Commies and Islamofascists - in 3 parts (Part 1)

I grew up in the era of of the communist menace. Obviously, as much as I would like to reject that as an influence in my life - it has affected the way I look at the world. It seems to me that there are a number of parallels between the quest to wipe out the Commies and the Islamofascists.

Here are some parallels that I see.

#1 - Both the left and the right misjudge the threats of our enemies. During the period when Communism was the enemy, the left consistently underestimated the threat of communist plots. There really were people who wanted to subvert our governmental system. Despite all of the romanticism of the left, the Rosenbergs were guilty. There is pretty good evidence that some of all of the Hollywood Ten were actively engaged in trying to subvert the American political system. No doubt about it. But if the left under-estimated the threat, the right often over estimated it. J. Edgar Hoover's worry that everyone who did not agree with his odd and curious view of the world was a commie was silly. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright's excellent book on Al Quaida said that Hoover thought the ratio of Commies to normal citizens was something like 1:1800. Silly. Martin Luther King was not a subversive. One of my most distinct memories in my work in the House of Representatives was two representatives James B. Utt (I always wanted to eliminate the period in his name) and H.R. Gross - for both of these members, there was a commie under every bed. By the time I began to work in Congress, in 1970, those guys were characatures of real issues.

In today's conflict the right assumes too much about the inter-workings of the Islamofascists and thus potentially ignore the potential for splitting a series of movements where there may be nuanced differences that could be exploited. The left on the other hand dismisses the possibility that there are evil people in the world who may want to work together. There is plenty of evidence that Saadam and Syria and Iran have at times worked together - the notion of the Axis of Evil is not silly. But over commitment in one region by this administration may preclude options we need to consider.

#2 - The Europeans for some good and bad reasons underestimated the threat of communism. In part, because many of the postwar regimes were variants of socialism they thought that socialism and communism were related. Indeed, the common cold and cancer are both diseases - but the naive notion that they were the same is nonsense. In this era the Europeans have striven toward political correctness and thus again have underestimated the perniciousness of the threat. Nuance is helpful but when driven to extremes is nonsense.

#3 - The long term interests of the US needed to include some recognition of the potential monolithic nature of the "communist menace" at the same time, intelligent foreign policy would look at inherent differences. I studied International Relations as an undergraduate. But the left consistently did lousy intelligence on the capabilities of the Communist block. Until right before the eastern block broke up, many on the left argued that a) the soviet block an economic and social powerhouse (witness the still odd responses we hear about Cuba being an island paradise) and b) that the block was not a block. In this era there was a lot of yammering about the capabilities of the groups which are not a single group but which often work in concert.