Jonah Goldberg has a a typically funny and observant post pointing out that even if every Islamic country joined a massive holy war against us, they’d all lose. Well, he’s right, but he’s thinking in conventional terms. No, the Islamofascists couldn’t invade and occupy the US, even if they wanted to.
But at the same time, they could easily unleash a massive campaign of suicide bombers, smuggle weapons of mass destruction into American cities, and generally drain American morale and the will to fight. At least that’s their plan. The Arab world isn’t so stupid as to believe that they can win against us head to head. Rather, they want to reduce our will to leverage our firepower against them.
However, September 11 proved that strategy might also be flawed. Rather than bending over and trying to look at "root causes" (as some did), the vast majority of the American people got really, really pissed. Pissed enough to have soccer moms wanting to personally hunt down, castrate, and slowly torture Osama bin Laden. You bet that if Arafat were to blow up a Wal-Mart in Ohio rather than a cafe in Jerusalem, he’d find his head on a pike in no time. (Even though that’s a very bad moral dichotomy – it shouldn’t matter who he kills where, but all that should matter is that he’s a terrorist slimebag.) In the end, unless the Islamofascists can bog us down in a Vietnamesque war they don’t stand much of a chance in a long-term conflict, and it is unlikely that the Islamofascists would have the resources to do so. After all, as much as China might like to see the US suffer, giving weapons to the Islamofascists would mean that they’d soon use them against the Chinese. With the Russians now looking westward and dealing with al-Qaeda’s support of Chechen rebels, they’re also likely to make every attempt to stop weapons from getting into terrorist hands. In the end, the Islamofascists stand essentially alone.
Yet at the same time, that doesn’t mean that they won’t try, and kill millions iin support of their murderous ideology. The real threat isn’t that al-Qaeda is going to take over the country, it’s that they’ll kill as many of us as they can before we can hunt them down. That’s why we need to revamp our military, police, and intelligence services to deal with this new kind of threat.
