Is the West or the Islamic World at Greater Existential Risk?

Responding to Shannon Love, Lex wrote:

If the West wants to survive, it could destroy this threat with a small amount of physical exertion. The moral and intellectual energy are what is missing. Or, missing from most of Europe, much of Britain and far too much of the United States.

I think the energy is there, but the activation threshold has not, for a large part of our population, been crossed. All it would take to cross that threshold would be another one or two big attacks a la 9/11, or several years of smaller attacks in which many people are killed and westerners become demoralized and cautious about daily life. Either way it is likely that voters would eventually insist that their leaders deal with the problem no matter what, which is essentially what happened in Israel. And either scenario is ominous for the Muslim world in general and Arab Muslims in particular.

On this last point I agree with what I take to be the positions of Wretchard and of Jim Bennett. By responding forcefully abroad to terrorists and their patron states, and by sincerely encouraging development in those states of robust new democratic political cultures, George Bush has substantially weakened our enemies. Ironically, by doing so he has also reduced domestic political pressure for a radical response to terror to such a low ebb that many Americans refuse to accept that we are at war. However, as I suggest above, further jihadist attacks could provide the political impetus for a much more brutal response on our part.

It is a mistake to assume that the proportion in our population of “Jacksonians” who favor annihilating our enemies is static. In reality, further terror attacks would probably radicalize many Americans who now consider themselves moderate accommodationists, just as the Intifada and bus bombings transformed many Israeli leftists into Sharon voters. Indeed the irrepressible prevalence in our society of speculations about nuking Mecca and the like shows how close the Jacksonian undercurrent flows to the surface of our polite discussions. So whose society is in mortal danger? I don’t think it’s ours.

UPDATE: See also this. (via Hugh Hewitt)

The Smallest Rudder

These are pictures (via Gateway Pundit via Instapundit) of the bombs used in the recent “bungled bombings” in London. (The yellow strip in the first picture is a traffic line to give you some sense of scale.)

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.usFree Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

I have to ask: Is this all it takes these days to steer the course of mighty nations, a half-dozen disgruntled loons with homemade hand-grenades?

If so, we are all screwed.

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Consequences of Our Continuing Double Standard on Israel

Victor Davis Hanson is right as usual:

We in the United States preened that we were the “honest broker.” After the Camp David accords we tried to be an intermediary to both sides, ignoring that one party had created a liberal and democratic society, while the other remained under the thrall of a tribal gang.

Billions of dollars poured into frontline states like Jordan and Egypt. Arafat himself got tens of millions, though none of it ever seemed to show up in good housing, roads, or power plants for his people. The terror continued, enhanced rather than arrested, by Western largess and Israeli concessions.

Then the Islamists declared war on the United States. A quarter century of mass murdering of Americans followed in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the first effort to topple the World Trade Center, and the attack on the USS Cole.

We gave billions to Jordan, the Palestinians, and the Egyptians. Afghanistan was saved from the Soviets through U.S. aid. Kuwait was restored after Saddam’s annexation, and the holocaust of Bosnians and Kosovars halted by the American Air Force. Americans welcomed thousands of Arabs to our shores and allowed hundreds of madrassas and mosques to preach zealotry, anti-Semitism, and jihad without much scrutiny.

Then came September 11 and the almost instant canonization of bin Laden.

Suddenly, the prior cheap shots at Israel under siege weren’t so cheap. It proved easy to castigate Israelis who went into Jenin, but not so when we needed to do the same in Fallujah.

It was easy to slander the Israelis’ scrutiny of Arabs in their midst, but then suddenly a few residents in our own country were found to be engaging in bomb making, taking up jihadist pilgrimages to Afghanistan, and mapping out terrorist operations.

Worth reading in its entirety.

(via Democracy for the Middle East)