Today’s Required Reading

Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure, and his latest OpinionJournal piece is proof positive. He writes on the danger of a stategy of appeasement in this war and why the appeasers of the past allowed the conditions that spawned the current wave of Islamofascism:

What went wrong with the West–and with the United States in particular–when not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to Sept. 11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the Khobar Towers in 1996, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American Embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: That debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy and Middle East state terrorism–and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it and go to war against it.

Part of the problem is that our intelligence services completely failed to understand the ramifications of what was going on in the Middle East – they completely missed the downfall of the Shah and the rise of Islamofascism – a sad tradition of ineptitude that has continued to this day. Part of the problem understandably stems from Cold War realpolitik in which defeating the menace of the Soviet Union took precedence.

However, the biggest problem currently is our lack of resolve and willingness to knowtow to political correctness. Al-Qaeda attacked us because they had done so before and our retaliations were completely inadaquate. Their mistake was assuming that an attack on our homeland would have the same results. They failed to understand American Jacksonianism and the will of our President to fight.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge we are at war, and right now we still have not done so. We are in the midst of the Third World War, a war that is against an enemy as pernicious and evil as the Nazis. Fewer than a thousand have died in the war on terrorism so far – less than one third of the number killed in a few hours on September 11, 2001.

If we cannot bear the small sacrifice we have borne so far, then we will be unable to maintain our freedom. We will be attacked again, and we will either have to close our society, which would be disastrous, or accept the deaths of thousands in perpetuity. Or, more likely, the next attack will be one that will result in us being forced to clean house – possibly with nuclear weapons. The choice we face is the hardship of a few dead soldiers dying to bring democracy for the Middle East or a war that will lead to millions of casualties. The choice we have to make is victory, or death. The costs and the benefits of both demand that we do what we must to win this war against Islamism.

However, as Hanson correctly notes, unless we can understand that we are in this war and acknowledge that choice, we cannot win. We must throw off the cultural nihilism, self-doubt, and unwillingness to spread the cultural values of democracy and freedom worldwide. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, we must bear any burden, aid any friend, and oppose any foe to ensure that Islamic fundamentalism does not metastize into an even greater cancer on this planet.