Are We Ready?

In another excellent article, Victor Hanson analyzes our relationship with the terrorists. Despite the 9/11 attacks and the attacks since then, the pattern of our actions has barely changed from previous 30 years. We have still not been able to gather our determination to actually fight and extinguish the terrorist threat. Instead, after every outrage we threaten, retaliate in some minor way, and then wait for the next slaughter. Al-Qaeda and its associates have figured this out:

Murdering 3,000 Americans, destroying a city block in Manhattan, and setting fire to the Pentagon were all pretty tough stuff. And for a while it won fascists and their state sponsors an even tougher response in Afghanistan and Iraq that sent hundreds to caves and thousands more to paradise. And when we have gotten serious in the postbellum reconstruction, thugs like Mr. Sadr have backed down. But before we gloat and think that we've overcome our prior laxity and proclivity for appeasement, let us first make sure we are not still captives to the Minotaur's logic.

True, al Qaeda is now scattered, the Taliban and Saddam gone. But the calculus of a quarter century — threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait - is now entrenched in the minds of Middle Eastern murderers. Indeed, the modus operandi that cynically plays on Western hopes, liberalism, and fair play is gospel now to all sorts of bin Laden epigones - as we have seen in Madrid, Fallujah, and Najaf.

Hanson believes that the actions of the terrorists are completely rational given the expectations of our responses that we have created. And until we gather our strength and decide for ourselves that the only way to triumph is stop pausing and start acting definitively, the attacks will continue and the West will get weaker and weaker.

Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats - Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry - employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon - precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies - and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane - but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.