The clarion call is by now all too familiar: terrorism is not a monolith.  There are different groups with different motivations and reasons for existence.  America needs to discriminate.  And so on.  There has been no shortage of people trying to analyze things with a fine tooth comb: see for instance the excellent testimony by Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institution and also a Foreign Affairs article by two Nixon Center authors on the Muslim Brotherhood. 

And yet, we regularly hear legislators (not just President Bush) lump together nearly everyone: Muslim Brotherhood, HAMAS, Hizbollah, Al-Qaeda, and on and on. One senior Democratic staffer, serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee, earnestly said to me in spring 2006 that the various Agencies were seriously looking into the Hizbollah threat in Columbia (!) – that Columbia, as a criminal-failing state, gave ample room for this Lebanese-based group (or HAMAS) to expand anti-American activities to Latin America.   

More specifically, the line I hear ad nauseum from the White House and the Hill is ”rogue nations pursuing WMD who support terrorism,” implying that if a bad nation gets a nuke, rest assured, it will end up in NY – not by accident, it is implied, but by the rogue nation explicitly and purposefully and maliciously turning said nuke over to a transnational, global, radical terrorist group (never mind that Iran is Shia, and Al-Qaeda is a brand of Salafi Sunni Islam that views Shia as heretical). 

My question is fairly simple: how does one cut through this fog?  What gets in the way of accurate perception of a more nuanced and complex world?  I refuse to believe that most of our elected officials are just plain stupid. 

One almost gets the sense that there is a fear – never voiced explicitly – that a finer distinction will show that Israel’s fight is not exactly, line by line, our fight – that if we discriminate between a Shia political-miltiary-local group like Hizbollah and global Sunni nihilistic anti-globalization group like Al-Qaeda, that suddenly we won’t be supporting Israel anymore – which is nonsense.  Just because the people who set bombs off in Tel Aviv are not the same people (and same ideology) that sets off bombs in European or US cities, does not mean that – poof – all security support for Israel vanishes.  And yet, I almost get a sense that this is what is holding up an accurate, clear-eyed assessment by people on each side of the aisle. 

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