More (dubious) praise for the 9/11 Commission's "new strategy"

Earlier I wondered why conservative war fan David Brooks was so receptive to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that seemed on the face of it to be a departure from the Bush administration's War on Terrorism line.  I suggested that Brooks' perspective might not be reflective of a more pacific turn in his thinking.

Now I see that Daniel Pipes is also enthusiastic about the Commission's suggested war of ideology.  Daniel Pipes is one of the most outspoken advocates of an aggressive, warlike policy in the Middle East.  The fact that he finds so much to praise in the Commission's ideas on the ideological struggle - or at least finds the language so easy to adapt to his purposes - suggests again that the report deserves to be treated with caution and skepticism:  The 9/11 Commission Findings: An accurate definition of the enemy by Daniel Pipes San Francisco Chronicle 07/27/04. 

Pipes is no Rush Limbaugh type.  So he knows to talk about "Islamism" instead of Islam:

As Thomas Donnelly points out in the New York Sun, the commission has called the enemy "by its true name, something that politically correct Americans have trouble facing."

Why does it matter that the Islamist dimension of terrorism must be specified? Simple. Just as a physician must identify a disease to treat it, so a strategist must name an enemy to defeat it. The great failing in the U.S. war effort since late 2001 has been the reluctance to name the enemy. So long as the anodyne, euphemistic and inaccurate term "war on terror" remains the official nomenclature, that war will not be won.

Since virtually everyone in the US identifies Islamist extremism as a problem, the sarcastic sneer about "politically correct Americans" is a reason to read closely.  Although worded carefully, Pipes encourages his readers to see Islam itself, at least "real existing" Islam (to borrow a term from the old East German regime's self-description) as the real problem:

The Islamist outlook represents not a hijacking of Islam, as is often but wrongly claimed; rather it emerges from a "long tradition of extreme intolerance" within Islam, one going back centuries and in recent times associated with Wahhabism, the Muslim Brethren and the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. (my emphasis)

Not a hijacking of Islam, but effectively the religion of Islam itself.  And this requires the United States to adopt a strategy of revolutionizing the Islamic world, or at least the Arab part of it.

Although in this essay, he sticks to praising the Comission's language that the "cures" for the problems of Islamic societies - or of Islam itself - "must come from within Muslim societies themselves. The United States must support such developments."

But in the view of war-oriented anti-Islamic hardliners like Pipes, "supporting" such developments can very quickly become an idological gloss to support wars of "liberation" like the doomed one we're fighting in Iraq right now.