Good Stuff...

over at Andrewsullivan.com...including a pretentious top 10 movie list and commentary about the different perceptions of Islamic Fundamentalism between Europe and the US. This is the same debate I've been having with my anti-war friends (nearly all my friends, by the way). They view 9/11 like the Europeans, as a "lucky shot," a one time catastrophe that the terrorists slipped past us. My friend over brunch the other day said to me: "We had all the resources lined up to stop the attack, it was just neglected by the Bush administration." Riiiight. My other friend suggested that all the stars aligned perfectly for Bin Laden and he got extraordinarily lucky. Maybe so.

But clearly most Americans, myself included, view 9/11 as both as a lucky shot and the evidence, right in our face of a new global threat - Islamic Fascism - a threat that has been building over the years and will continue to grow unless the freedom-loving nations of the world group together to stop it. Europeans think of Al Queda in the league of the IRA. American's think of Al Queda in the league of the Nazis. Honestly, they're somewhere in between...

One bone of contention I have with the liberal argument that we had all the resources to stop 9/11, it's just our fault we didn't, is that it is always coupled with the conclusion that Iraq is creating more terrorists. These two items seem to me completely separate. Even if we could have stopped 9/11, I think the point is that there are large groups of Muslims interested in attacking the US whenever they can because of our perceived support of dictatorships in the Middle East. Going into Iraq is an attempt to reform the Middle East and hence reform the intentions of the average joe Arab, who, once having a whiff of freedom, would think more about opening his own wig store before becoming a suicide bomber. The only common link I see between the two of them is an anti-Republican, anti-Bush position...which is why I don't think it's been convincing. The liberal democrats I know are still stuck in the mindset that Bush is untrustworthy and therefore all of his policies are suspect. If they started with the policy and then evualated it's pluses and minuses fairly, they might come to the same conclusion: that Bush is untrustworthy, but it would be for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons. I suppose they could also come to the conclusion that Bush is trustworthy - but, gasp, that is impossible to conceive...of course, that's the risk of rational thinking, I suppose.