In Anticipation of Nothing New

On February 22, 1946, George Kennan (then Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR) sent the Long Telegram, a profoundly significant letter outlining the author’s views of the Soviet enemy and the stakes of the Cold War to come. The telegram helped shape American foreign policy attitudes towards its competing superpower in part because of the force of Kennan’s argumentation. More important, though, was the fact that the foundation of the Long Telegram was unabashedly thrown into the public sphere. The Truman Doctrine was based on it, successive presidents and their administrations embraced it, and the American people were aware of it.

The New York Times has reported that Barack Obama is considering making a major foreign policy address from an Islamic capital during his first 100 days in office. Surely his aim will be to start the international healing process by articulating a tolerant position on the role of Islam in the numerous threats faced by the Western world. If a modern Long Telegram exists, it would be wise to bet against its appearance in the speech at Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus.

Mr. Obama and his defense team may have already pinpointed the relevant methods, self-perceptions and structures that Islamists possess and must be eliminated through military and diplomatic means. The problem is that, even if this was the case, we don’t really want to hear about it. Countering hateful ideology often requires a step onto an ideological ledge of our own. It requires drawing a line between good and bad beliefs. It is this line that we’ve been told to eliminate.

We’re told to eliminate the line on campus. When a conservative organization at The George Washington University announced its “Islamofascism Awareness Week” last year, student representatives earned a chance to discuss their program on CNN. Except instead of receiving a forum to criticize an ideology that wanted all of them (and everyone in the studio, and everyone at their school) dead, they found themselves on national television backpedaling against criticisms that their project was racist. If only the speed in which multiculturalists eliminated this threat could be replicated by our intelligence services.

When either the back of a Subaru or an actual person tells you to “Coexist,” the message is usually targeted at President Bush and his band of neoconservatives, not the man with the dull razor blade in all those horrible decapitation videos that somehow go ignored. Even if Mr. Obama inherits a nation more acquiescent to his brand of foreign policy, whatever that may be, the fear of ideological confrontation with everything short of a man with a small moustache remains. How could an official serving the Obama administration ever produce an effective Long Telegram when even President Unilateral Aggression didn’t have the heart to call the ‘war on terror’ a ‘war on radical Islam’? Last I checked 9/11 wasn’t caused by a failure of the American government to recognize the Irish Republican Army.

How long before our intellectual cowardice dissipates I don’t know. But until it does, we have about as good a chance of making actual progress against the ideas that form the lifeblood of anti-American terrorism as we have hearing Barack Obama say “Islamofascism” in Damascus.