Is There Anything To Say?

A big terror plot was foiled. Good. They will try again.

And eventually they will succeed not because they are right or smart or anything other than persistent. How long will it be before they can get their hands on a virulant strain of smallpox? All they will need to do is inject it into a willing jihadi, who board a flight, undetected, right into New York City. 7-17 days of incubation and in the meantime, hundreds, if not thousands, of people are spread throughout the world carrying the disease. It could destroy cities and civilizations and it is impossible for us to even fathom a way to stop it.

Is it worth thinking about this? Is there anything to say or that can be done that isn't already being done?

We've made so many attempts towards turning the tide in the Middle East. There's the constant brokering we've tried with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. We've supported democratic reforms in Palestine and Lebanon. We tried a military overthrow of a corrupt regime in Iraq. We try to work with allies to have a united stance against Iran. We try working with autocratic thugs in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We try going through the United Nations to get Syria to relinquish control of Lebanon.

And let's face it - none of these attempts have worked. They've all failed to varying degree.

We are facing a strand of fascism, something we thought dead, but turns out was merely dormant. It is tied back to Nazism, this ideology of hate and it's found a new cloak - not German National Socialism - but Islamic Radicalism. See the relations here. Like a virus that won't go away, it jumps from national/cultural characters and disguises itself as whatever is politically feasible because it's so clever. It's migrated to Islam because it senses weakness and it can feaster and survive in that environment. It's using Islam as a shield, as way to go unchallenged in the West because of our political correctness. It wallows in phony misery and feeds it, until the belief becomes real, up becomes down, 2 and 2 = five. It tells partial truths for deeply cynical reasons, to yield and seize power, to destroy, to dominate, the oldest and sickest of human desires.

And we still can't agree whether it's worth fighting against. We have one party in America whose majority thought before the 2004 election that George Bush was a greater threat to world security than Osama Bin Laden. And say what you will about George Bush, but this is not an issue of Iraq or dead civilians or defense expenditures, of bombs, or soldiers. This is an issue of civilization versus barbarism. Of criminal gangs versus governments. We should never confuse the two or succumb to the temptation to equate the two, or to concede to their partial truth that we are the cause of all of this.

It is they who seek to turn back the clock and up to us to stop it, if we think it worth the time, money, and energy.

UPDATE: And it seems Sullivan agrees with me.