Well, turning Iraq into a 21st-Century Islamic country is an effort to attack the root causes. Looming in the background of all this is the horrifying truth that if that there is not some demonstration that life can be better than living under some despot who blames Israel and The West for all of life's problems, we are going to end up having to nuke these people — all billion of them — to keep ourselves safe from rogue nukes and poison gas. I don't know if Iraq is the right laboratory for this demonstration; nobody does. But it was a reasonable choice, and we are making halfway-decent progress towards creating a place where Moslems can feel they have some ownership over what is happening and how their government behaves. Yes, this is new to them, and the average Mohammad in the street is still a bit baffled by the whole idea. In Iraq, he also sees various factions attempting to become the new despotic rulers — a system he understands pretty well and is familiar with. What he knows is that if any of them win, he had better not be on record as opposing them. President Bush was very clear at the beginning that this was going to be a long, hard struggle. Bush's political opposition chooses to use the term "quagmire" to describe that, but what liberals are not doing is being honest about the alternative. If we and our allies were to pull out, Iraq would sink into yet another despotically-ruled Arab "state" in which the Mullahs and their Madrassas would turn out yet another never-ending stream of hotheads looking to glorify Allah by killing infidels. Down that path lies the wholesale annihilation of a billion people, because we in the West are not going to have nukes going off in our cities... period. Our history as a people is that if we have to literally annihilate them — all of them — to keep from having to deal with WMD attacks, we will do so. The sorry truth is that compared to us, these people are bugs, and they will suffer the fate of bugs if they don't learn how to live in the world without blowing up other people's trains, cities, and schools. Too many people are looking at this Iraq issue as if it were about Iraq per se. It's not. It's about an extremely noble and moral quest to avoid having to commit genocide. It is also a race against time. Once nukes start going off in Western cities, the game is over for Islam. We will not take the chance that we missed one when going after such terrorists. If one suicide bomber can kill 500,000 people with a nuke, then we will not leave one potential suicide bomber alive. Not one. This is the ugly truth that liberals and appeasers refuse to face. If they are, as they ought to be, horrified by the prospect of having to kill a billion people, then they should stop right now and ask themselves what they are trying to accomplish by halting the "Iraq War." Their way will not lead to "peace." The road to peace is to convince a billion Moslems that the despotic governments that rip them off and blame The West for all their ills must go. We must convince them that they can lead halfway-decent lives, and that they have the ability to do so. No one believes that turning the Iraq of 2004 into a "shining city on a hill" will be easy. Certainly President Bush has never claimed it will be. It will be a long, hard row to hoe. Those who wish to take the easy road now need to ask themselves what they think is going to happen if we do not persevere in Iraq. How many nukes in Washington, New York, Paris, or Rome are they prepared to see before the entire population of the Western world transforms itself into an angry mob, demanding from its governments the annihilation of these so-called "people" who do such things. It is a testiment to our own morality and civility that we will invest troops and treasure to avoid that. It is high time that our "morally superior" liberals took their eye off this election and faced the long-term ugly truth about what's coming if we don't finish our task in Iraq. This may be our last chance to save a billion lives. |
Fundamentally, this article is about whether Iraq is the right laboratory in which to create the 21st-Century Islamic country. The author basically agrees that such a thing is needed; he's just making the usual Kerryesque comments about how such a task ought to be a "global effort" and how, to defeat terrorism, we must attack the "root causes."