Mitt Romney’s War: the total conflation of all Islamist movements. Not only is the Muslim Brotherhood not a jihadist organization, but its very lack of jihadiness is what spawned Ayman Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Suffice it to say that there is no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which goes a long way toward explaining why there is no concerted “worldwide jihadist effort” by these groups to establish one. ~Spencer Ackerman
Via Drum

Ackerman is right that Romney’s remarks in the debate make no sense, but they are worse than he thinks.  Not only is there “no caliphate on heaven or earth that will simultaneously satisfy Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Hizbullah presumably wouldn’t even want  a caliphate at all, since the last intertwining of Shi’ism and ideas of having a khalifat as such was in Fatimid Egypt more than a few years ago.  Plus, the Fatimids were Ismailis (though not, strictly speaking, Seveners), and Hizbullah today is from the Imamiyyah or Twelver Shi’ite branch, which makes the likelihood of this predominant strain in Iranian and Lebanese Shi’ism indulging dreams of a restored caliphate in Cairo (where virtually no Shi’ites today dwell) even more remote.  

Not that anyone is keeping score, but I would like to point back to a pre-debate post in which I zeroed in on Romney’s foreign policy and historico-cultural ignorance on display in his speech at Yeshiva University.  In the debate Romney offered up the same “gibberish,” as Drum called it, that he offered in the speech.  Few, if any, have called him on it in the past when he has said ridiculous things about “the enemy,” and so he keeps on repeating them, because they give him the superficial appearance of knowledgeability and understanding.  There are no candidates on the Republican side, except perhaps Ron Paul, who would either know to correct Romney or who would feel any strong desire to do so.  In the view of most of the candidates who were up on that stage Thursday, Hizbullah and Hamas must be our enemies because they are Israel’s enemies, and so any lazy or overbroad concept that unite them all together under a single umbrella term will do. 

For some of the ridiculous candidates (Brownback and Huckabee), and the Rick Santorums of the world, the catch-all idea is “Islamic fascism” or “Islamofascism,” a phrase and a word respectively so stupid that they must win some sort of prize for being the most stupid of the current century.  Romney shares in their profound confusion (or deliberately misleading rhetoric) for the same reason: all these diverse and disparate groups must be brought together under a single, frightening label and they must be made out to be enemies of America, whether or not these descriptions are plausible, true or reasonable.  As has been stated by some of the biggest supporters of the term Islamofascism, its value lies in its vagueness and its all-purpose application: everyone even nominally Muslim or remotely authoritarian can be classified as an Islamofascist, whether he is a Baathist, a member of al-Ikhwan, or a partisan of Hizbullah.  As May said in September of last year:

The problem, as I see it with using the term “Bin Ladenism”: It can’t be applied to the ideologies of the ruling Iranian mullahs, Saddam Hussein loyalists or other Baathists (e.g. in Syria).

In other words, the word we use to describe our enemies must be meaningless in order to accommodate the maximum number of enemies.  If there were ever a politician who was perfectly suited to an age in which words should be entirely malleable and subject to the political needs of the moment, it would have to be Romney.  Romney and rhetoric about Islamofascism were made for each other.