Storm Track Disinformation: The Semantics of This War

“If you can’t identify your enemy, how can you defeat him?”

How many times have we heard that from the starboard side of the bloggesphere? And yet there is still much confusion not only by the average Joe but also from bloggers too. Even President Bush has made two grave mistakes with his regrettable mislabeling of this global war between civilizations as a weapon and tactic (the War on Terror) and his repeated statements of how we must “bring to justice’ the ground troops of our enemy.

I cringe every time I hear Bush say that we must bring the terrorists to justice which feeds right into the hands of the Left and anti-war crowd who see this world war as simply a police action that must be addressed in the courts and which had led to the recent Supreme Court decision that Bush did not have the lawful authority to hold military Tribunals.

We are in this muddied mess because we don’t have the proper definitions and semantic tools to understand who our enemy is.

Though better bloggers than myself have tired endlessly to educate both Muslims and non-Muslims to the threat of the enemy confronting us, we throw words around like, terrorists, jihadists, Muslims, Islam, etc, without an attempt at organizing our thinking about this war and perhaps even help those that are leading it on our side to better understand exactly who the enemy is so we can confront and defeat it.

Militant Islam is waging a global war to dominate the world. That most people agree on. But who is the face of militant Islam? Is every Muslim out to kill or subjugate non-Muslims? Or do they just want to practice their religion in peace as the claim. If we are not at war with over billion Muslims worldwide, then who is the enemy?

Here’s what I feel should be the semantic tools we should use in understanding who that enemy is and thus be able to identify them and mount a proper defense and offense. I’ll use a recent ideological battle we have waged as an example because our enemy, like every enemy before, also wants to advance an ideology.

The recent example is Communism. Like any ‘ism’, it’s and ideology. But the our enemy in the Cold War were not the Poles or the Hungarians or the Albanians or the Bulgarians or the Ukrainians or any other country or peoples who were part of the Eastern Communist Block. Not even the Russian people. The Cole War was a struggle against Communism.

It’s the same for militant Islam, defined as an ideology of advancing the beliefs and doctrines of Islam and establishing them throughout the world. We are not at war with Muslims but with an ideology held by some Muslims. That ideology is Islamism. Those that believe in Islamism and seek to advance its agenda are called Islamists. Islamists come in two flavors – the violent kind (terrorists and jihadists) and the non-violent kind who seek to advance their agenda through the lawful means of intimidation, infiltration, and disinformation.

If we are to fight and win this war that was thrust upon us, we need to identify that enemy and its comprehensive strategy that go far beyond that of terrorism. We need to come to agreement of the semantics of this war so that we can act as one voice with a comprehensive understanding of what we are confronting and have plans on how to confront it when appears.

I’d like to hear other thought on t is matter and maybe some kind of semantic guide that we can use in opposition to the instructional guides that the EU, UN and western nations are using to try and ‘understand’ what they are confronting and how to confront it.