Duelling Islamofascists

So, contrary to what 46% of Americans still think after all this time, no. Saddam Hussein is not responsible for 9/11. In fact, he was so far from being in cahoots with Al Qaida that he tried to locate and capture Zarqawi, as the recent senate report revealed.

But hey, they're both Islamofascists, right? Start differentiating them, and the terrorists would have already won.

I think this is a good time to review a post from Yglesias from a few days ago:

Talk of a unified Qaeda/Iran/Hezbollah/Syria menace is nonsense as a casual scan of actual Sunni jihadist views will make clear. As Fred Kaplan notes, if Churchill and FDR had operated with the Bush mentality, "they might not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union (out of a refusal to negotiate with evil Communists), and they might have therefore lost the war."

It's worse than that, though -- they might have proposed attacking the Soviet Union in the middle of the war because Bolshevism and Nazism were both species of Eurofascism.

So, why didn't Churchill and FDR make Bush's mistake? It's all too easy to reach for the snide answer and say that FDR wasn't a moron like Bush or something like that. But I think that even if G.W. was the Commander in Chief during the Second World War, he wouldn't have made the same mistake that he did with Iraq. The reason is simple -- Germany was serious threat the way Al Qaida and all the other "islamofascist" factions we can't be bothered to sort out have never been and probably could never be. That's why we have the luxury of lumping them all together lazily and thus strengthening their hand instead of playing divide and conquer. We might talk as if our enemies are 10 feet tall and crazy, but the desultory way we're fighting them suggests that, deep down, we know they're jokes. When it comes to this war on terror thing, our rhetoric is as hysterical as our execution is sloppy.

Despite the weakness of our enemies, "war", "hysterical" and "sloppy" in the same sentence seldom bode well for the future.