Keep Kindly Old Uncle Sam Under Wraps Until Jihad is Crushed

That lovely but senile old bat is liable to get us all killed. In today's WSJ, Bernard Lewis writes:

During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?"

A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals--notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles.

These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions.

...From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected...dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks--on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000--all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places.

Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two--to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary.

More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences--both for Islam and for America--will be deep, wide and lasting.

Read the whole thing.

Comments

[AndyJ]

We face an enemy whose culture respects strength along the old fashioned might-makes-right sort of lines. When we display discipline, reason, belief in human life and dignity they perceive it as weakness.

Democracies seldom go to war gainst each other because people are peacful as our nature and we can control our leaders by removing them from office. Some among us are warlike and killers. We value these people in times of distress.

Our inability to remain resolute until the job is finished reflects both our democracy and native peacefulness. It is also seen as weakness.

We do not have a simple way out of this circle. We cannot become more like our enemy wthout losing what is essentially American. We cannot refute the surrender-monkeys among us without refuting our democracy or peaceful nature.

The only solution is to have the surrender-monkeys remember that we are all American and that the war will end sooner with fewer killed if we persist than it will if we runaway and hide... yet again... The surrender-monkeys have prevailed in the past and each time it hs led to a greater conflict with more dead on both sides

Whatever we do will affect the way our Islamic enemies, Latin American enemies, Chinese and Russian enemies respond in the future. The surrender-monkeys forget that there are other enemies watching and learning from our success and our failures...

I use the term "surrender-monkey" because reason does not work with those who chatter and scream and throw their own feces regardless of what the future brings... They do not care that they soil their habitat and make the future unpleasant for themselves. They only want something to happen -NOW-!