To people who know anything about me, it will come as no surprise that I respect and admire Sen. Rick Santorum. I support him in his bid for re-election, and I hope voters in Pennsylvania will do the same. I especially value his leadership on the many issues, such as abortion, that affect our moral vision, our moral strength as a nation.
In the past few days, several people have e-mailed me the transcript of Sen. Santorum's speech at the National Press Club on July 20. The senders shared it with me because they felt enthusiastic about the speech, including one who reported that "a professor of a major university said to a friend of mine who attended the speech, 'Do people realize that [Santorum] is quantum leaps ahead of other politicians on the Hill with his intelligence and strength?'"
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The main point of Sen. Santorum's speech is that President Bush was wrong to define the war in which we are presently engaged as a war against terrorism. "Some say we're fighting a war on terror," he observes. "That's like saying World War II was a war on blitzkrieg. Terror, like blitzkrieg, is a tactic of war used by our enemy; it is not the enemy. … In World War II, we fought Nazism and Japanese imperialism. Today we are fighting against Islamic fascism."
It is of course true that we live in an era so estranged from common sense that the willingness to state the obvious may require both courage and intelligence. Islamic fanatics carried out the attacks against us on Sept. 11, 2001. In Afghanistan, Iraq and indeed throughout the Middle East and the world, Islamic fanatics have been responsible for serial assaults against innocent, unarmed people. A label like "Islamic fascists" may be useful shorthand for these people and their ilk. But there is a serious difference between identifying the enemy and knowing what makes them our enemy. In his effort to redefine the war, Sen. Santorum does the first at the expense of the second. Terror isn't just a tactic Islamic fascists use. It is essential to what they are. Neglecting this fact is not only a semantic error. It is a strategic blunder.
Morale has always played a critical role in the outcome of war, but never more so than in the current conflict. A properly articulated understanding of the reason we must fight may be the key to maintaining our morale, i.e., our moral purpose and cohesion.
Sen. Santorum, himself, illustrates this at other points in his speech. Throughout the speech, he characterizes the Islamic fascists as brutal, wicked and evil.
"This war is not between two morally equivalent sides. It is a war between brutal, totalitarian fascism and freedom – our freedom, not just freedom for Iraqis and Afghans and people in the Middle East. … The terrorists know that they cannot win on the battlefield against our armed men and women, so their strategy is aimed at you. … They seek to break our will to fight, to get us to hang our heads and simply say, 'Enough.' … If we don't recognize that it is right and proper for us to defend our freedom against Islamic fascism, we may well lose this war."
It turns out that the key to victory or defeat is moral understanding. The Islamic fascists are evil, and it is right to defend ourselves against them. To illustrate their wickedness Sen. Santorum recounts the numerous terror plots and attacks that they have conceived and acted upon. So though terror is a tactic, their willingness to make use of it establishes the moral difference between them and the people they attack. Our sense of that moral difference is indispensable to maintaining the clear conviction that our fight against them is right and proper. In the moral sense, then, we do not fight them because they are Islamic, or even because they are fascists. (We never went to war with Francisco Franco, though he ruled Spain as a fascist dictator for many years after we exerted all our force to drive similar rulers from power in Italy, Germany and Japan.) We fight them because by their practice of terror they prove themselves to be people who have no regard for the fundamental tenets of decent conscience that we believe must be respected when human beings deal with one another, even in war.
Each time we speak of the war on terror, therefore, we evoke the moral cause of the war in which we are engaged. We rightly remind ourselves that our fight is not just against people who have attacked us, but against the evil that they embrace and embody in their heinous crimes against human conscience. We also remind the world at large that the fight is not for us alone, but for people everywhere who believe that there are moral rules that should not be transgressed, even in war. If it was a mistake to call it a war on terror, then President Bush was mistaken when he appealed to human conscience in the wake of September 11. If so, he was mistaken to declare that those in any region who align themselves with terror are our enemies and the enemies of civilization. If so, he was also mistaken when he made clear that there could be no neutrality; that there would be no escape; that there would be no flagging of our spirit and our will short of the victory that alone preserves the hope of decent humanity. But we all know that he was not mistaken. His finest moment was in that clarion call.
In his speech, Sen. Santorum mentions the alignment of regimes in North Korea and Venezuela with the Islamic fascists. Neither of these states is Islamic. North Korea still vaunts its communism, and Chavez of Venezuela worships at the shrine of Fidel Castro. Their hatred of the United States unites them with the Islamic fascists, providing the common ground of their otherwise incongruous connection. Though we don't like to think on it, envy and hatred of our country simmers, not always beneath the surface, in countries around the world, including those formally allied with us in NATO. In a battle where the enemy is us, political reality in many countries and regions saps the political will of governments, pushing them at the very least toward obfuscation and neutrality. Does Sen. Santorum really believe that the specter of Islamic fascism offers a sufficient basis for rallying the forces needed to offset this reality in every region of the world?
In a way, Santorum falls prey to this reality in his speech. He refers to the fact that fear of being branded anti-Muslim bigots makes some people hesitant to identify Islamic fascists as the enemy. Then he says: "Therefore, we can't say or do anything that might offend Muslims. That's backwards. The real offense to Muslims is to remain silent about an ideology that produces the systemic [sic] murder of innocents – mostly Muslim innocents." In a speech devoted to the idea that focusing on terror is a mistake, Sen. Santorum relies upon revulsion against the murder of innocents (i.e., the essential constituent of evil in terrorism,) to refute the hesitation that arises from our aversion to religious bigotry. He relies upon the moral opprobrium attached to terrorism.
This demonstrates the danger of the approach Sen. Santorum is suggesting. If we turn our focus from terrorism, we give up the moral high ground on which we must rally our forces in this war. Instead of a clear, bright line of moral distinction between friend and foe, we end up with a vaguely academic sounding label, one element of which (Islamic) rouses suspicion in regions where Islam predominates, and the other of which invites learned disputation about whether different ideas about government systems justify the tragic realities of war. In a world where the grim images of the dead – combatants, civilians, children – flow daily through our TV screens into our hearts and minds, academic distinctions are unlikely to sustain our morale for very long.
As the word itself suggests, what can and will sustain morale is a firm grasp of the moral basis of our war effort. Given his long record of commitment to the moral principles that define our national identity, Sen. Santorum is one of the politicians best positioned to articulate our moral cause. Though many people fail to speak of it, there is a deep connection between the concern for moral principle that motivates opposition to abortion, euthanasia and other violations of respect for innocent life, and the moral principle at stake in the war against terror. We must fight the practice of terror, whatever the ideological excuse for it, because human ideology is not higher than the authority that has established, and commands respect for, the rights of innocent life. For the same reason, and on the same grounds, we must oppose the intentional destruction of innocent life when promoted by arguments of convenience, scientific progress or heedlessly selfish individual freedom.
In fact, our susceptibility to these arguments may be our greatest, most secret vulnerability in our struggle against the practitioners of terror. They direct their violence against innocent civilians to achieve their political aims. Some of us justify violence against innocent life to achieve our personal, scientific or social aims. How long will America's conscience hold out against the secret suspicion that the evil we fight is but the lengthy shadow of the evil we are willing to allow?
As a nation, we cannot escape this challenge by obscuring the moral clarity that defines and justifies the difficult war in which we are engaged. We should not seek to do so. Instead, our leaders should call on us to face and overcome the secret ally of terror lying in ambush in the thickets of our domestic moral controversy. Through such leadership, we may assure the moral strength and courage that come from a determination to defend the claims of innocent life against intentional destroyers at home and around the world. Through such leadership we may hope one day to clasp in one embrace justice, life and victory, not just for ourselves but for the conscience of all humanity.
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