"Winning!" I immediately replied. "Winning what?" he asked. "Money? Well, that doesn't happen all the time. Socializing with people? Some are bums you wouldn't be seen with. Killing time? Now that would be a true waste..."
I walked away with a headache and a grumpy feeling that I had learned something if I could just understand it.
Years later I understood that to win something we must know what it is we want to win, be it money, entertainment or a war.
The war I refer to is the War On Terror. Some have called it WWIV. Some have called it a cultural war... But few have defined what it is we want to win.
If you want to define winning peace, well peace is an absence of war. All we have to do is give up and we will have "won." So don't we need a better definition of what we want from the billions spent and thousands dead?? And if we achieve peace in which our culture and laws are changed to accommodate a religion and culture that we do not agree with, is that a "win?" Haven't we actually lost?
These thoughts came to me after I had read this piece in the WSJ, "Homeland Security Newspeak."
In "1984," George Orwell famously created Newspeak, "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." How things haven't changed. The Homeland Security memo begins by declaring that "Words matter," whereupon it proceeds to suggest that some words matter so much it's best not to use them at all. Instead, the memo proposes a "strategic terminology" to dictate the utterances of public officials regarding the so-called Global Struggle.
In the new dispensation, much of which has reportedly been adopted by the State Department, using the word Islamic is out because it potentially "[concedes] the terrorists' claims that they are legitimate adherents of Islam." Use of the word jihad is said to "glamorize terrorism." Islamist – a neutral and broadly accepted term for those who espouse Islam as a political system – is frowned upon because "the general public . . . may not appreciate the academic distinction between Islamism and Islam." Using the word Salafism, the religious variant of Islam espoused by al Qaeda, may have the unfortunate effect of demonizing those Salafists who aren't violent. The term moderate Muslims may include those who aren't religiously observant, and thus offend those Muslims who are. "Mainstream Muslim" is supposedly better.
All of that is past the nonsense line, but consider this. The people they are using to decide the content are various Muslim "leaders."
The inanity here is so mind-boggling that it seems almost deliberate, and causes one to wonder just which "American Muslim leaders" the U.S. government is consulting. Last October, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was a guest of honor at a Ramadan event at which, according to one participant, he was publicly thanked by the president of the Islamic Society of North America for "keeping the doors open so we can advise you on how to engage the Muslim world."
For the record, the ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the case of the Holy Land Foundation, a U.S.-based charity alleged to have had ties with Hamas. Imagine if the Kennedy administration had consulted with the Workers World Party on strategies to contain the Soviet Union, and you get a sense of what Homeland Security is doing today.
So what are fighting for if we are not to change the opposition? If it is to have Islamic schools paid for with tax payer dollars, why treble the cost by opposing al-Qaida? If it is to not disapprove "honor killings," why even claim that we are a secular society?
An ironic saying that I heard for years was, "America has never lost a war or won a peace."
It looks like we are on track to set a new record.
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