Posted on 08/22/2003 2:44:25 PM PDT by Clive
LONDON, Ont. -- The terrorist bombings during the past two weeks in Jakarta, Baghdad and Jerusalem, and the increasingly visible activity of al-Qaida and Taliban fanatics in Afghanistan, are indicators of one undeniable fact: we are being engaged in a global war of an entirely new type for which the past offers little guidance.
We might say that five summers ago this month, when terrorists engaged in bombing American embassies in east Africa, we should have awakened to this fact. Or, we might say, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York five years earlier, in 1993, should have been our wake-up call.
We can go back further, for this war has been long in incubation and has crept upon us even as our politicians, their advisers and others were unaware and unprepared to comprehend the mutation of religious fundamentalism in the Arab-Muslim world into a variant of fascism with global ambitions.
All previous wars, conventional or unconventional, were fought between or among states. The enemy was geographically located within clearly demarcated boundaries, and even when conflicts spilled over international frontiers to involve several states, as in the war in Vietnam, belligerents negotiated and wars eventually were terminated by states involved.
Today's war against international terrorism has none of the features of the inter-state wars of the past.
The enemy may have a face - Osama bin Laden's face on posters serves the minimal purpose of identifying the enemy - but it is hydra-headed and not located in any one state. It does not possess authority in any state. It recognizes no diplomatic niceties and conventions. It is not bound by any rules of engagement. It is contemptuous of international law and the values of our open society.
Moreover, this enemy exploits our political sensibilities and mocks our democratic virtues that recognize limits of what is permissible and appropriate even when we are engaged in defending fundamental rights enshrined in institutions - such as the United Nations - of our making.
In the bombing of the UN offices in Baghdad on Tuesday, the terrorists sent us an unmistakable message of their ambition. They want to drive us out of lands they claim for themselves, and purge them of our civilization's values.
Let us be clear about who "we" are. "We" are a people who share together, irrespective of our faiths and ethnicities, the values at the core of our modern civilization, global in appeal, that make for a society based on the rule of law, a government based on consent of the governed and the protection of individual rights and freedoms.
There are some lessons to be learned from the years 1919-45.
The German Nazis and Italian fascists appealed to a mythologized past, manipulated the real misery and fears of common people, sowed widely their racist doctrine of anti-Semitism, railed against injustices of democracy and built totalitarian dictatorships before launching wars against the values of the modern world.
When all of this was happening in full glare of public knowledge, governments in Britain and France during the interwar years led by parties of the liberal-left, and intellectuals of the same persuasion, engaged in a policy of conciliating the enemies of democracy. This policy, known as appeasement, continued right to the moment when Adolf Hitler was no longer an imminent threat, in our contemporary parlance, but ready to devour all of Europe.
Liberal democracies are always slow in waking up to perils such as those we are now facing.
The members of the lib-left political class, certain of their own virtues and ideological convictions - built on the notion of an inexorable progress of humankind while remaining contemptuous of the idea of evil as real - are generally preoccupied in faulting the vices of their own societies as impediments in the grand march of human history.
Hence, they fail to see the wolves when they emerge from the dark ready to pounce upon them and the rest of us.
We are unmistakably in a global war, and the sooner we realize this, the more effective we can be in defeating an enemy more insidious than any in the past.
Nice article. Coming from a man with an Arab-sounding name, I take some solace it it. However, there is one more rung up the ladder of truth. Fail to grasp that last rung, and you'll stay stuck, with the problem-objective in defillade. So I'll rephrase: "We are unmistakably in a global war; the enemy is Islam, and the sooner we realize this, the more effective we can be in defeating an enemy more insidious than any in the past."
Revelation 6:3-4 When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, "Come!" Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make men slay each other. To him was given a large sword.
After we destroy some of these bad areas and upset the lives of those that aren't arrested, then maybe if we have selected the right neighborhoods we will have made a point. We might encourage more support from Iraqis that want to protect their assets.
We need some new approaches to fight these animals and perhaps others can refine and develop this idea.
Well, a lot of Christians (self-professed), for example European "Christian social democrat" types and American protestant religious leader types, made de facto common cause with Saddam Hussein - and thus against freedom - by arguing that no finger should be lifted to oust he and his lineage from absolute power for all time over Iraq.
A lot of people who said this seemed to think that they were operating from Christian principles - of pacifism, of setting a good example, turning the other cheek, "Just War", etc.
Now, you can say, I suppose, that those people aren't representative of "true Christianity", and that's the explanation. Fair enough. But then the fact remains that there are a sizable number of (non-"true") Christians who also stand against freedom. If freedom is to be defended, it is important to recognize all its enemies.
Assuming for charity that you mean Islamofascism, recognition of this would indeed be a start. But it's also important to keep in mind that the enemy counts among its allies various other utopians, for example communist/socialist types. Such people have made common cause with the enemies of the U.S./West due to their mutual need to see its power kept in check and its spread halted (so that utopia may arise). They are part of the problem too, and if we do not recognize that we will fail to find a solution.
islam calls for the creation of an islamic state wherever they find themselves through war or treaty. The people already there will be given the choice of convert or die...the same choice turkey gave Armenians when the last caliphate held power.
There are posters on this forum from those muslim parts of the world who swear that they are our loyal allies.
No, the enemy is islam. Just read the koran and see what it tells its followers to do. Look at the societies and values it creates. No, the enemy is islam.
Yes, actually, it does. But it does so covertly, and it's two states short of where it was on the 10th of September, 2001. That is, missed by a lot of people who have lost sight of it amidst all the anti-Bush foaming, the point of the whole affair.
Well, I could just point out that many "Islamic" terror groups are infused with all sorts of Marxist and "liberationist" drivel, and call it a day.
But what I am mostly trying to say is closer to the reverse of your question: it's not that "islam is allied with communism" as much as that communists/socialists ally themselves with (radical) Islam, by acting as its apologists and urging us not to go on the offense against it. Surely you are not unaware of this. The alliance is not overt or anything, but certainly on the face of it Islamic radicals have few better friends in the West than the likes of Noam Chomsky....
The alliance is completely rational and totally unsurprising given that both groups of people have utopian, near-apocalyptic visions of what they want the future to be like, both of which require that the U.S. culture not succeed or flourish. Of course the two groups' respective visions are completely different, which would cause problems if they actually succeeded in bringing down the U.S. culture, but this is a marriage of convenience.
What I am trying to say is that it would be a somewhat hollow victory if we defeated this enemy of our civilization (radical Islam) without recognizing and confronting the people within our civilization who instinctively sided with that enemy. There are many such people.
300 years ago Piracy on the seas was just this kind of international problem. When Pirates were attacked in one location they would (roach-like) scuttle off in another direction.
In the end the problem was solved by killing them off. This took the cooperation of all sea-faring nations as there were no superpowers back then.
Terrorists must be hunted from country to country. They must be killed without mercy, and not allowed to surrender.
Any country that harbors them must be crushed.
It took about 100 years to get rid of the Pirates.
Utopians seem to instinctively side with other utopians against common threats. A liberal democracy flourishing in the here and now, in some state or another, is a threat to utopians. (For one thing because it renders them unnecessary and proves their visions childish and spurious.)
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