Says Victor Hanson:
In short, while the Islamists get bolder and crazier, we become more timid and all too rational, quibbling over this terrorist's affinities and that militia's particular grievances--in hopes of cutting some magical deal with an imaginary moderate imam or nonexistent reasonable militia chief or Middle East dictator.
Notes David Warren:
Gloom and doom make good sense, under these circumstances. Despair never does. As the late Abba Eban, once Israel's foreign minister, used to say, "History teaches us that men and women behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." As he didn't add, this is invariably after the prospective catastrophe has vastly increased in scale.
We spend too much time trying to "understand" our enemies' many and multiplying grievances.
But our enemies won't save us. That's why they are "enemies." They won't even let us stop fighting. They'll keep killing us whether we try to kill them or not. Our basic choice is to fight and defeat our enemies and save Islam from its jihadis or--if our Understandniks prevent us from fighting and winning--destroy our jihadi enemie utterly and anybody who gets in the way. I don't think that Mark Steyn's predictions of quiet surrender based on demographic certainty will take place. At some point the West will rouse itself after it exhausts all means other than resolute self defense. But by then, winning a war as we fight now may not be an option. Then it will be a clash of civilizaitons.
General Abizaid stated the choice pretty clearly in a speech (tip to the Weekly Standard blog):
Army Gen. John Abizaid compared the rise of militant ideologies, such as the force driving al Qaeda, to the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s that set the stage for World War Two.
"If we don't have guts enough to confront this ideology today, we'll go through World War Three tomorrow," Abizaid said in a speech titled "The Long War," at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, outside Boston.
Mecca will not survive such a clash.
Unless our "anti-war" people are in fact "pro-surrender," their opposition to winning the fight against Islamo-fascism pretty much guarantees that there will be a clash of civilizations.
So just who is looking out for the best interests of Moslems?
