Best Essay

pettyfog · Nov 20, 2006

Excerpted:

There is a sick ingenuity of a sort that can disguise terrorists as state policemen in Baghdad to kidnap and torture the innocent, and outwit Humvees with land mines. The improvised explosive device, with help from Iran, gets ever more complex. And there is a great deal of mental energy, time, and money that went into making rockets and suicide belts or even the graphics on a bin Laden infomercial.

How odd that Iranians cannot design a car or computer, but can with the proper instruction manual spend millions of hours putting together Western-designed centrifuges, like the stamped lettered-parts of a build-it-your-self intricate model toy.

So again, the problem with the radicals in the Middle East is not the lack of capital or mental energy. Rather under the influence of Islamism and autocracy a deep-seeded cultural malady distorts human effort and creativity solely for destructive purposes. In all of these places, radical leaders such as a Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, or Sadr--the same thug has a thousand faces that come and go as we saw with Zarqawi, Saddam, and Arafat--are, like the Sultan and Grand Vizier of old, as fascinated with the West as they despise it.
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Not to mention an equally deep-seated malady that causes the target of that rage to blame itself for it.

Iraq to the CNN talking heads is solely a story of amputations, unemployed veterans, anti-war song-writing Marines, and gratuitous violence against civilians--nothing much about Iraqis voting, the Husseins gone, or the brave each day fighting jihadists. Somehow trying to foster democracy abroad has earned far worse public outcry than the old Cold War support for dictators. Leftists apparently think helping the elected government in Iraq is comparable to our past support for a Somoza or Marcos, while those on the Old Right lament that it is not.

We in the West write novels and film scripts about killing our American President, while those in the Middle East plan it, as their latest vows to blow up the White House attest. Better yet, we supposed liberals--not Nazis, communists, or monarchs--now will censor our own cartoons, operas, films, novels, and Pope, as if the Enlightenment was a mere construct. If we find the struggle to stop Islamism is too costly or at least too bothersome, maybe appeasement of it will prove less so.

In short, while the Islamists get bolder and crazier, we become more timid and all too rational, quibbling over this terrorist's affinities and that militia's particular grievances--in hopes of cutting some magical deal with an imaginary moderate imam or nonexistent reasonable militia chief or Middle East dictator.

Well beyond us now is any overarching Churchillian vision of our enemies. We lack the practical understanding of an FDR that all of these Islamists loathe us far more than they despise each other. Their infighting, after all, is like the transitory bickering of thieves over the division of loot that always pales before their shared hatred of the targeted bank owner.

So we are at a crossroads of all places in Iraq. The war there has metamorphosized from a successful effort to remove a mass-murdering dictator into the frontlines of the entire struggle between Islamic radicalism and Western liberality. If we withdraw before the elected government stabilizes, the consequences won't just be the loss of the perceptions of power, but perhaps the loss of real power. What follows won't be the impression that we are weak, but the fact that we are--as we convince ourselves we cannot win against such horrific enemies, and so should never again try.

That stumble will send a shudder throughout the so-called West that will be felt worldwide. It will insidiously show that the premodern world proved the master of the postmodern, as al Qaeda's Alfred Rosenberg, the pudgy Dr. Zawahiri, boasted all along--whose followers will not be happy with a successful defense when they think they can go back on an even more successful offense.

In the end, the Islamicists' best way to blow up the world's Starbucks or to turn off freewheeling American television is ultimately with a whimper, not a bang. They need not plant a hundred thousand bombs across the Westernized globe, but simply to cauterize its very spinal cord in the United States--the willingness of the American public, as in the past, to confront only the latest challenge to their freedom and all the ripples from it.
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- Victor Davis Hanson

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