Ishaan Tharoor has a piece in WaPo today: ISIS wants to fight a holy war. So do some Trump supporters.

Steve Bannon, the alt-right ideologue who is poised to play a key role in Trump's White House, has articulated a more coherent vision. In a 2014 event with Catholic conservatives hosted at the Vatican, Bannon declared that the West was in “the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism” and framed the contest in religious terms — never mind that Muslims themselves are suffering the most from and laboring the hardest against extremist groups like the Islamic State.

Bannon placed the current fight in a long history of Christian vs. Muslim conflict and praised the toughness of earlier European kingdoms. (Of course, he did not acknowledge the equally long history of Christian and Muslim cooperation.)

“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said and then invoked two famous medieval battles in which largely Christian forces in Europe repulsed Muslim armies. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places … It bequeathed to us the great institution that is the church of the West.”

Now, I’m the last person to get outraged over a tweet or a t-shirt. People say vile things, that is the nature of our world and the humans on it. So I wouldn’t advise spending the next four years discussing the next ignorant or hateful thing Trump or his cabinet tweeted. In fact, the constant outrage cycle created and sustained during the campaign distracted us from focusing on bread and butter issues for key members of our coalition. It is part of the reason we are where we are.

I put these tweets here to clarify the context in which we should evaluate Trump’s comments on our wars in the Middle-East:

“I mean one of the problems we have or one of the reasons we're so ineffective, you know, they're trying to, they're using them as shields. It's a horrible thing,"

"But we're fighting a very politically correct war. And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families," Trump said.

"When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don't kid yourself. But they say they don't care about their lives. You have to take out their families."

— The Hill

Now, unfortunately, we are already well along this road. We don’t exactly proclaim we will blow up a target’s house with his family inside as some of our allies do. But we have bombed homes and performed “double-tap” strikes killing first-responders and many more besides. We have also killed a 16 year old US citizen, who Robert Gibbs said “should have had a far more responsible father”.

Democrats have been largely silent about the impact of signature strikes and drone missions. That’s saying nothing about a widespread surveillance state that nets both US and international communication. Here is where our silence has led us. These deadly and dreadful capabilities are about to be placed gently into Trump’s hands on January 20. Who here can tell me they are confident these weapons will be used in the service of honorable ends by a Trump administration?

Imagine this scenario. A big terror attack leads to much of the country reflexively “rallying around the president”, just as we did in 2001 with Bush. That then leads to a “mandate” for a large-scale war in the Middle-East, directed by people who seem to be itching for a modern-day crusade.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars and that is partly what Bannon likes about them. But they have been invoked for ethnic conflict as well. Not for nothing is the KKK newspaper called The Crusader.

Even without acting on it, such rhetoric is bound to have profound impacts on how our widespread military actions are seen across the world. Muslim populations across Asia and Africa will undoubtedly be concerned. Such rhetoric feeds directly into the propaganda of various extremists fighting in wars across the Middle-East, Asia and Africa. But the impact will not be limited to these conflicts. How will the governments of the rest of Asia and Africa react to this. After all, they have directly experienced western colonialism fed by theories positing the superiority of Christianity. What of countries that have largely Catholic populations? How exactly will the world regard the fact of American hegemony when senior government officials openly espouse such rhetoric? What about when they enact policies in keeping with the rhetoric?

So no, as much as I would like it, we cannot ignore Bannon.

BTW, There are lot more of these tweets, if you stomach can handle them.

— @subirgrewal