Are we engaged in a war? If so, against whom? To Sen. Joe Biden, the answers are apparently “no” and “I don’t know.”
In this op-ed, Biden asserts that the regimes and movements sworn to the destruction of the West are merely “a small number of radical groups.” He adds that “to compare terrorism with an all-encompassing ideology like communism and fascism is evidence of profound confusion.”
Indeed, terrorism is a weapon so it makes no sense to compare it with an ideology. But Biden should by now have at least a passing acquaintance with the ideologies and movements utilizing the terrorist weapon to wage an asymmetrical global conflict. Those ideologies go by various names including militant Islamism, Jihadism, Islamo-Fascism, Khomeinism, Salafism and bin Ladenism. Has Biden not heard these terms? Or does he think he might offend some peaceful merchant in Casablanca were he to utter them?
Biden insists, too, that “Sunnis and Shiites, Persians and Arabs, Iraq and Iran, al Qaeda and Shiite militias” are “more at odds with each other than with us.” That the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is not familiar with the abundant evidence to the contrary is frightening.