How do you think we'll be judged in 1,000 years? While I can think of more complex outcomes, there are basically four sides to this issue: the west (led by America) remains tolerant, fights Islamic extremists, and wins. Or it loses because after all, a hudna is just a hudna, and our birthrate has relegated us to the past.
Or we fight every Islam everywhere on the planet, leading to a genocidal unleashing of our doomsday weaponry. And we win, because we're just that powerful. Or else we lose because we alienate every remaining human being on the planet, having rendered ourselves into guilt-wracked impotents.
(What we're leaving out of the discussion is what China and Russia, plus France are doing to either make this situation worse -- or better, as the case may be.)
My WWII vet dad and I agree: escallation of hostilities should have a clear goal; to retain our humanity, we cannot simply push this world war (and that is what it is) to the next level without knowing what we can obtain towards victory by doing so. Any U.S. aggression that could lead to using WMDs should have a clear goal in reducing overall suffering and loss of life. Until we know what we want, we need to take precaution. There is still hope for the future. I think Rice and Bush are taking the long view. Let's just hope 1,000 years from now the human race looks back on this choice as a wise one.
I came to an interesting conclusion based on this principle: the DPRK will stand, but Iran's fundamentalist regime must fall. The DPRK probably already has nukes, but we can stop the Iranian mullahs from getting them if we take drastic measures now. This might not be the wrong choice to make, given Iran's continual support for Hezbollah and other extremist groups merely on the basis of Islamic nationalism.
Maybe I'm just taking a hypothetical scenario to its illogical extremes, but it makes sense. While there's still time to prevent yet another Islamic country from obtaining WMDs, we have to act. We'll see what Rice and Bush do. Let's hope the people of Iran make it through the next few months safely. Ledeen says the Ayatollahs are closer to testing nukes than we realized.
In any case, Rice and Bush are doing what one would expect based on my father's criteria: without knowing the results of escallating, they are taking a longer route. I support that. Millions of peoples' innocent lives are in the balance. When we nuked Nagasaki on 11:02 am, August 9, 1945, we killed many people who had nothing to do with the second world war. But we also obtained total surrender of the whole nation, millions of enemy combatants. Doing so meant fewer casualties overall and the liberation of thousands of our POWs, one of whom was my uncle. A clear result was obtained, and fewer people died.
Today, we can still hope to encourage moderate Islam while the unstoppable progress of modernity seeps from the west into Islamic culture. They have their "Mecca cola" but it's cola -- still a western invention! I say we have already won, we won when we were victorious at the end of the second world war. Medievalism is dead, and a few nutcase extremists can be managed with direct application of force. Until we know this isn't true, we should be very careful.
We could call this a war between civilizations in public today, but with other forces moving through our cultures, we might also be able to win just by removing the perpetrators. History would judge us harshly for the deaths of millions of people if we didn't actually need to raise the stakes yet.
The coming years are going to require us to have more courage than we ever thought we had. But my father assures me that we can find it in ourselves.
And the odds of one or more of the above happening are quite high.