The War We Can't Escape

President Bush the other day on his opinion that the comprehensive border erasure bill will remove the need for a border fence:

"I’m deeply concerned about America losing its soul. Immigration has been the lifeblood of a lot of our country’s history," the President said during an interview on Air Force One. "I am worried that a backlash to newcomers would cause our country to lose its great capacity to assimilate newcomers."

"When you grow up in Texas like I did, you recognize the decency and humanity of Hispanics. And the truth of the matter is, a lot of this immigration debate is driven as a result of Latinos being in our country. I have seen firsthand the beautiful stories of people being able to take advantage of opportunity and make solid contributions to our society." [emphasis added]

IOW, anybody who opposes Bush-McCain-Kennedy is an anti-Hispanic bigot. A description that also is meant to fit the vastly greater number of ugly stories they've seen of people coming here to suck off our safety net, demand cash withdrawals for life FROM our society, and otherwise demanding that WE assimilate to THEM.

Well, let's stipulate for the moment that Bush's Spongebob-esque idealism about Hispanic illegal aliens is all that and a bag 'o nachos. What about all the illegals who aren't Hispanic....

....and who ARE Muslim? Or from countries with known jihadist networks? According to the above study, there are 246,000 total Middle East migrants that have entered our country, almost all since 9/11. How many of them are illegals? How many of them are jihadis? How many does it take? There were only nineteen in the 9/11 plot, and look at the havoc they wreaked. How about the Fort Dix Six? Or the JFK Four? What if they'd been able to realize their grisly ambitions in their horrific entirety?

And, just to really curl your toes, what about the "Americanized" Muslims in our midst?

[A] new Pew poll of American Muslims....found that while 80% of U.S. Muslims believe suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam cannot be justified, fully 13% said they can be justified, at least rarely. One in four younger American Muslims find suicide bombings in defense of Islam “acceptable at least in some circumstances.”

About 29% of those surveyed had either favorable views about al Qaeda or did not express an opinion. Yes, they either gave al Qaeda thumbs-up or had no opinion about the terrorist group responsible for slaughtering nearly 3,000 of their fellow Americans on 9/11 and responsible for a global bloodbath from Bali to Britain, the Middle East, and beyond....

“It is a hair-raising number,” Radwan Masmoudi, president of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, told the AP. Indeed. The numbers should be a wake-up call, not another excuse for the mainstream media to downplay the threat of homegrown jihad. [emphases added]

Russell Defreitas, the JFK Four ringleader whose nickname is "Mohammed," is an American citizen. He wanted to blow up half of Queens for Allah.

Just take the 246,000 Middle-Easterners that have come here the first half of this decade, legally and illegally, and apply the above percentages of jihadist leanings. That's anywhere from, rounding off, almost 32,000 to over 61,000 homegrown "holy warriors" either in cells or easily recruited into them who are inspired by Osama bin Laden's Hitlerian example and want to top what he pulled off.

And President Bush wants to offer the illegal ones amnesty, in the hope that they will assimilate and become Islamic Horatio Algers.

Do any of us truly grasp what terrible trouble we are in? That though it exceeds the scope of Bush-McCain-Kennedy, the immigration bill will make the problem exponentially worse?

Andrew McCarthy is not optimistic:

Militant Islam, you see, is mustered in Iraq, where al Qaeda — the inspiration for Defreitas and his cohorts — has called America out. Like Defreitas & Co., Osama bin Laden and his ranks see themselves in a world war between the United States and a vision of Islam shared by tens of millions. (Think one-in-four, writ large). Iraq, they have decided, is their frontline, though very far from their only line. Everywhere, America is their target. Everywhere, terror — the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women, and children — is their weapon of choice.

For the new Democratic Congress and its growing wake of jittery Republicans, that turns out to be a choice worth living with. Oh yes, they’ll sputter about how barbaric and unsavory it all is. But, like those one in four Muslim males, they’re prepared to let terror rule the day. That’s the plan: al Qaeda blows up things and people; we leave, grumbling all the way home about civil wars and intractable hatreds between the "Religion of Peace"’s murderous sects; and al Qaeda triumphs … with bin Laden reminding his acolytes: See, I told you, they’re a paper tiger — make it bloody for them and we win.

Naturally, we’ll tell ourselves they’re not winning at all. They want Iraq? Let ‘em have it. Just like — when they killed enough of us — we let ’em have Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Who, after all, needs these hellholes?

Except … militant Islam doesn’t just want the hellholes. It wants everything. It will take the hellholes. For now. But don’t think for a second they’ll be appeased. The appetite grows as it feeds. Jihadists won’t stop until they break our will. Give them Somalia and they want the World Trade Center. Give them Iraq and they want JFK … and Fort Dix. They’re coming for us, they’re only too delighted to tell us they’re coming for us, and still we’re stunned when their insatiable hatred draws a bead smack in the middle of our shrinking comfort zone — this time, where a thousand flights move 125,000 people every single day.

Almost six years ago President Bush told us that this war would be characterized by two unique traits: (1) it would be a long war, like the Cold War, outlasting his presidency and requiring the dedication and vigilence of presidents of both parties; and (2) it would be a war fought mostly in the shadows, out of the public eye. I wonder if anybody ever told him that those two traits make this war one that America is, historically and culturally, supremely ill-suited to win.

I really wish somebody had. That way maybe he would have eschewed Wilsonian idealism about democracy - itself of a piece with his blind "shining city on a hill-ism" - and instead adapted a little George Patton ruthlessness and sent the tanks sweeping through Syria and Iran from Iraq and finished the war while the political window of opportunity was open. Such a crushing defeat for the global jihad is the only thing, short of the Muslim version of Franklin Roosevelt's Japanese internment camps, that might have discouraged home-grown Islamists and infiltrators alike from believing that their contributions to the "war for Islam" could make a difference.

That window closed with a thud last November. Now we can only sit and wait for our borders to be expunged, the war to be defunded, the next plot to succeed, and ponder whether even that will be enough to convince Donks and the RINO lapdogs - this time for real - that terror cannot be allowed to rule the day, lest the Islamic Caliphate rule the world, and we all die.

Man, there are times when I almost wish I wasn't an amateur historian....