Riding the Weak Horse II
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote that he detected a whiff of the 1930s in the air. And he is correct, there are a host of similarities between the bizarre appeasement practiced by Baldwin, Chamberlain, Dadalier, and Halifax and the inability of Tony Blair and George Bush to identify the enemy, much less wage effectual war against it.
Nor is Hanson the only one to draw a '30s analogy. Robert Tracinski, in an excellent, if misguided article entitled Five Minutes to Midnight catalogs similar analogies attempting to equate the current situation with that faced by the Western Powers in 1936, 1938 and 1939. However, like the recalcitrant world democratic revolutionists, Tracinski follows the analogies to an incorrect conclusion in arguing that a strike against Iran is the correct next step required to fight the war on terms advantageous to the West.
The problem is that like the generals of the old epigram, the media hawks are hoping to fight a previous war, in this case one more than sixty years past. Suppose, for a moment, that Iran was successfully invaded and occupied. How would this prevent future Sept. 11 attacks by Saudis visiting the United States on legitimate travel visas? If the conquest and occupation of Iraq did not prevent British citizens funded by Pakistani jihadists from plotting to bring down jets flying out of Heathrow, how would the elimination of the Iranian regime make any difference at all?
What the hawks have failed to understand is that one cannot end an internal threat through external measures. Just as there is no number of dead Iraqis that will protect America from Saudi Arabians, there is no magical number of dead Iranians that will preclude a threat from Pakistan or any other Islamic nation.
As I pointed out more than two years ago, Iran is only one of the two centers of global terrorism and it is the lesser of the two. As violent incidents everywhere from Spain to Seattle have demonstrated, the main threat posed to the people of the West is an internal one and that internal threat is funded by Saudi Arabia, not Iran. In fact, invading Iran will likely increase the internal threat, not reduce it.
While neocons hail with quivering excitement the president's recent adoption of their term ''Islamofascist'', this actually represents an attempt at continued linguistic appeasement in the cringing tradition that produced the ludicrous Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, the Council on American-Islamic Affairs' protests notwithstanding. There is, quite simply, nothing that is Fascist about ''Islamofascism'', as even a brief perusal of the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle will conclusively demonstrate. For example, one rather doubts that the imams would stand for ''The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations ...''
However, the '30s analogy does hold true in at least one respect. While reading the second volume of Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, I came across the following passage which described the situation in London at the time of the German invasion of Poland in Sept. 1939:
It was still His Majesty's Government's policy to avoid offending Germany; although Great Britain and the Third Reich were at war, Reith's BBC was uncomfortable with criticism of the enemy regime.
— William Manchester, ''The Last Lion — Alone 1932-1940'', p. 583.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. In light of that, it was interesting to read the Sunday Times which writes: ''Muslims have to be persuaded that we are on the same side, that there is no witch-hunt against Islam and that the wars involving British troops are about stopping Islamists and the corruption of their religion.''
But persuading Muslims that the West is on their side is not the responsibility of the West or its leaders. This is pure appeasement at its most insidious. And how can the current jihad be a corruption of a religion that has always been a religion of the sword?
The only responsibility of the West is to its native inhabitants, to demand that those non-Westerners who wish to reside in it will live by its standards, by the cultural norms of the West. Likewise, Western leaders have a duty to recognize the enemy as all of those who have declared themselves to be at war with the nations of the West and to give them what they have demanded, regardless of whether they live in Baghdad, Boston or Buckinghamshire.