Jonah Goldberg proposes "Bin Ladenism" as a substitute for "Islamist fascism." "We used Marxism and Leninism pretty efficiently for a long time and Bin Laden's ideology is pretty well spelled out," he writes, so "why not do the same with him?"
It would be a mistake because Osama bin Laden rose as an exponent of the latest strain of authoritarianism to come from the Near East, and neither a founder of conquest styled after Islam nor a practically central figure in it. Were bin Laden confirmed dead and the West to take no other military or political action beyond that, the state of things would remain the same; the point indisputable if bin Laden were to be confirmed having been dead for years.
Some insist otherwise. The most memorable expression of the belief that terrorism is wholly centripetal came from Senator John Kerry when he in 2004 characterized the putative escape of bin Laden from Tora Bora as a missed opportunity to end the war, as if the Saudi lunatic were a sorcerer holding Islamists in thrall to an enchantment. President Bush finally challenged the senator on this in the third presidential debate and, by virtue of his present office, won that particular argument.
Islamist fascists are unique in their use of technology as an international deployment and delivery system (requiring state support but not national identity or dominion), and of religion as a conductive element (establishing cultural footholds in liberal countries). They are indistinguishable from any other organized group of thugs in their shared desire for supremacy and totalism and carnage. If "Marxism" and "Leninism" were efficient they were also exclusive, and with the last decade of the Twentieth Century as historical record, words that by constriction led to the pronouncement of Soviet communism's defeat as the end of history — presaging the senescence and expiration of evil. Evil did not retire. While clarity is to be sought, the authoritarian fundament of an ideology should not be lost in denotation.