Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times,
calls for a sweeping response to the threat of militant Islam in his book, "The
West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (Regnery
Publishing).
Last of three parts
When President Bush declared war on terrorism,
he did not, legally, put the country on a war footing.
Up until now, we have never accurately named
the enemy or the danger. If the government can't speak the real name and nature
of the enemy, it becomes impossible to explain, or even design, a policy for
victory.
This is why Mr. Bush -- who has tried to
talk around the problem of radical Islam -- has seemed (to his critics)
foolish or deceitful, neither of which he is.
What we need is a clear congressional
declaration of war, as prescribed by the Constitution. Congress should
declare war on the Islamist jihadists.
Naming the formal enemy limits the focus
of our war effort to the militant Islamists who have declared jihad
against the West. There are many terrorist groups in the world. Many
are no threat to the United States. The current danger is the Islamist
one.
Naming the threat also expands the scope
of our war effort to all the networks of radical Islam, including
mosques, schools and radical sites on the Internet. It is not only
terrorist acts that we are confronting, but the propaganda and
organizations that make them possible.
Some people would argue that we would be
declaring a religious war against more than a billion Muslims. But this
is not true. We would be declaring war on a particular, violent,
political ideology within Islam that threatens the West and the health
of Muslim societies themselves.
By declaring war on the Islamist jihadists, we can
underline why we stand side by side with peaceful and democratic Muslims and are
opposed in Afghanistan and Iraq only by those Muslims who believe in car bombs,
terrorism and murder.
Necessary powers
It is also important to declare war on the Islamist jihadists because we are a nation of laws.
When Congress declares war and passes
enabling legislation, the president can accept the full authority
delegated to him under the Constitution and by Supreme Court precedents
that establish presidential powers in wartime.
Some such powers that barely were used by
President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, such as the
sedition laws, are necessary to fight our war against Islamist
terrorism.
Muslim extremists on the Internet and in
mosques openly call for jihad against the United States and Europe. In
May, Muslim organizations gathered in front of the American Embassy in
London to protest against the United States and Britain.
They burned British and American flags
and threatened violence, including another September 11 attack. They
chanted, "USA, watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill
USA, kill, kill George Bush" and "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George
Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."
If this protest, with its threats of
violence and assassination, had been conducted within our own borders,
the protesters would have been ripe subjects for sedition prosecutions
-- and rightly so. Sedition laws do not outlaw dissent; they outlaw
advocating the violent overthrow of our government and violent
opposition to our war effort.
The likely prolonged nature of this war
should be a concern to everyone who values civil liberties. As long as
we are inventing a new form of war declaration, put a sunset provision
on it. Every two years, all exclusively wartime powers would be
extinguished and need to be renewed by the next Congress.
Ethnic and religious profiling is a specific war power that must be available to our government.
Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta
has declared that any profiling that takes race, religion or
nationality into account is forbidden in airport security.
Under current policy, our government
cannot take action or make judgments on the basis of ethnicity,
religion or nationality. Our government severely fined airlines that
barred suspicious-looking young Muslim men from flights.
Back to common sense
Obviously, such policies are not based on reason but on political correctness run amok.
Muslim organizations are quick to hold
press conferences and take legal action to intimidate the government.
They put pressure on magazines by trying to persuade advertisers to
withdraw ads or face charges of subsidizing racism. They try to
intimidate authors and publishers.
During World War II, the internment of
German, Italian and Japanese aliens (and American citizens of Japanese
ancestry) was found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court on the
explicit basis that it was reasonable to suspect them of loyalty to a
hostile country.
Today, the question is not incarceration,
but merely extra attention in sensitive settings, such as boarding an
airplane.
Our policy must follow the dictates of common sense and national security.
For example, since September 11, our
government has had a critical shortage of Arabic translators. But
according to the testimony of Sibel Dinez Edmonds, a former Arabic
translator for the FBI, ambiguous loyalties in the FBI translation
office compromise our national security.
The FBI should not be intimidated into
politically correct behavior that endangers security. But this is the
natural outcome of policy that puts political correctness before common
sense.
To give extra scrutiny to Muslims in
sensitive situations is not bigotry. If America went to war against
England, I would fully expect that as a former Englishman (now a
naturalized American citizen), I would receive a thorough background
check if I applied for government work or if I wanted to buy a gun or
board an airplane.
In time of war, no loyal American citizen
or peaceful resident should resent precautions taken for the common
defense.
Urgent needs
Essentially, senior government officials
admit that al Qaeda plans to illegally sneak terrorists across our
borders and that we have no plan for dealing with that likelihood.
In World War II, we safely shipped more
than 10 million troops through submarine-infested seas, built 100,000
combat planes in a single year and invented and deployed the first
atomic bomb.
We are at war again and need to treat
border security as a necessity. We need to meet the challenge with the
same can-do spirit.
Here is one hard truth: We no longer can
afford the luxury of not requiring national identification cards.
Without biometric cards for every person living or traveling in the
country, even secured borders will be insufficient.
Complacency also rules in the
government's search for reliable translators of Arabic and related
languages. The FBI admits to a backlog of 120,000 hours of potentially
valuable intercepts. The State Department admits that only one in five
of 279 Arabic translators is fluent enough to manage the subtlety of
the language. The military has similar problems.
Aside from classified material is a much
larger domain of what intelligence officials call open sources --
newspapers, Internet sites, magazine articles, television and radio
broadcasts -- that are not even submitted to our translators. And yet
Arabic-language Internet sites are the primary medium for spreading
Islamist doctrine -- and communicating operational information for
terrorists.
What we obviously need are tens of thousands of non-Muslim Arabic translators.
Challenge and strategy
The challenge for America and the West is
that we must try to more or less simultaneously shield our nations from
the Islamists; strengthen our own cultural vigor, laws and military
capacity; and shrewdly intervene in the Islamic world to establish
healthy economic and political connections.
These connections include creating a free
and self-sufficient Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps, if the Israelis
and Palestinians establish a lasting peace, pouring capital investment
into the West Bank to promote mutual prosperity.
The best strategy to fend off and reverse the
Islamist threat is to strengthen the alliance between the United States and
Europe.
Of course, Christian Southern Africa (390
million of Africa's approximately 850 million people), Hindu India, non-Muslim
Southeast Asia, Christian Latin America and Russia all have important roles to
play in defeating the Islamist jihadists.
But a defense of the West without the
birthplace of the West -- Europe -- is almost unthinkable. If Europe
becomes Eurabia, it would mean the loss of our cultural and historic
first cousins, our closest economic and military allies, and the source
of our own civilization. This is a condition Americans should dread and
should move mountains to avoid.
It bears repeating: An Islamified Europe
would be as great a threat to the United States today as a Nazified
Europe would have been in the 1940s.
Even before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt
understood that a Nazi-dominated Europe would be more than a fearsome military
and industrial threat. It would be a civilizational threat.
Now we face another such threat in insurgent Islam.
Part I
'An Islamist threat like the Nazis'
Part II
Needed: Old war spirit in a new war
• Copyright (c) 2005 by
Tony Blankley. Published in the Washington Times by arrangement with Regnery Publishing Inc.