INPLASTICITY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER:

Bush made the world a safer place: We may jeer him and tell him to go home, but America's allies continue to benefit from some of George Bush's decisions (Oliver Kamm, 6/17/08, guardian.co.uk)

[A]fter 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians".

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years has not been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society are not merely a criminal subculture, and still less an incipient liberation movement. Rather, they are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

The grand strategy pursued by the US under Bush has overestimated the plasticity of the international order, but it has got one big thing right. There is an integral connection between the terrorism that targets western societies and the autocratic states in which Islamist fanaticism is incubated.

Indeed, the international order wasn't plastic--it was glass and he broke it. Those Western leaders who wouldn't bend to our will have, for the most part, been replaced with folks who ill: Stephen Harper, Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy, Pope Benedict, whichever cipher is at the UN....

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2008 4:24 PM