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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (79828)	3/9/2003 2:29:45 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Calling something absurd doesn't make it so. In this cases there are good reasons for calling it that. Islamic radicalism is not in anything like the same threat category as fascism or communism. The fascist movements of the late 1930s built the greatest military machine the world had seen to that date. They had a real live axis, capable of staging simultaneous massive military assaults on opposite sides of the world. There was a very real threat that the free world would be overrun by force, and in fact that very nearly happened. The free world was able to roll back the assault only because the fascist powers overextended, and because the technology of the day left the industrial base of one power, the US effectively immune to attack. The threat posed by communism was as grave. While there was never a truly coordinated communist axis, not after the sino-Soviet split in’48 at least, the Soviet Union amassed a conventional arsenal capable of posing a very real challenge to the free world, and had a nuclear arsenal capable of global annihilation. Both posed major ideological challenges as well. Fascism held a real appeal on a global basis: a simultaneous appeal to national pride, traditional values, and human ethnocentrism is a heady combination capable of taking root anywhere in the world. Communism, too, is an ideological with near universal appeal among those who do not take the time to consider the reality behind the promise, especially the impoverished and disenfranchised. These were movements with the ability to spread their influence worldwide. Islamic extremism has nothing of the sort. There is no army behind the ideology, no military force capable of posing even a marginal challenge to the free world. They have no strategic weaponry or delivery systems. The ideology itself has only limited appeal within the Islamic world and none at all outside it: we don’t need to worry about it spreading. This enemy can hurt us, but they cannot destroy us. The fabric of civilization is not being threatened. It is not a threat so grave that we need to go ahead and fracture the alliance of free nations over the question of how best to confront it, especially since the most effective means by far of confronting it requires the maintenance of that alliance. There’s a real tendency to paint this conflict in excessively dramatic terms, and I don’t think that’s at all productive.