(Courtesy of Instapundit)
From global superpower and world cop, America is now recasting itself as feel-good therapist for rogue regimes — seeking to know what’s really on the mind of Kim Jong Il, and ready to break bread with the ayatollahs. It all sounds so civilized.
But I am more worried now than I have been since that clarifying and awful morning of Sept. 11, 2001. While America’s policy may be shifting, the nature of our enemies has not. We are now seeking good-faith deals with governments that rule by terror, and lie and cheat with an impunity that our own leaders cannot afford.
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[W]ith terror-based governments, regime change remains the only real answer. And if America is now living in a dream world in which there is no war unless we choose to declare it, our best hope remains that these regimes — like the former Soviet Union — will collapse from within. On that score, our real allies are not the tyrants who now deign to haggle with us over “stability” while pursuing weapons of mass murder and supplying roadside bombs to terrorists.
Our natural allies are the people living under such tyrants; people who desire not a false détente while their despots build bombs, but the genuine rights and freedoms that America not so long ago was promising to support.
Via Pajamas Media, a video clip of comments by filmmaker Pierre Rehov at this year’s Liberty Film Festival, regarding what may yet be in store in the fight against radical Islam:
I’m going to give you my honest opinion. I think we are on the edge of World War III. This is no longer between Israel and the Palestinians. This is between Islam and the West.
I hope he’s wrong. I fear he may be right.
Bill Whittle is back with another characteristically on-point essay: “Seeing the Unseen, Part 1“:
I cannot think of a single example where appeasement giving in to an aggressive adversary in the hope that it will convince them to become peaceful themselves has provided any lasting peace or security. I can say in complete honesty that I look forward to hearing of any historical example that shows it does.
What I do see are barbarian forces closing in and sacking Rome because the Romans no longer had the will to defend themselves. Payments of tribute to the barbarian hordes only funded the creation of larger and better-armed hordes. The depredations of Viking Raiders throughout Northern Europe produced much in the way of ransom payments. The more ransom that was paid, the more aggressive and warlike the Vikings became. Why? Because it was working, thats why. And why not? Bluster costs nothing. If you can scare a person into giving you his hard-earned wealth, and suffer no loss in return, well then you my friend have hit the Vandal Jackpot. On the other hand, if you are, say, the Barbary Pirates, raiding and looting and having a grand time of it all, and across the world sits a Jefferson you know, Mr. Liberty and Restraint who has decided he has had enough and sends out an actual Navy to track these bastards down and sink them all
well, suddenly raiding and piracy is not such a lucrative occupation. So, contrary to doomsayers throughout history, the destruction of the Barbary Pirates did not result in the recruitment of more Pirates. The destruction of the Barbary Pirates resulted in the destruction of the Barbary Pirates.
And it is just so with terrorism. When the results of terrorism do the terrorist more harm than good, terrorism will go away. We need to harm these terrorists, not reward them, if we ever expect to see the end of them.
As always with Bill’s work, I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
Instapundit:
All sins are pardonable, apparently, so long as one is sufficiently anti-Bush. It’s a religion that transcends religious divisions. Bush: A uniter, not a divider!
“No Excuses for Terror” — a superb, must-watch BBC program by David Aaronovitch.
Thanks to my friend jcr for pointing out that I need to do a better job of keeping up with Little Green Footballs! And to David at Harry’s Place for pointing this out and getting it on LGF’s radar!
So many interesting events and great podcast episodes lately, so little time to blog about them… Following are notes about and links to a few from this past week that I especially recommend…
Penn Jillette did a real good show last Monday, September 18th, regarding the Pope’s recent comments and the violent fallout from them. Here’s a direct download link from pennradio.com.
As an agnostic, it’s pretty rare that I find myself paying any attention to what the Pope says, or feeling the need to take up his defense. But man have I felt sympathy for the guy in the very tall hat this past week. Though he seemingly did so inadvertently, in the course of quoting a historic work during a lecture to an academic audience, he’s ended up saying something that I think very much needed to be said, in a way that very few in the West have had the courage to do. As I said here before, in an earlier post titled “Wanting to believe”, I don’t know what it is about the apparent corellation between Islam and violent extremism. But there’s apparently something to the connection that we need to better understand and can’t allow ourselves to be intimidated out of talking about openly. The response from radical Islam this week, unfortunately, only served to illustrate the Pope’s point.
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I always look forward to Pajamas Media’s consistently good “Blog Week in Review” podcast, adeptly hosted by Austin Bay and with Instapundit Glenn Reynolds as a frequent guest, and this week’s talk with Mark Steyn about Mark’s book “America Alone” was especially good.
Some particularly good moments from Mark:
[@ +19:00] Our whole way of forming the world view of tomorrow’s citizens is by raising them in this rather, kind of fluffy non-judgmental cocoon. You know, I find it very interesting in American schools, I’ve got three young children in grade school. And they go on and on about self-esteem, you know, every individual has to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important. I went to an English boys’ school where the object was, on the first day of term, to have every last ounce of self-esteem hammered out of you by the end of the first week. So it’s an entirely different system to me. But my kids, they’re taught all the time self esteem, self esteem’s critically important. Well what about societal self-esteem? You know, what about saying that the society that you live in, the inheritance of that society is actually important and worth valuing too. And I think we don’t do a very good job of that, and I think it poses a great question mark in the end over the long term future of that.
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[@ +22:00] I think a lot of [that kind of] doom-mongering sells precisely because, in a sense, it is so unreal that it doesn’t require any serious effort from you. You know, Al Gore is going around saying that, because of Earth’s “excessive consumption” at the moment, it’s put Earth “out of balance” with the rest of the universe. Well, you know, I don’t know how he’s measured that. But the fact of the matter is, if you pose that as the problem it is so unreal, that there is almost nothing you could do that would have any effect on it. So it becomes, in effect, a simple way of demonstrating your moral virtue to no purpose whatsoever. And there seems to be a streak in the psyche of kind of post-nationalist, post-modern man that would rather do that than actually attend to the hard practical problems that need dealing with now. The more pie-in-the-sky the problem is, the more universal and intergalactic it is, the more it seems to appeal to a particular disposition these days.
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[@ +29:00] I think America really needs to think seriously about what allies it has, real allies it has, and do its best to shore them up. I’m immensely heartened whenever you go to Australia, because one of the most heartwarming features about Australia is you don’t just get to talk sense with the right there, but there’s a remarkable number of people who would identify themselves on the left in Australia who talk an awful lot of sense on this issue too. And I think America and Australia both understand … what it is about. It’s not about racism. It’s not about being anti-immigration. But it’s about understanding the importance of assimilating immigrants when they come here, and the only way you can do that is to have something they can assimilate with, which is a large part of the problem in Europe. Even if you wanted to assimilate with modern Dutch identity, what would it be? What would you do? And in America, whatever the problems here, there isn’t the same problem with just huge, millions and millions of alienated immigrants that they have in most of Europe now.
I’m looking forward to reading Mark’s book.
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Another very interesting podcast this week was the September 19 Sanity Squad podcast, “A Religion of the Perpetually Paranoid”, hosted as usual by neo-neocon, with commentators Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, and Siggy. One particular comment by Dr. Sanity at about 18 minutes into the discussion especially caught my attention, as it connected with my own concerns about worrisome alliances of thought that we’ve seen forming:
There is a very interesting intellectual connection. There’s a book now that is apparently a bestseller in Turkey, which is one of the more moderate Muslim states, and it is called “Attack on the Pope”. This is already a bestseller, this was a bestseller and existed before the pope ever made any comments, which predicts that Pope Benedict will be assassinated in Istanbul, which he is apparently scheduled to visit. There is also a movie, as you well know, about President Bush, “Assasination of the President”, that just won an award at a Canadian film festival, that shows the assassination of a sitting United States president. And I think that it is not a coincidence that these two things exist in both … and are celebrated in the intellectual halls of the Left, and in the intellectual (such as it is) aspect of Islam. There is something very strange going on in the world today, and … the underlying thing is a lot of rage, and anger, and hatred that is coming out in this kind of format.
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Last but not least, don’t miss the Glenn & Helen’s 9/18 interview with Jim Geraghty, which is chock full of insights that Democrats seeking election would be wise to pay attention to.
