Where is our civilization headed? As a nation we've had a couple of good centuries under our belt. During that time we've had to fend off attempts by others to disrupt or even destroy our freedom and our way of life.
First the Brits wanted their lost colony back - and failing that, at least bloody our nose really good. No dice. We took some lumps, but we drove them off. Then the Mexicans mounted a somewhat half hearted attempt which was quickly and relatively quietly turned away. There's not even much mention of it in the history books these days. Next came the Spaniards who really only wanted some of the territory we used for trade...Cuba. Maybe we should have let them have it. How would they have dealt with Fidel I wonder? Then came the first big one. This time we didn't wait to defend ourselves on our own soil. This time we went to Europe. And because we didn't follow through as we should have, we had to go back 25 years later as we stood off the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the west.
WWI and WWII were great wars. You knew whom to hate and could recognize them because they spoke different languages, wore different uniforms and fought us in massed formations in conventional methods.
Then it all went haywire. First in Korea where we tried to help those less fortunate than we hold off the communist juggernaut. That's when the ideological war began. The war against communism. Sometimes it was hot as in Korea and Vietnam. Most of the time, however, it was a cold war. Still in Korea and even occasionally in Vietnam we were able to fight an enemy that usually wore some identifiable uniform and fought in formation against us. The cold part of it we finally won it because the bulk of Americans refused to give in - refused to compromise away our principles.
Today we have entered into another war. Like the previous one against communism, this one is different again than all the ones that have come before it. Military people call it "asymmetric warfare" meaning nothing organized or "typical" about it. This one however is being fought for the same reasons as the others even if the threats to us look far different than previous wars. It is a war against people who have been brainwashed into believing that we are evil and must all be killed. A war against mad men and radical religious zealots - neofascist jihadists.
Sadly, this time, a larger than ever number of Americans have lost sight of why we are doing this. They have already forgotten the lesson of 9/11, the slaughter of over 250 Marines in Beirut, the bombing of the Kobar towers...etc. They seem to believe that diplomacy and negotiation will help us "live in peace" with the demented lunatics of Islamic fascism. A large number of us, possibly because of the limited scope of the media coverage, have somehow dissociated Iran, the root sponsor of this insanity since 1977, with what is happening in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. The majority of these people are the new, anti-war democrats and they, in their zeal to hate George Bush, have lost the connection between Iraq and the global war on radical Islam. I don't know that I particularly like Bush either, but I don't let hate blind me to what is going on in the world. Neither am I silly enough to believe that somehow I could sit down with the Iranian Mullahs and quietly convince them that they don't want nuclear weapons.
Charles Krauthammer in yesterday's Washington post put it succinctly:
This naivete in the service of endless accommodationism recalls also the flaccid foreign policy of the post-Vietnam Democratic left. It lost the day -- it lost the country -- to Ronald Reagan and a muscular foreign policy that in the end won the Cold War.We can only hope that something similar will happen in the next few years. Before some whacko Islamic fascist gets his hands on an Iranian made nuclear weapon.
