The West's Last Chance?

Mark Steyn's weekly Chicago Sun-Times column always comes out over the weekend, and it's almost always a delight to peruse. This one was no different:

I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti-masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."

During the Cold War (or, as I prefer to think of it, World War III), there was a book on the subject from a conservative perspective entitled None Dare Call It Treason. It was a frank examination of the stubborn left-wing insistance upon appeasement and disarmament as the means to "peace" with an aggressive, imperialistic, ever-expanding Soviet Union, a concept that was fully implemented during the Carter presidency with miserable results yet was pushed anyway right through Ronald Reagan's White House tenure to the USSR's collapse in 1991 as a direct result of the peace-through-strength policies he successfully pursued.

The gist was that in just about any other time, vehement demands that the nation weaken itself in the face of a clear and self-evident threat to its very existence from a huge, heavily armed enemy power would have been called for what it appeared to be - treason. Whether witting or unwitting, the end result was the same, but the charge was never floated because of the stigma of "McCarthyism" that lingers even to our present day.

If the possible motivations of the American Left could not be uttered then (in the present era they've been transferred neatly to opposition to Operation Iraqi Freedom), today, as Mr. Steyn wittily points out, not even the name of our even more clear and self-evident current enemy, which makes no pretense of concealing his enmity, hostility, and objectives, can be uttered by those same people who have made cultural self-loathing a political fetish.

Steyn not only names the enemy, but nails the same left-wing motivation as well:

I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing who it is we've lost to.

Tony Blankely has just published a book on this timely subject, The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, and he leaves no doubt that defeat and/or disaster in this war is no joke and no "right-wing fantasy":

Blankley explained that he's been keenly focused on the issue of terrorism since the morning of September 11, 2001 when he stood in a field outside his house watching smoke rise from the nearby Pentagon. In conversations with experts both inside and outside of government over the last four years, however, Blankley said he'd come to the conclusion the West remains in a state of "deep denial" over the nature of the threat we face. "The danger," he tells me, "is more than just bombs, it's also the cultural assertiveness of Islam."

That, it seems to me, is key, if not the very heart of the matter. There Osama bin Laden sits, whether in a cave somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier or in a moderately comfortable billet in Iran someplace, besieged, hunted, on the run, and yet he remains supremely convinced that time and the cultural retreat of Western Civilization are on his side and make the ultimate victory of the Caliphate over the infidel "Crusaders" (and the Jews) inevitable.

Just look at what's happened to the Old World:

Of particular concern to Blankley is the speed at which Islam is asserting itself throughout Europe; a process exacerbated over the last few decades by liberal immigration policies, falling birthrates across the Continent, a decline in the willingness of Muslims to assimilate, and an adherence to the diktat of tolerance among Western elites that has prevented any meaningful discussion of the issue.

As a result, Blankley argues the fate of Europe now hangs in the balance. "The threat of radical Islamists taking over Europe," he writes, "is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940's."

This echoes Steyn's sober observation that Russia is "dying" and being inexorably drawn into the Islamic orbit, a harrowingly destabilizing development that would put the largest repository of non-Western nuclear weaponry on Earth under the indirect control of Muslim fanatics in Tehran, Damascus, and whatever additional "moderate" Arab regimes eventually topple to OBL and friends.

This is what is currently at stake in the Middle East, and why just democratizing Iraq, as noble and epic an achievement as that is, is not enough. The terror regimes in Iran and Syria must meet the fate of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or the beachhead of democracy, yes, but more importantly, peace (in the form of an absence of Islamic theocracy and its festering anti-Western/anti-Israeli hatred), will, it seems to me, inexorably erode (assuming that we withdraw in the near future) no matter how well-trained Iraq security/military forces become.

As it stands now, we've merely bought ourselves some additional time - and, with the mullahgarchy on the doorstep of the nuclear "club," perhaps not even that. The war itself remains only half fought and entirely up for grabs until we finish it.

And until we - ALL of us - are willing to call out the enemy, and, in like kind, re-embrace our own Western/Judeo-Christian culture and rally to its defense, the final outcome will remain in serious doubt.