I admit it: I’m wavering. Just a little bit, mind you, and by no means enough for me to tear up my leftist credentials once and for all, but recently I’ve been wondering whether – shock, horror! – the War on Terrorism is really such a bad idea. And, if I’m honest, a distinctive pattern is emerging. A pattern wherein the more I think about the issue, the more strongly I feel inclined to support a battle against international terrorist groups… although, as before, the current conflict remains several million miles away from what I have in mind and, unlike the architects of the so-called ‘WoT’, I’m not talking about instigating a never-ending crusade against every two-bit redneck with a sawn-off shotgun, a tinfoil hat and a vague daydream of bringing down “the gubmint”.

Before you start hurling bilious invective in my general direction and slinging around insults such as ‘Judas’, traitor’ and ‘drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay’, permit me to clarify my position so that there can be no doubt whatsoever about where I stand on this controversial topic.

First and foremost, I still think that the attack on Iraq was a truly terrible idea on a par with allowing Britney Spears to procreate. It was the wrong battle (Saddam had no WMD and did not pose an immediate danger to the West); it was started at the wrong time (the conflict in Afghanistan was by no means over and the 9/11 perpetrators had neither been apprehended nor punished); it was spearheaded by the wrong leaders (an American President with the IQ of an inbred 12-year-old and his loyal New Labour lapdog); and, just to cap it all off, it was predicated upon the wrong motives (which actually included a wide range of factors, including oil/imperialism/vengeance/egotism/etc., and had little or nothing to do with the high-minded pseudo-moral rhetoric spouted by Blair and Bush as they prepared to send their troops into harm’s way).

Furthermore, I’m still utterly unconvinced that the full-scale bombing of Afghanistan in the wake of September 11 was justifiable, given that the Taliban – as odious as they undeniably were and remain – had had nothing to do with the attacks on Manhattan, Pennsylvania and Washington in any direct sense. A series of surgical strikes against al-Qaeda strongholds would have been a far more sensible, not to mention fair, option, serving to minimise civilian casualties while also bringing some form of well-deserved chastisement to the culprits. I’m also unsure that the West’s current sabre-rattling with Iran over its nascent nuclear programme is truly going to make the world a safer place in which to live and I’d certainly rather the whole issue could be handled peaceably, if such a route were to prove any way practicable.

Last, but by no means least, I remain confident in my belief that the Bush administration took the wrong approach to the whole War on Terrorism by choosing to base it upon lies and distortions instead of just being honest. Had they pitched it in more legitimate terms then many more people across the world would have been on board, especially in the wake of the September 11 atrocities. The public’s collective resolve would then have been strengthened by the Madrid train attacks of March 2004 and the events of July 7 and 21, 2005, in London, not to mention the campaign of crass brutality perpetuated by Middle Eastern insurgents (which, lest we forget, has included videotaped beheadings of civilian hostages and an endless stream of car-bomb assaults against domestic non-combatants as well as a wide range of other, equally-unpleasant, tactics). As it was, both the Republicans and New Labour managed to alienate their respective electorates by treating them like fools, and they lost an awful lot of potential supporters in the process.

All that having been said, though, one countervailing sentiment continues to shine through in spite of my anti-Bush and pro-peace leanings: I’m sick to death of the onslaught of Islamofascism with which we’re faced on a regular basis. As a result, I’ve started to wonder how best to stem the tide of Islamic fundamentalism and therein lies the reason behind my pensive frame of mind. It’s been a difficult thought process through which to work, not least because it has involved a certain amount of departure from my well-worn ‘liberal’ views on the topic, and –  as uncomfortable as the admission makes me – I’m forced to concede that, although the WoT has thus far been little more than chronically flawed and utterly mismanaged, if there exists a non-violent method of combating these insane religious zealots then I’m yet to think of it.

Of course, I’m hardly the first left-wing commentator, self-appointed or otherwise, to have had these doubts and I’m immensely grateful to people like Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens for having blazed the path so I don’t have to. Again, I’m not saying I agree 100% with either one of them – indeed, it’ll probably be a frosty day in Hell before I can bring myself to praise Bush, as the latter has done fulsomely on occasion – but neither pundit has shied away from asking (and answering) the difficult questions where the War on Terrorism is concerned, particularly from a liberal standpoint, and, for that much alone, I’m chock-full of admiration for both men.

In order to give an otherwise-unwieldy article some sense of coherence and structure, I’ll begin by dissecting what is, in my view, the primary problem with the WoT as it exists today before moving on to the thorny issue of Islamic extremism and its manifestation in the early 21st Century. I’ll finish by discussing a few more of the War’s latent shortcomings before suggesting a few ways in which we might improve the crusade in the hope of negating at least some of the flaws inherent in its current incarnation.

As far as its present weaknesses are concerned, let’s start with the big one: its name. The ‘War on Terrorism’, huh, George? Hmmm. As David Cross so memorably proclaimed back in 2002, when taken literally it’s “a fucking joke” at best. “You cannot win a war on terrorism… it’s like having a war on jealousy!” he raged. “At no point in time, ever, are we going to go ‘Phew! We got ’em all! Everybody loves us again!’” Of course, the comedian was, and remains, 100% correct in this regard. What, then, is in a name when push comes to shove? In this instance, a combination of ill-conceived political spin and enough unfiltered hot air to power Rush Limbaugh for at least a decade.

Make no mistake about it, folks: this isn’t a war on terrorism in general, it’s a war against hardline Islam. However, two problems would immediately arise from calling a spade by its appropriate moniker in this instance. First of all, such a course of action would immediately alienate more moderate Muslims on worldwide scale and would simultaneously lead to accusations of promoting Islamophobia. Secondly, ‘The War on Terrorism’ sounds good. It conjures up images of might, justice, freedom, liberty and all those other intangible bits of hyperbole which George W. Bush sought to claim as his own in the wake of 9/11. By contrast, a ‘War on Islam’ gives its perpetrators access to no such moral high-ground. Indeed, openly initiating such a crusade would make one seem as bigoted and as shallow as the 19 hijackers and their cowardly cave-dwelling financiers (which is, of course, the very last thing its organisers wanted to achieve).

As a result of this ill-chosen soubriquet, then, the conflict immediately became an object of mockery for those who, like Cross, were able to think outside Bush’s rhetorical box. Of course you’re never going to completely eradicate worldwide terrorism, and you can bet that the more intelligent of Bush’s puppeteers never thought otherwise for even a nanosecond. Besides, have the American authorities made any attempt whatsoever to quell non-Islamic terrorist activities since September 2001? Not for a second. Why? Because that simply isn’t what the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ is about.

As I’ve said before, Bush’s innate stupidity has meant that every single aspect of his job, up to and including the WoT, needed to be drastically oversimplified in order for him to be able to comprehend it. Nowhere is this premise better demonstrated than with regard to the name given to the campaign his string-pullers set in motion soon after 9/11. To be fair to them, can you imagine the difficulties you’d face in explaining something as complex as the September 11 attacks’ antecedents to someone as thoroughly ignorant as Dubya? I doubt I’d have had the patience for such a gargantuan task, either. It would have been far simpler to say “Mr. President, they hate our freedoms” and have done with it… which, of course, is pretty much exactly what happened.

Perhaps, though, this analysis is too simplistic and even, dare I say, glib. Maybe it places too great an emphasis on Bush’s ‘village idiot’ shtick, which some onlookers have long postulated is little more than an attention-diverting act. I myself have never seen any reason to believe that he’s anything other than a bona-fide fool, but, in this case, it matters not. We must simply turn our attention to other possibilities at hand, and one such potential explanation for the naming of the ‘War on Terrorism’ has recently been put forward by the American media. The source? None other than one of the WoT Architects-in-Chief, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld.

In November 2007, The Washington Post published excerpts from a series of the former Defense Secretary’s internal memos. Contained therein was a telling phrase, “bumper-sticker statements”, which was used in the context of selling the battle to the American public and shoring up support for what would be, in Rumsfeld’s own words, “a long war”. The story was so important that even the notoriously right-wing Fox News carried it, albeit with characteristic pro-Bush bias and an archetypal dearth of legitimate commentary. Nevertheless, the implication remained clear: from the get-go, the slogan ‘War on Terrorism’ was little more than a rallying-cry designed to take advantage of post-9/11 national patriotism and widespread international sympathy.

Regardless of its present nickname’s origins, and ‘politically-correct’ worries about causing offence notwithstanding, what would happen if we recast the Bush-led and Blair-backed battle in a more honest light and called it the War Against Islamofascism?

To begin with, it would be imperative for us to state in unequivocal terms that this is not a crusade against law-abiding and moderate Muslims. Failure to get this basic message across would mean that we’d alienate the very people who could potentially be our strongest allies in the fight against extremism, leaving an already-difficult battle looking utterly unwinnable in the process. As words are cheap and often hollow, the point would have to be backed up in reality, meaning that racial profiling and the demonising of well-integrated Islamic factions would be strictly verboten.

Secondly, we’d have to define our terms. What is ‘Islamofascism’, exactly? Well, it’s old-fashioned fascism, as practiced by Hitler, Mussolini and their ilk, but with a Muslim-centric slant. It’s manifested in people like Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and dozens of others, all of whom are not content to simply have their private little superstitions but who seek to impose them upon the rest of the globe, not one person excepted. It’s a terrifyingly-proactive cult which simply won’t take ‘No’ for an answer, analogous to a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses armed to the teeth with explosive vests and AK-47 assault rifles. It’s nothing less than the end of civilisation – freedom of speech, freedom of association, women’s rights, democracy, etc. etc. – as we’ve come to know it in the West. And, worst of all, without wishing to sound like Dubya himself, it’s coming for you.

This last part seems to be particularly contentious among so-called ‘liberal’ critics of the WoT, most of whom seem to be irrevocably-convinced that all non-white terrorists are fluffy little kittens who only lash out when provoked by mean old Caucasians and their nasty foreign policies, but can there really be any doubt that such draconian and dogmatic Muslims are indeed out there and will continue to exist independently of Western actions? Think about it for a second. Cut the wishy-washy PC bullshit about allowing them to indulge in their own ‘values’ and ‘customs’. Ignore, if only for a moment, the latent hypocrisy in the fact that one of the very worst offenders, Saudi Arabia, is considered to be a good friend of the USA’s. Try to see the wood in spite of the trees.

Start by divesting yourself of any lingering discomfort you may feel at leaving the familiar path of anti-war righteousness, in favour of the road less travelled, and casting your minds back to late 2005. Twelve cartoons, all of which depicted the Prophet Muhammad in some way, were published in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper and were subsequently reprinted by a plethora of other publications across the globe. The resulting international protests saw no fewer than 100 people killed while nearly 1000 were injured, embassies in Syria were attacked by rampaging mobs and high-ranking Muslim figures, including Mahmoud Zahar of Hamas, called for the deaths of those responsible for the caricatures in question. In the UK, protesters waved placards bearing slogans such as "Butcher those who mock Islam", a sentiment which was widely expressed throughout Europe and, indeed, the rest of the world.

Now, do these events really sound like the perfectly-sane reactions of peaceful and placid folk? Verily, they do not.

Let’s have another example, this time in the shapes of Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The former was a Dutch filmmaker while the latter is a Somalian critic of Islam. Together, they produced a documentary entitled Submission, which emphasised the maltreatment of women in Islamic society. November 2004 saw poor van Gogh brutally murdered in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street as a result of his role in directing the movie. His assailant shot him eight times, nearly decapitated him by slashing his throat and then used a second knife to pin a five-page letter to his battered corpse. Contained in the document were threats against Hirsi Ali, who has since required round-the-clock security for her protection; also featured were thinly-disguised threats against all other “unbelievers”, i.e. anyone who dares not to follow the Muslim faith.

Again, does this sound like a reasonable response on the part of van Gogh’s killer? I’m sure I needn’t provide an answer to this rhetorical enquiry, so I shan’t.

If more illustrations are needed then there are plenty of them to be found. How about author Salman Rushdie, who was forced to spend nearly ten years of his life in hiding after The Satanic Verses prompted death-threats from Islamic fundamentalist bullies? Or what about the (more recent) case of Gillian Gibbons, the British schoolteacher who was imprisoned in the Republic of Sudan – albeit for a short time, thanks to diplomatic efforts on the part of the British Government – for the heinous crime of allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’? (It may help you to know that her ‘transgression’ could have earned her six months in jail or 40 lashes with a whip, save for the international outcry her plight provoked. It may also prove illuminating to learn that protesters took to the streets soon after she was arrested to demand that her initial 15-day sentence be increased, with some even demanding that she be executed immediately.)

Lastly, let’s return to Britney again, who (along with fellow singer Madonna) was the subject of a thoroughly unpleasant outburst from a Muslim extremist named Muhammad Abdel-Al, spokesman and senior leader of the Popular Resistance Committees terror organisation, in September 2007. His remarks are worth reprinting in full:

“If I meet these whores I will have the honour – I repeat, I will have the honour – to be the first one to cut the heads off Madonna and Britney Spears if they keep spreading their satanic culture against Islam.”

Hamas’s Abu Abdullah also inveighed against the poor pop-stars when detailing what his organisation will do if it ever manages to conquer the States:

"At the beginning, we will try to convince Madonna and Britney Spears to follow Allah's way. But I honestly don't think they will follow. If they persist with their whoring music, we will prevent them by force. I don't think that I can be in the same place with these singers. They might be killed if they do not respect our laws."

Both men were being interviewed for a book entitled Schmoozing With Terrorists (written by American journalist Aaron Klein) when they made these astonishing pronouncements, and there has since been no suggestion that either one was misquoted or otherwise misrepresented when their remarks saw the light of day.

Now, let’s contrast this with the treatment meted out to some of those high-profile figures who have incurred the wrath of other religions, shall we?

Take noted atheist and author Richard Dawkins (a man known in some circles as ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’) and his anti-religion books, including a certain bestselling tome called The God Delusion, for instance. Has he been forced to go underground to protect himself, compelled to live his life in fear of violent reprisals for his disavowal of religious beliefs in general? No. He’s had to endure more than his fair share of criticism from religiously-inclined buffoons, certainly – and one could probably argue that having the utterly vile Ann Coulter mouth off about you is a form of torture in itself – but otherwise he remains a free man.

What about Christopher Hitchens, then? Not content with antagonising many on the political Left by supporting the War on Terrorism, in spite of his former socialist proclivities, he has launched a series of bitter attacks against religions of all shapes and sizes as well. In his own book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he gleefully puts the boot into Mormonism and takes great delight in lampooning its facile and fraudulent founder, Joseph Smith. Does Hitch now live under an assumed name, surrounded by armed bodyguards and constantly awaiting a kamikaze attack from an embittered member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints? It probably won’t surprise you to hear that the answer is a resounding “No.”

The list goes on and on. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Edward Tabash, Eugenie Scott… they may be targets for the verbal arrows of pro-creationist Bible-bashers and Torah-trumpeters, certainly, but they do not have to worry about the kind of vicious treatment doled out to van Gogh and threatened against Hirsi Ali. (I shan’t even delve into the long list of people who have brutally mocked Scientologists for their preposterous belief system, but will note that they too are able to live normal lives without having to worry that Tom Cruise and John Travolta are going to come after them with butcher’s knives and fiery Hubbard-related propaganda.)

In a well-known and rightly-beloved George Carlin riff, the comedian dissects the Ten Commandments with his usual fierce honesty and unadorned intelligence. By the end of the ‘bit’, he has successfully reduced the “artificially-padded list” to two simple rules (“Thou Shalt Always be Honest and Faithful to the Provider of Thy Nookie” and “Thou Shalt Try Real Hard Not to Kill Anyone, Unless, of Course, They Pray to a Different Invisible Man From the One You Pray To”), to which he then adds a third: “Thy Shalt Keep Thy Religion to Thyself”. Most religious groups fall down at this final hurdle, to be fair, but even the more aggressive Christian ones – such as the aforementioned Jehovah’s Witnesses – do not take their didactic moralising quite as far as do the more extreme Islamic factions. Endless exposure to this kind of extremist speechifying has had some truly disturbing results among young British Muslims, a sizeable proportion of whom would, it seems, like to see the UK placed under Sharia law. A similar number would be happy to see those who leave the faith punished in extreme fashion for the ‘sin’ of apostasy, while some are even willing to openly profess their admiration for the anti-Western campaign undertaken by al-Qaeda.*

Now, before you start espousing the Chomsky-lite angle that US foreign policy was solely responsible for the events of 9/11, please bear in mind that this shallow outlook entirely neglects the religious element of the equation. In particular, it pays no heed to Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of February 1998, which took the offending foreign policy issues and recast them not as transgressions against people but as “a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger [the Prophet Muhammad] and Muslims.” It went on to proclaim that “jihad”, or holy war, is “an individual duty” for followers of the faith across the globe. According to what? Why, the Qur'an, of course. The communiqué, which was signed by representatives from several Islamic terrorist organisations, concluded by calling upon all Muslims to “kill the Americans and their allies” whenever and wherever possible, making specific reference to both “civilians and military [targets]” and announcing that this drastic course of action was “in accordance with the words of Almighty God”.

See, the conflict between the West and radical Islam has never been as simple as mere retribution – “You kill us and we’ll kill you” – because proponents of the latter group are not content to simply strike back. They want to convert the whole globe to their skewed and warped way of thinking, and nothing less than the wholesale achievement of this goal will satiate their desires. In that sense, as much as it sickens me to say it, the ‘War on Terrorism’ is about freedom and liberty, at least to some extent, but not quite in the way Blair and Bush tried to claim. Instead of being entirely about the specific values we enjoy so much in this hemisphere, on an individual case-by-case basis, it’s about our collective ability to avoid being subjected to all this Allah/Muhammad-related business with which the vast majority of us, as non-Muslims (Christians and Jews, atheists and agnostics, Hindus and New Age mystics) have severe disagreements. Simply put, the issue runs much, much further than our right to imbibe intoxicating beverages and partake in all manner of sexual liaisons: it goes right to the heart of what we are allowed to believe, how we must act and, indeed, how we must exist.

Unfortunately, the opinions postulated by certain left-wing writers fail to take the fundamentalist factor into consideration and are, therefore, fatally-flawed in my opinion.

While the oft-cited 7/7 and 9/11 attacks are at the forefront of the debate once more, let’s briefly analyse their impact from another angle.

When Briton Margaret Hassan was kidnapped in Iraq in October 2004, a message was posted to a website known to be frequented by Middle Eastern insurgents. Purportedly written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then-leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the note condemned the kidnapping and also made a very telling pronouncement:

"In true Islam, they don't kill women and young children.”

This declaration, invoking a moral code akin to honour among killers, apparently came from the mind of one of the most brutal Islamic terrorists of recent times, a fact reflected in the $25m bounty on al-Zarqawi’s head which put him on an equal footing with bin Laden in the global ‘Most Wanted’ rankings right up until his death in June 2006.

However, to what extent is the ‘noble’ idea contained therein actually reflected in reality? Leaving aside the unanswerable quandary of what constitutes “true Islam”, I’m forced to point out that the 9/11 planners made no attempt to avoid killing women and young children when concocting their insidious scheme. Nor did the 7/7 bombers, for that matter, who also failed to take into account the fact that so many members of the British public partook in anti-war demonstrations as soon as the invasion of Iraq was first mooted. It ought to go without saying that other such Islam-originated attacks, ranging from the Bali nightclub inferno of October 2002 to Richard Reid’s inchoate ‘shoe-bombing’ of a packed aeroplane in December 2001, also opted not to consider the scale of international opposition to the Iraq war and proceeded to butcher, maim and kill innocent bystanders at will in spite of ostensible public support for their cause. Would attacks upon the Houses of Parliament or the US Congress have been more legitimate, thinking along these lines? Only in the sense that the victims would then have played some direct role in instigating the conflicts, and such a course of action would remain indefensible in the extreme.

The unadorned fact is that these jihadist hooligans adhere to no such niceties and are ready to kill randomly in order to advance their campaign. End of story.

At this stage, I think it would be wise for me to emphasise that I’m pretty much an equal-opportunities offender when it comes to the subject of religion, insofar as I detest them all equally. In that sense, at least, I would hate to be thought of as being ‘Islamophobic’ in any way, shape or form, and would much prefer to be thought of as ‘religion-phobic’ if such labels are really necessary. Nevertheless, I do think that – for the most part – today’s Christians, for example, have slowly come to realise that the worst excesses of the Bible are irrelevant, anachronistic and just downright unpleasant where modern society is concerned. That is to say, even those who believe in the Sky Bully do not, in general, feel that a woman ought to be stoned to death for committing adultery. With the exception of Fred Phelps’s loathsome brood and others of a similarly-extreme mindset, most contemporary pulpit-punchers do not feel that homosexuality is a grievous sin and that AIDS is God’s way of expressing his/her/its disapproval of such behaviour. And so on, and so on, and so forth.

Lamentably, the same cannot be said of the Islamic faith, in which even the most brutal and outmoded concepts are considered to be very much au courant by many of the movement’s leaders. Take the recent case of a female rape victim in Saudi Arabia, who was sentenced to a custodial sentence and 200 lashes for the ‘crime’ of being around men who were not close family members, an act forbidden under Saudi law. (The sentence was subsequently commuted by King Abdullah after an international outcry, but Islamic conservatives decried the monarch’s decision and accused him of pandering to Western values.)

Just as sickening as the mooted punishment in the above-referenced example was America’s refusal to condemn the Saudi justice system, with one Bush administration official describing the sentence as “astonishing” but stopping some way short of wholesale criticism. One rule for your enemies and another rule for your friends? You bet, and it’s just this kind of dual standard which must be abolished for good if the campaign against Islamofascism is to stand any chance of succeeding over the coming weeks, months and years.

So, then: I remain opposed to the War on Terrorism as it exists at present and yet I also detest Islamic fundamentalism and favour fighting it. You’d be forgiven for wondering what I actually suggest, having read this far, and it’s precisely this query which I shall now attempt to answer.

For a start, I’d very much like to see the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq brought to their long-overdue conclusions, thereby putting a full-stop to this phase of the WoT and allowing us to turn our backs on six years of near-constant snafus. Blair has now left 10 Downing Street for good and, regardless of the outcome of next year’s general election in the United States of America, Dubya’s time in the Oval Office will soon come to an end at last. With a new British Prime Minister already in situ, a new calendar year due to start in a matter of days and, most importantly of all, a new American President due to take over the reins from Bush Jr. in due course, the time is right to rethink our approach to this quest and arrange a phased withdrawal of Western soldiers from both countries in order to leave each embryonic regime to stand on its own two feet.

Of course, we cannot bring these battles to a satisfactory halt by simply pulling our troops out of the relevant regions, slowly or otherwise. Insofar as the original goal of the Afghanistan campaign is concerned, we can be pretty certain that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are hiding out in Pakistan and have been there since late 2001; let’s stop pussy-footing around with President Pervez Musharraf and tell him to either expel the al-Qaeda leader from within his borders or else face a severe assault designed to capture or kill the terrorist targets. (While we’re at it, let’s make it abundantly clear to the Pakistani leader that, ‘Western ally’ or otherwise, he’s not to impose a state of martial law in order to clamp down on dissidents ever again. It couldn’t hurt, and it’s a message which has at least doubled in importance following the recent assassination of his arch-rival, Benazir Bhutto.)

What next?

Well, while we’re punishing those Islamofascists who were somehow related to 9/11, why not go after Saudi Arabia? Although I’m not suggesting for a second that the Saudi Royal Family actually had a direct hand in the attacks, we do know that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals – as, indeed, is bin Laden himself – and that’s more than enough evidence on which to proceed with an invasion. They fit the proverbial bill on a number of other fronts, too: they’ve been buying weapons from the UK since Thatcher’s time, so we know beyond any doubt they have some pretty powerful kit at their disposal, and they have an appalling human rights record to boot. I’ve yet to hear a single vaguely-convincing reason for leaving Saudi Arabia untouched, so let’s get on with it and eradicate yet another Muslim dictatorship in the process.

Then it’s just a matter of eliminating ALL Islamofascist societies, one by one, country by country. But why stop there? We could extend the mandate of the newly-rechristened War Against Islamofascism, re-dubbing it appropriately if trite slogans are deemed to be required, and take on other powerful and oppressive regimes as well. In the process, we can not only end the long-running genocide in Darfur but also remove the repulsive Robert Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe, to mention but two more potential targets. While Phase One of the WoT has largely been disastrous, the removal of the Taliban and the Ba’ath Party from control of Afghanistan and Iraq respectively has been an undeniable boon and I cannot bring myself to mourn the downfall of either; the problem is, we haven’t applied the doctrine of ‘regime change’ to a great enough extent, and there has been no suggestion from Washington that a coherent plan exists for combating other fascistic leaders across the globe. This grievous oversight must be remedied as soon as possible if the WoT/WAI is to have any legitimacy whatsoever, or else it looks as though we’re only concerned about liberating oppressed citizens when their regions have oil supplies and/or some other form of strategic value.

Naturally, the above-described crusade would not be entirely free from pitfalls of its own. Remember what happened after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979? The West promptly began to train and arm as many anti-Soviet insurgency fighters as they could find, and this rag-tag group of jihadists – collectively-known as the Mujahideen – soon became a force with which to be reckoned. After the invaders were successfully expelled from Afghanistan, the best part of a decade later, the pesky insurgents refused to simply vanish into the ether and instead decided to bite the hands which once had fed them.

A series of unpleasant incidents followed, including the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the October 2000 attack upon the USS Cole.

Then came 9/11, and the whole playing-field changed in an instant. As soon as American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the WTC, Islamofascists ceased to be an mild, rhetoric-heavy irritant and collectively became Public Enemy #1; Osama bin Laden immediately became the poster-child for every disaffected Muslim extremist with dreams of a concubine-filled paradise, while al-Qaeda came to represent some kind of idyllic resistance movement for angst-filled teenagers who dreamed of playing their own parts in the war against ‘The Great Satan’.

One of my worries, then, is that giving the US Christian Right power and support means that we may one day be faced with an overly-powerful bunch of right-wing God-botherers whose supremacy cannot be easily curtailed. Then what will we do? To this, I’m afraid I have no easy answers. As disconcerting as the prospect undeniably is, the more pressing concern is to combat bin Laden and his contemptible organisation and the most we can do in the process, as far as the future is concerned, involves trying to ensure that we keep the US God Squad on a tight leash.

In summary, then: we need an intelligent US leader (Dennis Kucinich, perhaps, if we can keep him off the subject of UFOs), in charge of a broad coalition (not solely comprised of the USA and the UK), featuring leaders who are not afraid to disagree with America when necessary (cf. Blair) and, above all, we need a systematic approach to wiping out Islamofascism. We need outright honesty, not asinine gibberish pertaining to phantom WMD, and we need an absence of dual standards, which means that the Saudis must be on the ‘To Bomb’ list as well. It’d be great if the new US president were an atheist, but I’d probably settle (in the short-term) for someone who isn’t dumb enough to say “God told me to bomb Iraq!” when, in all probability, the 9/11 planners would say that ‘God’ also ‘told’ them to hijack passenger-laden aircraft to act as makeshift missiles. Then, perhaps, we can also turn our attention to Mugabe and his fellow despots and really take steps towards making Planet Earth a better place in which to dwell.

First, though, we must rid ourselves of the PC blinkers which blind us to any nefarious misdeeds perpetuated by those with dark skin, turbans and beards. It’s great that we’re so vociferous when it comes to the wrongdoings of rich white guys like Bush and Blair – the Patriot Act, the ID card farrago and, of course, the WMD-related lies they told – but it’s a pretty damned stupid state of affairs if our so-called ‘liberalism’ leaves us unable to address issues such as Islamofascism for fear of causing offence to Muslims in general. I in no way advocate aggression against moderate and peaceful followers of Islam, regardless of my ill-disguised opposition to all forms of religion. My umbrage is exclusively aimed at the extremists who seek to wage holy war on the Western world, whether they come with explosive vests and handguns or just violence-advocating placards, and if you finish reading this article with even the vaguest sense that I’m just ‘anti-Muslim’ then you’ll have missed my point in quite spectacular fashion.

I’m aware that the ostensibly pro-war stance I’ve enumerated herein may well make me unpopular among fellow lefties, but at the end of the day it would be the worst kind of intellectual cowardice to hide from these thoughts and I can’t help but feel that I’ve allowed my hatred for Blair and Bush to blind me for too long already. I really believe that fighting terrorism is a case of priorities: we need to make sure we do the job right, starting with one group before we focus our attention upon another, and we may find ourselves forced to make uneasy alliances with people we dislike, including the incumbent US neoconservatives, in the meantime. It’s uncomfortable and unpleasant, to be sure, but it’s also going to be damn near unavoidable if the Republicans win in 2008 and the alternative – rolling over and allowing our way of life to be forever compromised by Osama and co. – is even more wretched, to the point of being quite unthinkable.

Before I wrap this up, allow me to hastily pre-empt a possible point of contention with regard to the views I’ve expressed above. Yes, there are other forms of fascism and oppression out there, ranging from the mild (e.g. the BNP and other democratic parties) to the extreme (e.g. the Russian militant faction which recently released a videotape of foreign captives being beheaded); the difference, however, is that the Islamofascists of whom I speak are organised, plentiful, have an agenda and are determined to stick to it. At present, most other extremist groups are simply members of the lunatic fringe in their respective countries. We’ll worry about them if and when they get their shit together and begin to pose a serious threat to the outside world. In the cases where they’ve done so already, including Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF group… well, to paraphrase Led Zeppelin, their time is gonna come.

Happy non-denominational holiday season to one and all.

* For recent survey results which support these trends, visit some of the following external websites: BBC News Online, WorldNetDaily (a conservative rag, the general contents of which I in no way endorse, although it did report upon the survey in question) and the Islam in Europe blog. I’m not altogether comfortable with the notion of citing such right-wing outlets as sources, but unfortunately the liberal media is – for reasons aforementioned – generally reluctant to cover these stories.

 

IMAGE TAKEN FROM A VIDEOTAPED STATEMENT ISSUED BY OSAMA BIN LADEN IN OCTOBER 2004 AND BROADCAST BY AL JAZEERA TELEVISION ON THE 29TH OF THAT MONTH.