Deciding whether to defend civilization

Victor Davis Hanson:

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... grant a jihadist his 7th-century dream world, and within months even he wouldn't have a cell phone signal to call in an IED explosion.

So just as the central nervous system controls an animal's most powerful muscles, so too capital, politics, and armed forces are all governed by subtle, unseen public opinion, or the people's will to define and defend their civilization. For America soldiers to fight jihadists in Afghanistan or Iraq, Americans back home must grasp whom they are fighting and why. And that's the core problem when we consider the recent news and the West's response to it.

Intelligence sources announce that Iran is seeking to replace al Qaeda as the foremost anti-Western global terrorist organization. Not to be outdone, Al Qaeda is said to be desperately seeking a nuclear device. This is precisely at the time President Ahmadinejad announces the next step of uranium enrichment and more promises to end Israel.

International inspectors report that traces of plutonium are found in Iranian nuclear waste sites. The results of a terrorist with a plutonium-laced suicide belt in the New York Stock Exchange, the Mall of America, the Louvre, the Vatican, or the Harvard Library are like a water spill into a computer hard drive--the tiny drop unseen to the naked eye as it shuts down a way of life.

In the Middle East, Israeli intelligence warns that Gaza is to be the next Lebanon. The terrorists of Hamas worry that Hezbollah's Katyushas have upstaged their lesser Kassems. The very idea of Israel has suddenly been turned upside down. The last sanctuary of the world's Jewry that offered immunity from another Holocaust is now to be a one-bomb state that might ensure it. This is not Western paranoia, but Middle Eastern braggadocio. In that way, the Iranians trump Hitler--by not just writing about their plans, but by their president promising both to destroy Israel and to ignore international efforts that might not let him have the means to do so. Could anything be clearer?

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The rationalist would find a common Thucydidean denominator in all this madness, one of lost honor and rampant envy. There is wealth aplenty pouring into Iran and Iraq through oil that is sold at a high price in a world market whose sanctity is ultimate protected by the United States. So the poverty there of radical Islam is not material, but one of the soul.

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How odd that Iranians cannot design a car or computer, but can with the proper instruction manual spend millions of hours putting together Western-designed centrifuges, like the stamped lettered-parts of a build-it-your-self intricate model toy.

So again, the problem with the radicals in the Middle East is not the lack of capital or mental energy. Rather under the influence of Islamism and autocracy a deep-seeded cultural malady distorts human effort and creativity solely for destructive purposes. In all of these places, radical leaders such as a Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, or Sadr--the same thug has a thousand faces that come and go as we saw with Zarqawi, Saddam, and Arafat--are, like the Sultan and Grand Vizier of old, as fascinated with the West as they despise it.

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There is much more in this important essay. Hanson gets its in a way that the unintelligent left cannot comprehend. The naivety of the left is based on two misunderstandings. The misunderstand the motivation and determination of the enemy, and they also misunderstand the motivation and of those trying to stop them. They turn logic on its head and accuse those fighting back against the Islamic bigots of the very thing the bigots are trying to accomplish. The ridiculous Bush Hitler analogies and the Israeli Nazi analogies are both 180 degrees out of phase, but the people who do not want to resist the Islamic bigots are wrapped up in their emotions and have not engaged their intellect.