It's more than a narrative, it is about how the GOP misconstrued and mis-conceptualized the war. (On bad days, one might add deliberately misconstrued for partisan political purposes, since it is plain at points that Rumsfeld was crystal clear about the outcome of the effort as linked to the struggle within Islam.)
A conceptualization of the "war on terror" will not be advantaged by trying to cast 'terrorism' as an offshoot of different sects within Islam, I don't think. If anything, this will prolong it, as those differences are ultimately irreconcilable, IMO.
What can be done, however, is to take full advantage of stories like the one in the Guardian to discredit the Jihadis, if not the Jihad. Soldiers of fortune, taking money for killing and killing Muslims at random, are inimical to the central message of Jihad. These stories are a counter-terror propaganda treasure trove. Fanaticism is a strength of the Jihadi groups - this is what others admire in them. It is the rest of their story that can cause a widespread recoiling from them.
If sectarian violence induced by terrorist tactics (not terrorist ideology, really) and carried forward by mis-guided jihadi-wannabes has any beneficial short-term affect it will be to consolidate the notion that terrorism is the greater evil by far, for everyone, rather than afford the West an "out" from their GOP militarist conception-to-date. For the West, the only "benefit" will be that the casualties during this collective learning period, if one is needed, may not be mainly or mostly American.
While it is a consensus reconceptualization that needs to occur on the Right, mostly, what may be needed is a compelling narrative to confront radical Islam. Clearly, the American "armies of Freedom" on the march isn't doing the trick altogether, although it may be having more beneficial affects than some realize. Calling people killers is not going to to it either.
It may be diffcult to build up such a narrative. For one thing, it takes a while to get to know the jihadi message, to understand how it links into their bizarro interpretation of the world and of the Hadith, to see how they play on the ignorance of the "Arab Street", and so forth. But, it is possible to develop a counternarrative, to build counter-factuals, and to center a policy around that approach. This has to be done in a disciplined way, to put money where one's mouth is, to build a relatively consistent narrative and avoid actions that yeild propaganda points to the competiting narrative. (For those on the hard-right, the Conservative situational ethics crowd, who probably just cannot understand much what I just wrote there at all, here is another way to put it: let psy-ops lead the operations, not follow them).
That is the kind of far-reaching, long-range planning that the International Liberalists should be setting themselves about. The Conservatives simply aren't up to that task, obviously.
sullylink
