Rich: Is it really the case that the Cold War has been the Bush administration’s model for the WoT? It doesn’t look much like that.

A few inconsequential “rollback” exercises aside (Grenada, El Salvador), the Cold War was a war of containment. The object was to prevent the advance of totalitarian communism, most especially its futher advance into Europe, then seen as the heartland of Western Civ. The bet we placed was that communism was such a lousy way of organizing a society that it would eventually turn into something else, something less threatening. The bet worked with Russia. With China the issue is undecided, though I think we can claim a sort of victory: present-day China is more powerful & assertive than in Mao’s day, but also more rational.

There was, though, no effort to transform those societies. We ringed them with armor, and waited for them to change. True, our passivity was based on fear of a major nuclear exchange, a fear that does not apply to the MME (Muslim Middle East). It remains the case that we are trying to do something we never tried to do before, certainly not in the Cold War — actively to transform the politics of another civilization.

Islamofascism is much less of a threat — economically, militarily, and culturally — than communism. Why would containment not work just as well, with the expectation that these societies would crumble and change even faster than the communists did? We’d need to be vigilant against fanatical terrorists of the 9/11 type, and against moves in the MME to develop nuclear weapons. The second of those must surely be easy, though — just a matter of decent intelligence and an occasional Osirak-type military action. For the first, we need to keep out foreign Islamofascists the way we used to keep out foreign communists, and to keep a close watch on any home-grown ones we might produce, and to publicly demonize Islamofascism — teaching our kids that it’s evil, turning out movies and TV dramas that show it as an enemy, and so on. (Where is our Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. for this “new Cold War”?) Now THAT would be using the Cold War as a model! Unfortunately, it would fly in the face of all the dogmas of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism that our society nowadays holds to be precious and inviolable.

The Cold War analogy breaks down in other ways too. Islamofascism has no appeal to our intelligentsia, as communism had. Its principal appeal is to jail inmates–the bottom, not the top, of our culture. And the Cold War was, at its core, a war within Western Civ — really, a war between two white European nations both nurtured on Christianity. The present conflict is civilizational — some people might even say racial — in a way the Cold War wasn’t.