The War, here and abroad, goes on
V D HANSON
In War And Everything Else
Insult to Injury
The worst thing about the global oil spike brought on by increased consumption is not worries over global warming, or the idea that the United States is not "energy independent" (Japan does not overly worry that it must rely on others for food), but that our thirst has driven up the world price--and with it the importance of the Middle East while sending half-a-trillion dollars in petroprofits to a primordial region.
And now we are seeing the wages of that circulating cash, as the Gulf monarchies are racing to acquire nuclear reactors ($4 billion a pop) to counter Iran's soon to be on-line nuclear arsenal.
In other words, a region that has neither the innate economic resources to fund such a program nor the scientific expertise to see it through nor the stability that is the precursor for economic development, has the cash from oil (that someone else found, exploited, and developed) to buy Western help in creating the very weapons that might soon be turned against the West.
The idea of a nuclear Wahhabi State, nearby a nuclear theocracy in Iran, with nuclear Pakistan looking over their shoulders is horrific—especially when coupled with Western appeasement as evidenced by many European diplomats deploring the "militarization" of their continent by US offers to base an ABM shield in Eastern Europe, and the culturally relativistic arguments that if the Western powers are nuclear (US, France, UK, Israel), who is to say a Sharia-run Saudi Arabia or 7th-century Iran should not likewise be? The fact is that already we are confronted with the nightmare that the majority of nuclear powers in the world today is (with India) only democratic by a small margin, and the illiberal states are multiplying and may soon compose an antithetical majority—Russia, China, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran?.
We have the worst choice of leaving this mess to our children who will be faced with both oil and atomic extortion, or the bad one of dealing with it now when the will to is nearly nonexistent in the West. A 1939 all over again. When reading jihadist websites, one is struck not about their worries over the morality of preempting and using a nuclear device against a Western city but only the practicality of carrying it out.
The Re-Reconquista?
The recent explosions in Algeria and Morocco, coupled with al Qaeda's boast that "We will not be in peace until we set our foot again in our beloved al-Andalus" and the fact that the Madrid train bombing was pulled off by nearby North Africans, should remind Spain that distancing itself from the US, withdrawing from Iraq, and electing a pacifist socialist Prime Minster will only ensure violence.
Jihadists believe that Europeans are weak and can be intimidated into concessions and near paralysis until demography and terrorism win over the continent—either by elections of pro-Islamist governments or by the creation on near autonomous Muslim enclaves as we see in Paris and in some cities in the Netherlands and Sweden. We already see the symptoms of such Jihadization in the European hostility voiced toward Israel, its cheap anti-Americanism, and virtual disarmament.
Our attitude toward all this? A hard call. Our hearts say, "Let them go, and pull out all American bases. Let them defend themselves and become emasculated neutrals now, and vassal state later if that is their wish."
Our heads counter, "Not so fast. Only American engagement keeps Europe safe and for a while longer a neutral rather than an outright belligerent."
But what is fascinating is the continual European delusion that radical Islam is a consequence mostly of righteous hatred of George Bush's United States, and thus that their own multiculturalism will win exemption rather than greater contempt for its cravenness. These Euros remind me of 1930s fascists in Great Britain or France who believed that their influential presence ensured Hitler would never attack their countries. |
