More Like Nazis than Commies

...And in so doing, everything should be placed on the table, from religion's role in this war, to the influence of fascist and nihilistic modes of thought, to the fifth-column question, to the Iraqi menace...

...It's one thing to be called "bourgeois," quite another to be called an "infidel...

...There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east...

...Or he may have meant nothing more concrete by the comparison than did the first President Bush in his fight against Saddam Hussein...

...Kennan contrasted the leaders of the Soviet Union with Napoleon and Hitler, who were deaf to anything but their own megaloma-niacal dreams of world conquest...

...FDR never spoke of "moderate Nazis...

...The response of the United States to each threat was also quite different...

...Nazism and communism were dissimilar regimes, of different historical and philosophic lineages, and exhibiting distinct political profiles and contrasting international conduct...

...Nonetheless, as a political phenomenon, the terrorists do have more in common with fascism than with communism...

...This is more Adam Wolfson is executive editor of the Public Interest...

...We "look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living," said one al Qaeda leader...

...Some, like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, think that the appropriate comparison is to the Cold War...

...Certainly, the president's analogy to Nazism is imperfect—most obviously, Nazism had no roots in religion, whereas the terrorists consider themselves to be acting in the name of one of the world's great monotheistic religions...

...And when it ended, it ended not with a bang, but through internal collapse...

...The decision to attack Afghanistan rather than Iraq is representative of Cold War thinking: Concentrate on the periphery, not the source...

...In all likelihood the analogy to either Nazism or Soviet communism will prove inaccurate, and thus neither a policy of unconditional surrender nor one of containment will alone be adequate...

...In contrast, Rumsfeld's commander in chief seems to have uppermost in his mind the struggle against Nazism...

...The terrorists instead take a nihilistic delight in blood and destruction...

...And indeed, our foreign policy during World War II was very different from what it was during the Cold War...

...It was a war fought not over decades and by proxy, but swiftly and furiously, by our own arms and men, and ultimately with atomic bombs...

...On October 4, in Cairo, he declared: For it undoubtedly will prove to be a lot more like a cold war than a hot war...

...The carnage of September 11 was the work not of an Iraqi missile but of 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, and it was masterminded by the Saudi bin Laden and the Egyptian Mohamed Atta...

...In contrast, anti-American sentiment is rife, and while mass murderers like bin Laden and Atta remain a minority, they are cheered by the thousands in the street, lauded by the government press, incited by imams, and winked at (when not openly encouraged) by their rulers...

...It was a brilliant piece of political and psychological analysis, which accurately forecast nearly the entire future course of the Cold War...

...The problem is that such a containment-oriented policy does not match the Nazi-like threat that the president has repeatedly warned the American people they now face...

...in the Nazi case, we sought the total destruction of fascism as a political entity and ideology...

...As the first war of the new century begins, America's leaders have been reaching back to the two great struggles of the 20th century, against communism and fascism, to understand this one...

...Liberal Democrats (and some Republicans as well) would have argued that the terrorists only meant to send a message about our Middle East policy and that we can reason with them, perhaps appease them with a more "neutral" policy...

...Which should be our guide (if either)—the fight against communism or against fascism...

...Had they flown planes only into the Pentagon and other military targets, a peace party probably would have emerged in the United States...

...If we are to respond effectively to September 11, it will be necessary to investigate, as Kennan once did, the "political personality" of our foes...

...Thus whether our reference point is to Nazism or communism will have enormous policy implications...

...foreign policy will have to confront both sorts of regime—those that are openly at war with us, and those that claim to be our allies but export suicide bombers to our shores...

...Perhaps President Bush had none of this in mind when he likened the terrorists to Nazis...

...Nazism was irrationalist and anti-Enlightenment to its core, while, as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment—an extreme outgrowth, to be sure—Soviet communism was amenable to the persuasion of the carrot and the stick...

...X's) famous article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published in Foreign Affairs in 1947...

...Thank God for that," said bin Laden after the assault...

...The failure of the Cold War analogy to capture today's threat can be grasped most simply from how our enemies characterize us...

...BY ADAM WOLFSON IT IS SAID THAT GENERALS are always fighting the last war, and this is no less true of politicians and policymakers...

...But such a policy, as Kennan implied in his article, would never have succeeded against a power like Nazi Germany...

...foreign policy towards communism was mapped out in George F. Kennan's (or Mr...

...We must also reconsider whether so-called moderate states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are any less inimical to our national security than rogue states such as Iraq...

...The interplay of these two factors, in his view, caused the Soviet Union to be highly flexible and responsive to outside pressures in pursuit of its goals...

...Not our policies but our very existence enrages the terrorists...

...In the cold war it took 50 years, plus or minus...

...The political character of the terrorists is also revealed in their September 11 assault on the United States...

...Some pundits have suggested that he compared them to fascists rather than to Communists only to avoid alienating China...

...It strikes me that might be a more appropriate way to think about what we are up against here, than would be any [other] major conflict...

...But the terrorists' savage attack on civilians in the liberal state of New York, wantonly killing people as they sat at their desks in the World Trade Center, made any such argument absurd on its face and turned even Senator Hillary Clinton into a war hawk...

...They are at war with the Enlightenment and modernity...

...Only then will we regain our peace and security...

...than an academic question...

...It did not involve major battles...

...In the Islamic world, where liberal democracies are scarce, so too are liberal democrats...

...Never did we directly engage them on their own soil, nor they on ours...

...Similarly, George W. Bush has invoked a fascist-like threat to national security, and yet his policies, like those of his father, seem closer to how the United States fought the Cold War than World War II...

...It involved cooperation by a host of nations...

...If the terrorists are to be defeated in their war against the United States, the regimes that nurture them will have to be held strictly accountable, not merely "contained...

...The Soviet Union was, in a sense, a rational actor, which, in Kennan's memorable words, "can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy...

...And several years later, in a speech before Congress, FDR declared our war aims to be "unconditional surrender," meaning "the end of Nazism and the Nazi party— and all of its barbaric laws and institutions...

...In particular, they reject the liberal principles of separation of church and state, toleration, and the rights of the individual...

...This containment strategy fit the Soviet Union's political personality—malevolent but rational, ill-intentioned but cautious—like a glove...

...In his war address of December 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt flatly declared, "We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again...

...In his address to the joint session of Congress on September 20, President Bush declared: "By abandoning every value except the will to power, [the terrorists] follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism...

...For almost 50 years, we fought a series of wars along the periphery to check Soviet expansion, aided and funded anti-Soviet proxies, and engaged the Soviets in intricate arms-control negotiations and propaganda one-upmanship...

...They view the United States and other liberal democracies as weak and corrupt, and have nothing but contempt for a way of life dedicated to commerce and the pursuit of happiness...

...The souls of men, Plato taught, are reflections of the regimes that raise them...

...In some instances, the only solution will be ending, as FDR did, "barbaric laws and institutions...

...Rumsfeld has said that today's war will be waged more as we fought the Communists than the Axis...

...Kennan argued that to counter Soviet conduct, one must first come to grips with "the political personality" of Soviet power, which he diagnosed as a product of Communist ideology and historical circumstance...

...U.S...

...And finally, the terrorists harbor an insane, all-encompassing hatred of Jews (indeed, much of their anti-Jewish propaganda is borrowed directly from the Nazis...

...In the Soviet case, we applied a policy of calibrated counter-force...

...George W. Bush's carefully calibrated use of force in Afghanistan, his emphasis on coalitions, and his proposal to create a "moderate" Taliban regime, all suggest a policy of containment, not unconditional surrender...

...Rather, we will need to think broadly and deeply about the political personality of this new enemy...

...That President Bush boldly declared that the war against Iraq was akin to the war against Nazism, and then, after a brief military campaign, implemented a policy of containment instead...

...It involved continuous pressure...