I just read Josh Marshall's response to Peter Beinhart's controversial piece here:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/004186.php
He agreed with some of Beinhart's points but disagreed over the nature of the terrorist threat:
But unlike communism in 1947, militant Islam simply does not pose an existential threat to our civilization. It just doesn't.
Normally, Josh Marshall is pretty clear-headed, but I don't know where he came up with that. Of course militant Islam poses an existential threat to us. Just because it doesn't control any large countries outside of the Middle East, as Marshall goes on to argue, doesn't mean it does not have the potential capacity to ruin our way of life.
I was discussing the post by email with
markusd, who summed up the flaws in Marshall's reasoning well:
Of course terrorism poses an existential threat to us.
They could conceivably buy nukes off the black market and detonate them in
several of our major cities one fine morning - that would kill hundreds of
thousands, maybe millions, and destroy our economy. Those who survive would
live in an American that has an economy worse than that experienced during
the Great Depression, and there would likely be no freedom or civil rights
left to speak of either - would there really be any political support for
any limitations on the power of the state at all after such an attack? Or
they could get their hands on smallpox or another biological weapon and
cause as much damage as the above scenario via that route as well.
Marshall's distinction between "existential" and "physical" harm is meaningless. Whether he wants to admit it or not, the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists do have the potential to destroy our way of life as we know it, and if that's not existential, I don't know what is. Not to mention that their stated goal is to destroy our way of life--not to change our policies, as so many people claim. Fundamentalists of any stripe, as we've unfortunately seen too often here in America, aren't satisfied with being intolerant themselves. They feel the need to impose their intolerant, illiberal beliefs on everyone else.
Although he claims to be relatively hawkish, Marshall is displaying the very problem Beinhart was talking about--the failure of Democrats to truly understand the threat of Islamic terror and make defeating it a priority. Although I know it's not popular around here, I agree with Beinhart's analysis. People like Josh Marshall--who is a pretty thoughtful, intelligent guy--are certainly not the biggest thing we have to worry about, but it's unfortunate to see him falling for exactly the mindset Beinhart was so right in pointing out.
We Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever need to recognize that Islamic fundamentalism is both a threat to liberal values everywhere and a threat to our very way of life. And although purging people from the party, as Beinhart suggests, may sound extreme, it may be necessary if they keep failing to recognize the threat militant Islam poses and make combating it a priority.
Doing so is not synonymous with being Republican-lite. We don't need to agree with Bush's tactics to realize that the enemy he's fighting is real. In fact, we need to make it a priority to protect America in the very ways Bush has failed--to secure the loose nukes in the former Soviet Union, to provide adequate funding for firefighters and police, to work toward checking the tons of cargo that enter America by boat every day, and so on and so forth. And we need to make it clear to the American people that Bush's follies have been a distraction, not a part of, the war on terror, and that we will do better, because all of our lives depend on it.