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July 17, 2006
The War Against the West (and The Canary in the Coal Mine)
A couple of great essays caught my eye this weekend, both focusing on the ongoing war against us -- and by "us" I mean non-Muslims who oppose the imposition of a global caliphate -- and the travails of the Israelis, who serve as the West's canaries, forced to take the first breath of the toxic cloud coming from Tehran.
First, Mark Steyn has finally reached his limit when it comes to demands for diplomatic "superstars" to provide the Magic Bullet that will slay the Warwolf.
I was on the road the other night and so found myself watching CNN's coverage of Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, etc. It was "Larry King Live," and it was one of those shows where Larry interviews great men about what needs to be done and the great men all agree that what needs to be done is that the president needs to get other great men involved to "broker" a "deal."
Sen. Chuck Hagel proposed that Bush appoint Colin Powell or Jim Baker as his Special Envoy; Sen. Barbara Boxer proposed that Bush appoint Madeleine Albright as his Even More Special Envoy. Sen. George Mitchell, who himself served as Extra-Special Super-Duper Envoy a few years back, proposed that Bush involve the European Union. And someone else proposed the G-8. And Larry suggested Putin. Oh, and some smooth-talking apologist in Savile Row pinstripes proposed Chirac, because he and Bush had agreed a U.N. resolution on something or other a year or two back.
[...]
And some of the Great Men we send to negotiate aren't all that great: the wretched Mohammed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, is, in fact, a patsy for the nuclear mullahs. To reprise one of my all-time favorite Iranian negotiating positions, let's recall the perfect distillation of what Great Man diplomacy boils down to in the Middle East, as reported in the New York Times exactly a year ago:
"Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Thursday."
If we don't let Iran go nuclear, they'll go nuclear. Negotiate that, Chuck Hagel.
The forces at play in the Middle East are beyond the Geopolitical Friars' Club. The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian "moderates" who've been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult? Israel withdrew from Gaza and, instead of getting on with a prototypical Palestinian state, Hamas turned the territory into an Islamist camp. Israel withdrew from Lebanon entirely in 2000, yet Hezbollah is now lobbing rockets at Haifa.
Why? Because in both cases these territories are now in effect Iran's land borders with the Zionist Entity. They're "occupied territories" but it's not the Jews doing the occupying. So you've got a choice between talking with proxies or going to the source: Tehran.
And, as the unending talks with the EU have demonstrated, the ayatollahs use negotiations with the civilized world as comedy relief. They don't get Larry King's salutes to Red Buttons and Don Knotts on Iranian TV, so entering into talks with the French foreign minister is as near to big-time laughs as the mullahs get.
[...]
During all the time the Great Men were shuttling back and forth, a kind of toxic globalization occurred: The Palestinian "movement" (insofar as there ever was a genuine nationalist movement) became infected and eventually annexed by hard-core Islamism and the Palestinians' most depraved terror techniques were exported to every corner of the world.
You can build a "security fence" in the region, but what we might call Palestinianism has leapt the psychological fence and incubated in radicalized Muslim communities worldwide: It's not just Palestinians but also Yorkshiremen who now blow themselves up on public transit. What's happened in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria and elsewhere is that the weaknesses of those polities were exploited by Iran and others through various client groups and a potent ideology that's really a virus.
That's a much more cunning and effective strategy than sending a fellow in a suit to concoct a plan in his name. We need to learn from the Iranians. We need to wage war on the ideology, because until we do, the reality is that the Middle East's fetid "stability," its demography, its remorseless nuclearization and proxy militarization all favor Israel's and our enemies.
Read the whole thing.
The other essay, from the Toronto Sun, asks it's readers (again), "[H]ow long the civilized world would continue to deny the reality of a war declared on it by modern day al-Qaida bandits and their global affiliates?"
In the aftermath of the most recent terrorist bombings of passenger trains in Mumbai, India, evidence of the civilized world's continued reluctance to respond adequately and with conviction to the asymmetrical warfare unleashed by Islamists has become more alarming than the irrefutable depravity of al-Qaida terrorists.
The culture of denial among the weak and the corrupt is an admission of incapacity by these people of managing the world they inhabit.
Denial in such circumstance demonstrates preference of an inconsequential people for a nostalgic past or an improbable future rather than contending with requirements of the present. When denial becomes the reflexive response of the strong then it is an evasion of responsibility -- instead of doing what is self-evidently right, an escape is sought in the labyrinth of legalism and fake morality.
Islamists have succeeded this far in turning the strength of democracies to their advantage. They have exploited the restraint of modern civilization that opts in criminal justice for proportionality, restitution and rehabilitation as evidence of guilt and weakness.
Islamists declared war on the modern world much before Sept. 11, 2001. But the modern world -- despite President George Bush's leadership and effort since 9/11 -- opted instead to study the neuroses of Islamists, discover root causes of their depravity, offer palliatives by acknowledging their grievances as legitimate, and view the warfare launched by them merely as a problem of domestic law and order.
I wrote last year, "Bandits win, if they win at all, when lawfully organized society is drained of its will to eliminate banditry from its midst."
The bandits of al-Qaida are winning -- growing probably in relative strength of membership, resources, ingenuity in striking their enemy and intimidating neutrals -- because democracies remain in denial of what is self-evident in the recent carnage in Mumbai and the continued low level warfare in Kashmir as an integral part of India.
What is required in destroying irreversibly these modern day bandits and their war against the modern world is taking a page from history in the war democracies fought in the last century against German-Italian fascism and Japanese militarism.
In August 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met in secret and announced the Atlantic Charter as response to the fascists in Europe.
The principle of this Charter -- bringing the resources of democracies together in winning the war unconditionally -- was extended to defeating Japan after its Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.
The time is long past to wait upon a corrupt and cynical United Nations to devise a response that should have been prompted by 9/11.
The Charter against terrorism can only be promulgated by democracies with the legitimacy that authorities derive from the will of their people based on the rule of law. Such a Charter would strategically unite the world's most powerful democracy, the United States, with the world's largest democracy, India, and bring together Britain, Australia, Canada, Israel and Japan with invitation to others to join in the common effort to crush Islamist terrorists and those who shelter them.
Unless such a Charter is devised we will continue to have our modern version of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Why do I suspect the State Department careerists are counseling us to apply rosin to our bows? Pass the Stradivarius, will you?
Posted by Mike Lief at July 17, 2006 06:41 AM
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