Is the Boston bombing really going to shake the administration out of its liberal belief that only George W. Bush angered jihadis enough to kill us?
The underlying assumption of those narratives [of past jihadi plots] is that the counterterrorism strategy pursued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, was self-destructive. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan mobilized the Islamic world against America. The existence of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, the scandal at Abu Ghraib, and the reports of harsh interrogation of detainees eroded our moral high ground. Bush betrayed our values. He exploited fear for political gain.
The appropriate response, it was said, was to do the opposite of Bush.
After four years of hope and change, nothing about jihadi rage has changed. As I predicted nearly four years ago, the administration may be forced to raise the national threat level to Code Pink:
The highest level, Code Pink, is true emergency status meaning "Holy Cr*p, Not Even These Code Pink Hags Will Believe Us If We Say It Isn't Our Fault." This means we've been attacked again and remember that yes, we really are still at war with jihadis.
So let's act like the jihad threat is real. Their goals may seem ridiculous, but the deaths they inflict in pursuit of that goal are very real:
Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.
The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying it out loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and they don’t care, even a little, what you think.
You do not defeat an ideology by hoping it will change or disappear. You have to challenge it, to make it defend its baleful tenets in the light of day. You cannot protect yourself from its violent outbursts absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.
As I've long said, our military fight to kill jihadis and their sponsors is just one--if necessary--part of the effort to help Islamic society purge itself of the jihadi urges that spring so readily into bloody action.
We had a good run with Code Green and Code Yellow. Now the threat is real--people might expect the president to protect us from bloodthirsty enemies who make a mockery of our question "why do they hate us?"
