typically need to sustain war’s expensive costs (in both human and financial terms). There can be no moral equivalence between our Islamofascist enemies on the one hand and, on the other, those who are fighting and dying to protect freedom here at home and, as a bulwark for our own security, to promote it elsewhere.

Shortly after 9/11, President Bush rightly said to the nations of the world “You are either with us or against us.” That is true. You are either part of, and willing to help defend, the Free World or you are with the unfree. The latter are at best, playing a double-game. Among them are nations like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and Russia – all of whom profess friendship, but are simultaneously working to support our enemies and undermine the interests of the Free World.