The End of the Beginning Sets Up 2008 Presidential Election

It is not about George Bush. That’s the real inconvenient truth of the poorly named ‘War on Terror.’ Rather, it is about a fifty year conflict in which we are at most one decade along, a war against what we can pray is the last totalitarian movement the natural world will see.

This started before George W. and he might be just a footnote by the time it is done.  And yet The Left, in a patented bit of self-defeatism, has met the enemy and found it to be us.

Brilliant. Let’s let Fascist Islamism win, in all its stultifying, life-defying, women subjugating, no rest until all non-Islamic infidels are dead or praying five times a day, living-in-the-false-past brutality. Looking for a state of denial? This qualifies.

Clash of civilizations? You bet. Not with the (vast, we hope) majority of Muslims, but with the alarmingly large (and growing) Islamist cohorts that refuse to accept modernity, in all its limiting and limitless messiness.

Nor is this simply a West or a Jew or a Christian v. Muslim issue. Sadly, in the grandest possible way, it is a Muslim v. Non-Muslim issue. After all, the Taliban came to global notice in March 2001 when they saw fit to dynamite two ancient, huge Afghani statues of Buddha. (The Buddha, who in the world hates the Buddha?) And it was Islamic radicals who blew up the Indian parliament some years ago, bringing India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear war. (BTW, if India didn’t nuke Pakistan then, why fuss now about dropping the pretense of their possession of nuclear weapons? Remember, mature democracies don’t threaten offensive nuclear war. Only totalitarian or pseudo-democratic states like Iran, North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq are prone to such toxic bombast.)

Yes, nothing is simple. Saudi petrodollars – fed by American SUVs – fund Wahhabi schools that teach a benighted vision of Islamic superiority and vengeance to millions of youngsters the world over. But complexity doesn’t change the most fundamental of universal standards of decency, the first corollary of the Golden Rule: thou shall not target civilians. (Here is a simple rule of thumb for telling the good guys from the bad: the good guys try to avoid collateral damage, while the bad guys consider collateral damage the goal.)

On 9/11 we stared into the valley of death, to all appearances the beginning of the end. Turns out it wasn’t the end, just the mass launch of a new beginning. Five years later, after ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and serious rear-guard skirmishes in London, Madrid, Amsterdam, Ankara, Paris and Bali, we are finally, painfully, bloodily at the end of that beginning.

Now the Middle Game begins. To get your bearings, compare the current IslamoFascist War (IFW) to the Cold War, its closest recent analog. Five years into that East-v-West conflict, our last Middle American rube of a President had awkwardly if in the end magnificently laid down the strategic markers of success: containment and Mutual Assured Destruction. Dismissed during his presidency, other than for one all-time-great photo opp, Truman has since risen to near Rushmorian proportions.  A strongly martial Democrat, of the kind now extinct, Give ‘em Hell Harry was broadly considered a dufus and an embarrassment by the Ned Lamont crowd of his day. Of course in those days the comfortable crowd at country clubs in Connecticut and elsewhere were solid Republicans.

Today’s comfortable Democrats are so dismissive of George W. many can’t bring themselves to even look at him, diverting themselves from the wolf at the door by fixating on a transitional character, the first of what will likely be five US Presidents during the full run of the IFW.

Consider Truman’s Cold War successors: Eisenhower did okay, JFK a bit of this a bit of that during two and a half years, LBJ disaster, Nixon self-inflicted disaster, Ford mostly stayed on his feet, Carter wimped out both economically and martially, literally leaving the Iranian hostage situation on Reagan’s doorstep. Then, finally, a hero.

Ronald Reagan, to the everlasting chagrin of the Left, immediately faced down a young Ahmadinejad, then ably and mostly elegantly won the End Game of the Cold War, bringing a fifty year conflict to a very successful conclusion with nary a nuke fired. A generation of Democratic sophisticates still can’t bring themselves to accept it.

Enough history: back to the future. How many Republicans and how many Democrats are going to follow George W. Bush in the White House before Beirut becomes a vacation hotspot again, before Amman is a thriving regional hub and before Cairo becomes a leading light of academia and engineering? In short, until the IFW is over?

The next couple of Presidents, assuming each serves two terms, will have the Middle Game to play. Their job will be to not mess up things any worse than they are, setting up the End Game for IFW President Number Four, if we’re lucky.

Unlike the last time someone tried to unseat the sitting wartime President, we can hope that 2008 candidates will realize that the key to winning the larger contest will be not just out debating the other party’s candidate. Rather, it will be to truly lead the Free World by speaking directly to the Muslims and every other ‘interest group’ on this spaceship Earth. Because the war won’t stop, can’t stop, until Islam grows up and accepts that it ain’t all about them, or their Prophet (Peace be upon him.), or what their Mullahs say. The IFW will end when Fascist Islam becomes relegated to the dustbin of history, there to sit in infamy with the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and the Cultural Revolution Maoists.

Give us an upcoming President that speaks that truth to that audience and we’ll get busy scouting out another spot up on Rushmore. (A woman’s face would look good, don’t you think?)

Political Cartoon of the Century

So Much for Papal Infallibility

Well, that wasn’t very helpful was it? I am referring, of course, to Pope Benedict’s ham-fisted challenge to Islam to prove itself a non-violent religion. ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,’ quoth the Pope this week, citing 14th Century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos.

Now the Armchair Historian appreciates historical references more than most, but this one strikes me as specious and spectacularly unenlightened. Consciously reaching back to a pre-Enlightenment source, especially to a Christian emperor of what is now Islamic Turkey, bespeaks intellectual juvenility unbecoming a modern global statesman.

Certainly Islam deserves to be challenged from within and from without. This youngest of the world’s great religions has much trouble in its tent, having failed to negotiate a harmonious entry into our now very small modern world, thus allowing itself to be defined by the death worshipping extremists of its lunatic fringe.

Indeed the entire world waits with baited breath for Islam to slough off its adolescent cloak of petulance so it can reclaim its heritage as a source of light among the family of men. Will this take ten more years, or fifty, or another century, or the better part of this fledgling millennium? No one knows, not the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Grand Ayatollahs or the Grand Muftis, not a roomful of Rabbis or even the Dali Lama. Though many of these learned leaders might dispute the form and even the premise of the question, the fate of the world rests on the answer.

More important than the environmental health of the Earth, than increased prosperity, than the eradication of disease, the maturation of Islam is the overriding issue of the current age. Which is why the Pope’s public entrée into the debate is so terribly disappointing.

He might have extended a hand of empathy to the vast majority of Muslims who are dismayed at the highjacking of their faith by a dogmatically corrupt minority. He might have pointed out that when the 14^th Century Christian Emperor made his challenge to Islam, Christianity was roughly the same age as Islam is now, yet sadly was more than a century away from halting the religiously inspired slaughter of infidels by Christians and even of Christians by other Christians.

In short, he might have said ‘Christianity had a difficult adolescence when we were 1400 years old too, so we know of whence we speak.’ He could have gone on to observe how Christianity made terrible mistakes, Protestants beheading Catholics, and Catholics torturing Jews, to name just a couple of depredations. He could have pointed out that as unspeakably horrible as these atrocities were, they occurred before technology brought us all into a small world studded with weapons of mass destruction, observing that the stakes are therefore profoundly higher today than in those relatively simple times.

He could have proposed a summit of the leaders of the world’s great religions, a Global Ecumenical Council, charged with identifying the truths that unite us, in order to repudiate the forces that benight us.

But he didn’t. He failed, proving yet again that we’re all just human.