Decadence

Dictionary.com defines the above term as "A process, condition, or period of deterioration or decline, as in morals or art; decay...the state of being degenerate in mental or moral qualities."

For the past hundred years every dictator on the planet that wanted to challenge the Western democracies believed that they would win because their declared enemies fit this description. The German Nazis, the Italian Fascists, the Japanese militarists, the Soviet communists, ranging on down to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, all thought Westerners "soft," unwilling to pay any significant price in blood to defend its freedom and liberty-guaranteed way of life. Debacles of recent vintage like the botched hostage rescue attempt in Iran in 1980, the 1983 Beuirut Marine barracks bombing, and the "Blackhawk down" incident in Mogadishu in 1993, and even the failure to finish the war against Saddam in 1991 and the "war" in Serbia in 1999 that was conducted from three miles in the air and not at all on the ground all served to reinforce that impression in the minds of our enemies.

The mistake the black hat guys have always made is to exaggerate that impression and overplay their hand, as at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11. We may be at times a "pitiful giant," but we're not "helpless," and we are a giant, and when we finally do get aroused, woe be unto our attackers, as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the decimation of al Qaeda starkly illustrate.

I've written on several occasions previous of how the lesson I think the enemy drew from the Madrid bombings of April 2004 is not that they shouldn't have attacked America on 9/11, but that the attack wasn't big enough. Hit us with a WMD attack that kills/injures tens of thousands and even "Uncle Sam" might turn tail and run, or at least sit back and rethink his current course of action.

But there is another alternative which the enemy may have stumbled onto in London over the past few weeks: to borrow a baseball analogy, "smallball":

[T]oday’s apparent attacks in London show that al Qaeda is finally learning a lesson. Single, dramatic attacks or series of attacks over a single day will not get the job done. But a series of attacks, weeks or days apart, random, unpredictable, and persistent — what effect will they have?

The October 2002 D.C. sniper attacks are a good model of how to do terrorism correctly. Two men armed with a rifle and a mobile gun platform made 15 attacks over several weeks, killing ten and wounding three others. By some measures the story received media coverage at a pace and density equal to the 9/11 attacks, especially in the Washington area. The reason the operation worked so well from the terrorist point of view was that the violence was sustained and random. Anyone could be a victim at any time. The body count, which some people like to focus on as a measure of the effectiveness of attacks, was relatively low. But the fear factor — a true measure of effectiveness — was high. Luckily, polls showed that public anger ranked higher than fear, which mitigated the morale effects. But how long can anger sustain community will if small-scale attacks continue unabated? Likewise, today’s bombings may have resulted in few or no casualties, but that does not mean they were not successful. They news coverage is wall to wall right now — and who knows if this is the last attack? Will the public be as determined to strike back at the terrorists after the fifth attack? After the 50th?

In baseball, teams built around power - i.e. "chicks dig the long ball" - tend to not be as successful over all as teams built around consistent hitting - i.e. "smallball." Home runs are certainly more spectacular, or "sexy" if you will, but they're the exception, with a lot of strikeouts and stranded baserunners being the rule. Whereas if everybody in your lineup can hit - think Ichiro Suzuki - you won't be as exciting a team, but you will score, and win, more often.

In baseball parlance, 9/11 was a home run. But it was only a solo shot, and in the bottom half of the "inning" al Qaeda's declared enemy unloaded an avalanche of offense that completely buried them. And more to the point, it minimized their enemy's achilles heel weakness - Western decadence - by unifying a majority of the opposing populace behind leaders willing and eager to pursue decisive retaliatory action aimed not on tit-for-tat-ism, but on utterly destroying its attackers.

The Islamists can certainly go for an even bigger "home run" (measured in megatons and/or megadeath), but unless they already have the cells and hardware in place, that will prove more difficult than it would have been pre-9/11, perhaps prohibitively so. But frequent nickle & dime attacks - "death by a thousand nibbling ducks" - aims smack at the heart of Western decadence, feeding all the worst instincts of its worst political demographics, sewing division and discord, and...well, read for yourself:

The aftermath of the London terrorist bombings has demonstrated that the antiwar Left is severely afflicted by the political equivalent of battered-wife syndrome. With each new beating, the scarred and bruised victims of spousal abuse tend to excuse and rationalize the actions of their tormentors. A stubborn unwillingness to accept the proposition that their partners are violent louts plunges these woeful women into a morass of self-deception that spawns only further violence.

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It’s our own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn’t realize what good people we are.

And all the while, these “progressive” academics, pundits, and politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an understandable reaction to what they describe as “Western imperialism.”...

[T]he far-left views the world through a political prism that distorts this essential reality. Fixated by a knee-jerk hostility towards all things American, the likes of Ali, Fisk, and Galloway refuse to recognize the existence of this conflict, much less the stakes that are involved. Their primal instinct is to appease bin Laden and his cohorts rather than oppose them.

If you need more evidence of how an open-ended state of siege can wear down even a courageous, hard-headedly realistic people, look no further than Israel - which has been fighting a "war on terror" for the past fifty-seven years - entertaining the roaring folly of the Oslo "peace" process for nearly a decade, offering the disembowelment of their meager national territory, only to be rewarded with an escalation in the Palestinian terror war. And now, five years further down the line, no less a "right-wing hawk" than Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is bugging out of Gaza, which, in combination with the West Bank "terrortories," threaten to become a "new Taliban" in terms of a deliberately designed and designated terrorist state.

Call me cynical, but I don't think even the Anglosphere measures up to God's chosen people when it comes to "opposement" over appeasement. And yet Israel was beaten into at least temporary submission.

Let's put it into terms we Yanks can understand. If we had suffered civilian casualties proportionate to what the Israelis have just in the second Intifada, we would have lost somewhere around fifty thousand, or just short of the number of combat dead we suffered in Vietnam. But, like in Vietnam and unlike 9/11, the losses would have come not all at once, but in a steady, incremental, demoralizing stream.

And we know how the home front made the war in Southeast Asia turn out - an angry, self-defeating turn away from the very policies that were needed to win:

Scotland Yard has good cops and good investigators, but it seems pretty obvious what it’s going to take to break up this threat: Going deep into the Muslim communities of Great Britain, listening to the imams, figuring out who’s endorsing these acts or calling for jihad against commuters, figuring out who’s listening, and busting them. It’s going to take undercover work, and interrogations, and wiretaps, and motivating Ali the stool pigeon with alternating piles of cash and threats of deporting his mother. It is going to be a long, tough fight, and I wonder if the sensitive, postmodern, multi-culti Brits are willing to let their cops do the impolite stuff to their Muslim neighbors.

Jim Geraghty's is a rhetorical question - of course they won't. Look at the relentless attempts of "our" Democrats and even some tetched-in-the-head Republicans to gut the Patriot Act even as they criticize President Bush for failing to do enough to protect the homeland from terrorist attacks.

Or just read Mark Steyn:

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Be white, Anglo, and believe that a culture devoted to freedom and self-determination is superior to a culture fifteen centuries more primitive and characterized by death, slavery, and theocratic totalitarianism, apparently. Which is the flower of the very self-loathing that Mr. Lapkin describes.

President Abraham Lincoln famously quoted the LORD Jesus Christ from Mark 3:25 that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." We can fight the GWOT in the terrorists' homelands and we should. We can liquidate their fighters and shut down their financing channels and disrupt their operations wherever we can and sever their support from terrorist regimes like Iran and Syria, and we should. But if the enemy can diffuse himself to such a degree that even "lone gunmen" can wreak regular havoc with explosives-filled backpacks - even multiple duds like was the case in London today - and do so long enough, and we, the people, don't recognize and accept the necessity of doing what is necessary to protect ourselves, it is possible for the publics at large to lose heart, conclude that continuing the fight is pointless, and, just as in Vietnam, demand that the contemporary Allies (principally America, Britain, and Australia) cut and run.

And that would make another "home run" a far more distinct and horrifying possibility.

One thing appears certain: one way or another, Western decadence will become obsolete.

I pray it is abandoned voluntarily.