It is sometimes said that bad ideas never die, but just return zombie-like in different forms. This is true, except that occasionally they return in the same form. On the front page of the March 1 Washington Post we see illustrated a current case in point.

In Greg Jaffe’s “three little words” piece a White House argument is put on display. The three little words are “radical Islamic terrorism.” On one side of the argument is Sebastian Gorka, a holdover from the brief but not brief enough Flynn regime at the National Security Council. On the other is Flynn’s successor, General H.R. McMaster. Gorka likes the three little words, and McMaster does not. Jaffe describes the no-longer-private disagreement by noting that, in the President’s Monday evening address to a joint session of Congress, he “slow[ed] his cadence to enunciate the words. The president was still speaking when Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to the president, added an exclamation point to his remarks. ‘RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM!’ Any questions?’ he tweeted.” Jaffe continues:

It is by no means clear how this argument will be resolved. Michael Flynn is gone, but his influence may not be, since for many months before he left he was busy filling Donald Trump’s mainly vacant head with bunk about this and related matters.

That said, the basic description of the argument Jaffe offers us does not differ appreciably from a similar debate that took place in the Bush Administration in the weeks just after 911, or from a more succinct re-run of that debate in the early weeks of the Obama Administration back in 2009. In order to understand the third coming of this disagreement, it is useful to review briefly its first and second dispensations.

But be warned: It’s useful but it’s not necessarily any fun. That’s because it follows that if bad ideas never die, then the refutation of bad ideas must not fade away either. The task ahead reminds me a little of what writing from within government is often about: the tedious pounding out of the same messages over and over and over again.¹ I can only hope the tedium does not inflict itself on you, dear reader.

Speaking of fading away, it is easy for memory to do that going on sixteen years since September 11, 2001. Not long after that infamous, surreally horrible day, President Bush used the word “crusade” in discussing what America needed to do to fight and win a “war on terror.” To this day I remain convinced that the President, despite his sojourns at both Yale and Harvard, was at the time unaware of the etymology of the word. He soon was made aware, grasped what he had done, and never erred in that fashion again.

He did soon err in a different way, however, by referring to Islam as “a religion of peace,” thus illustrating James Thurber’s observation that one might as well fall flat on one’s face as lean over too far backward. This “religion of peace” remark was more than just a locution born of banal ecumenism, although Bush was guilty later on of that, too—once uttering in a major speech the phrase “house of Abraham,” which had to have been some White House speechwriter’s idea of how to conjure a Middle Eastern kumbaya moment. No long-lived capacious religious tradition has been exclusively a “religion of peace” in its real historical experience, just as, as far as I know, no long-lived capacious religious tradition has been a “religion of war.” These kinds of labels, pointed in whatever direction, are unhelpful, to put it mildly, not to speak of near to meaningless.

Ah, but back to the case at hand. The Bush Administration, in its private counsels, decided to avoid Gorkesque language like “RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM!” for first one and then a second reason. The immediate reason was to head off any possibility that the White House might be seen as complicit in vigilante revenge attacks on Muslim citizens of the United States. What later became known as Islamophobia was the issue—specifically, minimizing it to the extent possible because within the larger scope of the diplomatic strategy then just taking shape, it would have been completely counterproductive. It would have ratified the addled conspiracy-mongering of al-Qaeda about the West being at war against Islam as such.

But fears of Islamophobia-in-action proved much exaggerated (at least until November 8 past, perhaps). So a second, related concern came to the fore—namely that the governmental elites of all of the Muslim-majority state partners of the United States pleaded with the Administration not to use broad-brush kinds of language about Islam. Their argument was simple and direct for the most part, and sincere, too, since the scourge of Islamist extremism threatened them more than it did us.

To simplify just a little, the argument went like this: “You, a nation defined as ‘Christian’ by Muslims in the Middle East, have no standing to tell Muslims what Islam is or isn’t, and any effort to try to do that directly, from the mouth of the President especially, will be seen as intolerable condescension. Moreover, while in your language you have developed a standard way to distinguish between Islamic and Islamist—the former being a normal adjectival form of the noun Islam, and the latter being a specific designation for politicized radical Islam—no such distinction (yet) clearly exists in street Arabic, so your distinctions will not translate well over here. The result will be to muddy and debase our arguments that al-Qaeda’s creed lies outside the tent of an acceptable definition of Islam. If we say it, people may listen; if you say it, you’ll make our job a thousand times harder. And worse, you might well compromise our ability to act as a useful partner because of the gratuitous pressure your words will bring upon us.”

This argument did not bowl over everyone in the Bush Administration, but it persuaded the people who mattered most. After all, the President himself had done a John Foster Dulles soon after 9/11—“you’re either with us or against us,” remember?—and he certainly expected Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the UAE, Kuwait, and, more complicatedly, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to declare that they were “with” us. So why make it harder for them?

As for Act II, more or less the same thing happened, but since the debate had been rehearsed before, the Obama Administration fairly quickly came to the same conclusion. My guess is that a spate of forthcoming memoirs, taken together, will provide more details here—but they won’t change the basic description of what happened.

Now, none of this means that George W. Bush et al. or Barack Obama et al. did not understand who the enemy actually was. Of course they did, and from time to time when not before a podium they said so to associates and the occasional journalist. So the partisan anti-Obama depiction of that Administration being so addled by political correctness that they deluded themselves as to what was really happening is absurd. Gather enough self-styled conservatives in a room and before long this kind of nonsense will pour forth, and no one will dare mention that the rhetorical tactics of the Bush and Obama Administration were, for all practical purposes, identical. This had nothing to do with confusion about the enemy, and everything to do with what made prudent sense to say publicly. But it is a rare Obama-hater who appears capable of this distinction.

Even more bizarre, I have even heard such people claim that if only we had called the enemy by its proper name from the start, we “would not be in the situation we are in now.” (Of course, that begs the question of what this “situation” actually is, and almost without exception this way of thinking exaggerates the dangers of salafi-jihadi Islamism—more on that below.) But when challenged to show the logic of that statement—how exactly could a different rhetorical choice have made a major positive difference on the ground?—such folks either clam up fast or mumble some pseudo-ideological jibberish about a so-called “war of ideas.”²

Far be it from me to downplay the power of symbolic language in politics and diplomacy, but there’s just no route that can get us logically from uttering out loud and in public “radical Islamic terrorism” to the current state of affairs. There is only the judgment of Bush and Obama Administration principals that having done so would only have made things worse. Both claims are counterfactuals of the “road-not-taken” sort, so we’ll never know. But the route taken at least makes sense, as General McMaster affirms, while the route not taken but still advocated sounds more like some form of primitive incantational word magic.

Beneath this argument, as already suggested, is a deeper disagreement. Jaffe put it reasonably well, sort of, using Steve Bannon as a banner to represent the thinking common to him, the departed Michael Flynn, and the residual Sebastian Gorka:

McMaster, and just about everyone else who actually understands the issue, embeds his assessment of causes in a reasonably detailed knowledge of the region’s history and contemporary political sociology (although why Jaffe used the term “torture” to describe McMaster’s view, and whose torture he means, is unclear to me). In other words, he uses the same standard methods any serious person would use to try to understand any non-Western cultural zone.

Not so the “say-the-magic-words” crowd. They focus on just one factor: theology cum ideology, and theology in effect removed from any actual social context. They think the problem inheres in Islam itself, and that there is therefore no relevant difference between radical entrepreneurs like Osama bin Laden, Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (and, to some, the Supreme Leader in Iran, first Ruhollah Khomeini and then Ali Khamenei) on the one hand, and more-or-less typical traditional pious “supremacist” Muslims on the other. In this rendition, the enemy sums to tens or even hundreds of millions, and so qualifies as an adversary in a “civilizational” conflict that is fully existential in character. At its most extreme, this view actually takes seriously the possibility that radical Muslims without and within the United States can impose sharia law on the United States—a continent-sized nation of more than 325 million overwhelmingly non-Muslims.³

Is there any sense at all in this? Not much. It is true that Islam was born in battle and became institutionalized as an empire on the make, and that its scriptures are not pacifist in tone. It is also true that a kind of ultimate supremacism inheres in most forms of contemporary Islamic theology. But that’s about it. If there is any sensitivity here to the tides of historical change and social science they make their appearances in walk-on roles at best.

One sees immediately how history and context matter just by noting the fact that the Hebrew Bible is not a pacifist document either, and that more often than not in its history Christendom possessed armies, and used them. (So much for Stalin’s quip about the Pope’s absent legions.) More: The other two Abrahamic faiths are also supremacist in their own way. Observant Jews say three times each day, quoting Isaiah, “And it shall be that on that day Jehovah will be king over all the world, and on that day Jehovah will be one and His name one.” If that were not enough, they also say fairly regularly, “Let them praise the name of Jehovah, for His name alone will have been exalted.” As for Christians, most denominations—Catholic and Protestant alike—still insist that acknowledging Jesus as Christ is obligatory theology with universal relevance, such that a Second Coming implies that everyone left sentient as it happens will, one way or another, acknowledge that.

Now of course Jewish and Christian apologists will immediately claim that these eschatological themes are both ancient looking backward and distant looking forward, and that anyway the matter is in the hands of God, not men. They therefore imply no blood-on-the-saddle intolerance of other faiths, and that has become perfectly true for the most part.

But for most “supremacist” Muslims the same attitudes apply. The typical pious Muslim does believe that his faith is superior to all others, and that one day, by God’s will, everyone will be a Muslim. They believe it to the point that many goodhearted local folk, if they come to like you, can’t understand why you don’t want to become a Muslim. This kind of conversation is familiar to just about every non-Muslim Westerner who has spent some time in the region. But the conviction that tens or hundreds of millions of Muslims awake each morning thinking themselves warriors in a civilizational struggle to conquer the world is either a sign of full-frontal madness, or at the very least shows an encyclopedic ignorance of Middle Eastern realities.

If this is so, as H.R. McMaster appears to be insisting, then the problem is not existential, is not about tens or hundreds of millions of enemies, and it suggests that there indeed are cleavages—religious and otherwise—in the region that warrant understanding and utilizing in a sound and patient U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

In other words, the McMaster-Gorka tiff that Jaffe describes is not a difference of opinion. It is a difference of analysis with definite implications for policy and for policy outcomes. Anyone can have whatever crazy opinion they like; if you don’t believe me, just look at the troll crawl below just about any essay published online these days. But responsible government officials, whose judgments have life-and-death consequences for Americans and others, cannot have whatever analysis they like independent of professional competence and—dare I say it these days?—the facts.

At least that was true a few months ago. Now a person would have to think twice, or maybe three times, before asserting the fact—maybe any fact—with confidence. I mean, just look around, and I’m not even referring to the Tweeter-in-Chief.

We have an Attorney General who, in a strange unforced error, obviously lied under oath—and yet who remains Attorney General. Not just any cabinet official lied under oath: the Attorney General. That can’t happen, but it is happening.

Then we have the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes (R-Ca.), using the prospective conclusion of an investigation to negate the rationale for conducting an investigation. Now, that might be considered Orwellian in normal times, but Orwell could both speak and write beautifully. Nunes, on the other hand, in trying to bait-and-switch the subject by claiming that the leaks are more egregious than the behaviors the leaks reveal, managed to say this: “There’s been major crimes committed.” When the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee cannot even manage to express his own punch line in a grammatically correct English sentence, we really do have to pinch ourselves and ask if we’re still in Kansas.

Clearly, then, however much of a problem one thinks the President may be, he’s not the only problem. Of course it’s not as though the nation’s political class (not to speak of those of other countries) hasn’t gone a little whack-a-doo at times in the past. A list could get long in a hurry, from the Alien and Sedition Acts to the McCarthy hearings and beyond.

Still, one wonders if what is happening now is just another dip in the seemingly eternal sine wave of American rationality, or something else—something else perhaps accurately described (with profound apologies to Ortega y Gasset) as “the revolt of the asses.” In chapter 8 of this afore(mis)mentioned 1930 book, one finds this remark: “The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who did not care to give reasons or even to be right, but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: ‘the reason of unreason.’” Ring a bell, perhaps? (Caution: I am not talking about the rank-and-file Trumpenproletariat, but about the big bad ideas guys trying to instrumentalize them.)

If so, note that H.L. Mencken, exceedingly clever boor that he was, had commented a decade earlier (Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920), in a quip that has lately enjoyed wide recirculation, that, “As American democracy is perfected, the Office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.” Mencken was probably ruminating on the likelihood that giving women the right to vote for President would likely result, in its first spin around the block, in the victory of Warren G. Harding, a man for whom he had little respect. No matter; the point stands: no wide-open post-1972 primaries in the GOP, no POTUS Trump.

What can one say, then, to General McMaster (and General Mattis) as he jousts with those who cannot or do not care to give sound reasons for their views. Only this: “Steady on, sir.”