Mark Steyn - America Alone

So any retaliation would be down to others. Would Washington act?

It depends how clear the fingerprints were. “Mutually Assured Destruction” only works if you know who lobbed the thing your way in the first place. One reason Iran set up Hezbollah and other terror franchises is to have “plausible deniability.” Actually, it’s implausible deniability, but that’s good enough for the UN. So, if the links back to the mullahs were just the teensy-weensy bit tenuous and murky, how eager would the United States be to reciprocate? Bush and Rumsfeld might, but an administration of a more ClintoPowellite bent? How much pressure would there be for investigations under the auspices of the UN? Perhaps Hans Blix could come out of retirement, and we could have a six-month dance through Security Council coalition-building with the secretary of state making a lastminute flight to Khartoum to try to persuade Sudan to switch its vote. The Iranian version of No Dong will be able to hit not just Tel Aviv but also Rome, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and London. How will the European political class react? Will it stand firm against threats from Tehran? Or will it take the view that there are ways to avoid having to confront incoming Islamonukes? You might, for example, approve the spectacularly large mosque wealthy Muslims have been wanting to build in your capital city. Or make certain well-connected heads of Muslim lobby groups members of a special government commission. You might appoint a minister for Islamic education to your cabinet. In other words, “the Muslim bomb” is likely to accelerate the Islamification of Europe, because Islamification more or less brings you under the Persian nuclear umbrella and encourages Tehran and its clients to turn their attentions elsewhere.

“Men of intemperate mind never can be free; their passions forge their fetters,” wrote Edmund Burke. From the ayatollahs to the freelance jihadists, there are, in the end, no “root causes” — or not ones that can be negotiated by troop withdrawals from Iraq or the flagraising ceremony for a Palestinian state. There is only a metastasizing cancer that preys on whatever local conditions are to hand. Five days before the slaughter in Bali in 2005, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. Must be all those French troops in Iraq, right? So much for the sterling efforts of President Chirac and his prime minister, the two chief obstructionists to Bush-Blair-neocon-Zionist warmongering since 2001.

In the months after the Afghan campaign, France’s foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, was deploring American “simplisme” on a daily basis, and Saddam understood from the getgo that the French veto was his best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. Yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker. If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it. But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, “We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels.”

No problem. They are all infidels.

When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements I tend to take them at their word. As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they’re happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. No problem. We are all infidels. You can be a hippy-dippy hey-man-I-love-everybody Dutch stoner hanging out in a bar in Bali, and they’ll blow you up’ with as much enthusiasm as if you were Dick Cheney.

Back in February 2002, Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent (i.e., he’s reliably wrong about practically everything), wrote a column headlined “Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl.” It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you’ll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is “an own goal of the worst kind,” as it ensures he won’t be able to get your message out, the message being — Fisky presumed — “the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees,” “the plight of Pakistan’s millions of poor,” etc.

Somehow the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out. Pearl’s severed head is the message. That’s why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrassas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. It was a huge hit. The message got out very effectively. In our time, even the most fascistic ideologies have been canny enough to cover their darker impulses in bathetic labels. The Soviet bloc was comprised of wall-to-wall “People’s Republics,” which is the precise opposite of what they were — a stylistic audacity Orwell caught perfectly in 1984, with its “Ministry of Truth” (i.e., official lies). But the Islamists don’t even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say — and we choose to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G-8 summit and the world’s leaders twitter about how “tragic” and “ironic” it is that this should have happened just as they’re taking steps to deal with the issues — as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming. Even in a great blinding flash of clarity, we can’t wait to switch the lights off and go back to fumbling around on the darkling, plain.

A world without order eventually liberates all restraints. Even in low-level conflicts there’s no monopoly of depravity: Americans think of “Northern Ireland” as being the IRA versus the Brits. But it doesn’t stop there: there were plenty of “loyalist” paramilitaries too, groups that took the view that if the other side was blowing up their civilians maybe a little reciprocity was in order. Islamists are foolish to assume that freelance nukes go one way. If a dirty bomb with unclear fingerprints goes off in London or Delhi, it’s not necessary to wait for the government to respond. As in Ulster, there’ll always be groups who think the state power is too pussy to hit back. So unlisted numbers will be dialed hither and yon, arrangements will be made, and bombs will go off in Islamabad and Riyadh and Cairo. There will be plenty of non-state actors on the non-Islamic side. In the end the victims of the Islamist contagion will include many, many Muslims.

But we surely don’t need to wait for Iranian nukes, do we? The Bali bombs and Madrid bombs and London bombs have already lit up the sky: they make unavoidable the truth that Islamism is a classic “armed doctrine”; it exists to destroy. One day it will, on an epic scale.

Can America win its “long war”? If you think the question’s ridiculous, well, other countries are certainly asking it. Because, if America can’t, nobody else in the developed world can, and they’d be well advised to begin reaching their accommodations with the new realities, an Islamic Europe and a nuclear Iran being merely the warm-up acts. A good place to start any consideration is the Sunni Triangle. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove into Fallujah. What a dump — no disrespect to any Fallujans reading this. I had a late lunch in a seedy cafe full of Sunni men. Not a gal in the joint. And no Westerners except me. As in the movies, everyone stopped talking when I walked through the door, and every pair of eyes followed me as I made my way to a table.