PITY THE POOR ROACH (via Eric Timmons):

Europeans are worse than cockroaches: There is a Cold War between the US and the EU, says Mark Steyn, and it will end with the collapse of Old Europe (Mark Steyn, 11/08/03, The Spectator)

Tariq and co. are right to this extent: in the scheme of things, it’s not about Islamic terrorism. The Islamist goal is a planet on which their enemies are either dead or Muslim converts. That’s not going to happen. But Islamism is sufficiently disruptive to rupture permanently the old ‘Western alliance’. A lot of things have been said on both sides, but what’s impressive about the Europeans is the palpable desire for America to fail, and Bush to fall.

I can’t see that happening. On election day next November, the Democrats have no chance of taking back the House of Representatives and they’re all but certain to lose seats in the Senate. Bush is likely to be re-elected: with that 7.2 per cent growth in GDP, it’s hard even for the BBC to keep pretending America’s in the middle of some sort of recession; and whatever happens in Iraq it’s difficult to see the Democrats, running on a foreign policy of Cut & Run, being the beneficiaries. But the trouble with a war on terror is that the victories go unreported -- the plotters who get foiled, the bombers who don’t make it through. All you hear about are the defeats. Let’s say there’s a terrorist attack in the US in the next 12 months and it kills several hundred people. On the one hand, you could argue that this shows the soundness of Bush’s judgment in making terrorism the priority of his administration. On the other, you could argue that this proves he never learnt the lessons of the failures of 11 September. Knowing the American media, I’d bet on the latter line being the one they settle on.

But other than that, the arguments over the next few years are going to be between conservatives -- between those who think it is worth pushing on with an ambitious programme to bring the Middle East within the non-deranged world, and those who figure that’s doomed to fail and we should settle for something less. This project is in the national interest of the United States but, in the end, the fate of the world’s hyperpower does not hinge on it.

Mr. Steyn tends to be almost sui generis, but it seems fair to loosely group him with the neocons. He's certainly been as belligerent in his post-9/11 prose as anyone. So it's especially gratifying to see him make the necessary distinction that not just Iraq but the entire war on terror is for the United States a war of choice--we are not threatened in any serious sense by Islamicism.

MORE:
-An Open Letter to the Party of Wilson and Roosevelt (Michael J. Totten, 09/22/2003, Tech Central Station)

An old left-wing slogan says Fascism Means War. Slap it on a bumper sticker. Now is not the time to retire it. Our enemies in the Terror War are totalitarian religious fanatics, everything liberals and the left despise. They killed and enslaved millions on the other side of the world. Then they attacked our country. They are not, as Franz Fanon put it, the wretched of the earth. They are the murderers and oppressors of the wretched of the earth.

Third World liberation is an old cause of the left. Marxists hijacked that dream and shackled it in a labor camp. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Terror War is our chance to make it right.

The Democrats must support without apologies the spread of liberalism and democracy to all. Be the champions of freedom for every human being. Address the root cause of terror by striking at its source; tyranny over the body and mind of man.

The Terror War will outlast the Bush administration, and America's enemies know it. Surely they look eagerly forward to President Bush's retirement. Let us not make them smile on that day.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2003 6:05 AM