Are the Right-Wingers Stoking Islam Fury Invested in a Never-Ending War?

In a New York Times column titled “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus,” Frank Rich argues that the right-wing freak-out over the Islamic community center to be erected in downtown Manhattan hurts U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. “How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar,” asks Rich, “when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?” 

One might call it the 'national security argument,' and it is irrefutable. Last week, Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who has interrogated several violent extremists, wrote, “When demagogues appear to be equating Islam with terrorism…it bolsters the message that radicalizers are selling: That the war is against Islam, and Muslims are not welcome in America.” Osama Bin Laden’s “next video script,” wrote Soufan, “has just written itself.” 

It is no doubt a tempting argument for the New York Times liberal and highly educated audience. It throws the neoconservative rhetoric back at the Right: if Islamic extremism is an existential threat to the United States -- if the future of the country rests on its defeat -- than surely sensitivity to how these protests are perceived by the rest of the world is a vital national security issue. “You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan ‘surge’ would not act against their own professed interests,” writes Rich. “But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country.” 

Rich’s analysis is flawed, however, because he’s fallen into a trap of rationalism, unable to contemplate that those behind the “nontroversy” aren’t necessarily interested in “winning the war” in Afghanistan or defeating violent Islamic fundamentalism. It is no doubt the case that the cynical Republican politicians who have inserted themselves into the debate -- Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and a host of others -- are prioritizing short-term electoral gains over their hope of success in the Afghanistan conflict.

But Rich misidentifies “The prime movers in the campaign against the ‘ground zero mosque’.” He thinks of them as “American Hawks” who are “among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan.” The furor may be amplified daily by Fox news and the rest of the GOP establishment, but this is an issue being “ginned up” -- in Rich’s words -- by feverishly paranoid “War-bloggers” who for the past nine years have built their identities around not only the “War on Terror,” but also see themselves as fierce defenders who alone guard the homeland not only against dangerous invaders but also liberal Americans who don’t share their simplistic bloodlust.

Rich rationally assumes that they desire “victory,” but doesn’t contemplate the possibility that they might rationally see an enduring campaign against the Taliban or Al Qaeda as an inherently good thing, a trial that will eventually cleanse the U.S. of its weakness, its misguided devotion to liberal pluralism. Hw doesn’t get that while the “war” against the Taliban may be an obsession of “American hawks,” the battle against Islam is a product of the war-bloggers and dedicated Right-wingers whose poisonous invective taints the airwaves of AM talk-radio.

A moment that revealed that kind of personal investment occurred in 2006, when blogger and radio host Hugh Hewitt interviewed Time Magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief Michael Ware by phone from Iraq. Ware had just narrowly escaped several bombings, but Hewitt wanted to brag of his own courageous contribution to the war effort, saying, “I’m sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I’m sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target…. This was the front line four and a half years ago.”