red, white, and blue wahabi

(Yours truly has a Saudi friend who would object strenuously to this characterization of Wahabism. The stereotype is important, however, if only because "aginners" become mirror images of what they are against.)

RED WHITE AND BLUE WAHABIS?

Would Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein ever give two hoots in hell what motivates Americans? Why, then, should we care any more about theirs?

At the September 2003 meeting of the Illinois Forum, a statewide conservative and libertarian group, John McNeal, a retired prosecutor, said all the fuss over the PATRIOT Act was over nothing, that the act was largely drug enforcement and anti-crime syndicate measures that had been around for two decades or so. Plus, some good old fashioned charity fraud investigaton, something he had done in the attorney general’s office. Picking up on the IRA, phony Muslim charities were making widows and orphans, not helping them. The Libertarians, he said, were on the wrong side of the issue and were spreading unjustified fears of the government.

At the end of the meeting a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Jerry Kohn, introduced himself. A former Republican who had voted for Bush but had since objected to his war and terrorism policies, he pointedly differed with NcNeal’s earlier remarks. As Kohn said the 9-11 hijackers had to be extremely angry to do such a thing, McNeal, two seats away at the table, stood up and said he was not going to tolerate such nonsense, that it was treasonous, and that the Wahabis were a militant sect that had been trying to take over the world since the early history of Islam. It went back and forth, Kohn being well outshouted by the vehement McNeal, citing WWII precedents for dealing with foreign saboteurs.

After the meeting Kohn’s supporters, by and large, had the better of the post-mortems. One McNeal supporter simply could not understand how anyone could legitimately object to U.S. foreign policies or to bloated military spending or to troops in over 100 countries. She said it was just my opinion and actually asked why I don’t leave, as if she owned the country.

I asked if she had ever read the Federalist Papers, especially Nos. 6 and 8, which every good conservative should know are the public case for ratifying the Constitution. She said she had, but, to me, not very believably.

Why, indeed, should any good American care what motivates terrorists or tyrants? For one simple reason, if nothing else, that we do not descend to their level or become mirror images of them. That is one reason why McNeal’s attitudes, written into law and policy, scare me a lot more than anything from overseas. How much further does such anti-terrorism, in this instance disrupting a perfectly orderly expression of opinion, have to go before it descends into home-grown Wahabism?

McNeal & Co. might recall the military proverb to judge an enemy not by his intentions, but by his capabilities. The capabilities of a home-grown red white and blue Wahabism, dogmatically oblivious to differing opinion or even to making enemies quite unnecessarily, there or here. "Projecting American power anywhere in the world," as the Navy video at the Museum of Science and Industry puts it, at least that sort, are incomparably more frightening to me than anything that Saddam or Osama might ever pull off, even a suitcase nuclear explosion.

Not that an enemy’s intentions or motivations are irrelevant at all, however "treasonous" to consider. At the risk of undemonizing the enemy, there might be a way to defuse his all too human will to fight, but not, however, a demon’s.

And let’s be careful not to demonize McNeal & Co. the way they demonize others. When will they realize that they do not ease mistrust with any such contempt of others’ opinions and most certainly not the divisiveness that undermines their war effort? By my Vietnam nostalgia, the anti-war movement was only inflamed, not cowed, by the pro-war side calling it Communists, cowards, traitors and such. Read very, very carefully, if you are patriotic enough, Federalist No. 6, about men, possessing the confidence of their countries, plunging them into ruinous wars for personal reasons, and No, 8, on people too cowed by frequent wars to resist military usurpations.

William F. Wendt, Jr.