Newsweek: Little of Bush’s 'war on terror' rhetoric is making sense

Terrible as they are, wars can be clarifying events. Like thunderstorms, they purge the diplomatic air. They force people to take sides and, if they are total wars, they leave one victor standing. This is what happened during World Wars I and II (the latter being mainly an extension of the former) and the cold war. In the end, fascism and totalitarianism were vanquished—with the exception of a few redoubts, like North Korea—freedom was left the sole victor and America was seen as its champion. George W. Bush would have us view the "war on terror," which turns five years old on Monday, in this light as well. "This is the great ideological struggle of the 21st century—and it is the calling of our generation," the president said this week in a dramatic rendezvous-with-destiny speech timed to the 9/11 anniversary. "Freedom is once again contending with the forces of darkness and tyranny"—the terrorists who would seek to impose what he called a "totalitarian Islamic empire."

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The president's opponents say the war on terror is nothing at all like the last century's biggest conflicts. With a crucial midterm election approaching, Democrats in particular are eager to portray what Bush calls the war on terror's "central front"—Iraq—not as another glorious fight against totalitarianism but as another Vietnam, a quagmire unrelated to the fight against Al Qaeda. Vietnam, of course, was not a clarifying war, at least for Americans. Indeed the war provoked so much confusion and self-doubt about U.S. policy that its impact is still felt today, 31 years after the fall of Saigon. To Bush's critics, the "Vietnam Syndrome"—a casualty-shy reluctance to use force—has now been replaced by a parallel, and equally paralyzing, "Iraq Syndrome."

The truth is that, year by year, the so-called GWOT (global war on terrorism) has become less and less clear in its direction and goals—and less and less like any previous war. What began as a crystal-clear fight against a small, self-contained group of murderers has become a kind of murky, open-ended World War III in which the identity of the enemy is less certain and our allies seem to grow less reliable. While at the beginning no one had any use for Al Qaeda—Americans, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Arab regimes—now that the Bush administration has expanded the war to include all terrorists and their "state sponsors," very few nations seem to be buying fully into the U.S. vision. Many of those who hated Al Qaeda, for example, never accepted the link to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And some of these countries are ambivalent at best about making Hizbullah and Hamas (both of which disavow any link to Al Qaeda), or their sponsors, Iran and Syria, part of the same struggle. "We're a nation at war," Bush says. But we all must now ask: with whom exactly?

In two remarkable speeches delivered in Washington this week, the president sought to recover some of the clarity of 9/11, returning the war on terror to its origins. On Tuesday he restored Osama bin Laden to his place as America's central bogeyman—after a three-year period of barely mentioning his name—and compared him to Hitler and Lenin. The next day, the president brought families of 9/11 victims into the East Room for a dramatic speech in which he acknowledged, for the first time, the existence of the CIA's secret prison program and an "alternative set of procedures" used to interrogate key Al Qaeda suspects rounded up in the early years after 9/11. He made a vigorous case that "questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks."

darkness and tyranny as a totalitarian-like regime builds its empire would seem incontrovertible to all except extreme ideologues and other true-believers, albeit seemingly numbering in the tens of millions in Amerika.