Military tacticians have long understood that you have to “know your enemy.” That means that to defeat your enemy, you have to assess his battle strategy, capabilities, and various strengths and weaknesses, as well as what motivates him to fight.
But in our nation’s struggle against terrorists, we are failing to know the enemy as fully as we should.
The Obama administration has declined at times to call terrorism by its name, absurdly referring to it as “man-caused disasters.” And it has renamed the “global war on terror” an “overseas contingency operation.”
What is just as disturbing is that the administration has downplayed or ignored the Islamic radicalism that has been behind the overwhelming majority of terrorist attacks on the United States and on U.S. interests in recent years. Officials say they don’t want to portray the battle against terrorism (or “man-caused disasters”) as a war against Islam.
But while it’s true that most Muslims have never committed terrorist attacks, it is a fact that most of the terrorist attacks against the United States have been coming from radical Muslims.
Now, a group of counterterrorism experts has issued a report challenging the idea that we can fight an enemy that we will not clearly name.
Experts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said the administration should not “denigrate the Islamic religion in any way,” but should state plainly that the threat is obviously coming from radical Islam.
“There is an ideology that is driving al-Qaida and its affiliates,” Matt Levitt, one of the authors of the report, told The Associated Press.
We should never gratuitously insult a peaceful group or individual on the basis of his faith. But it will be difficult to defeat those Muslims who do resort to terrorism if we refuse even to describe them accurately.