Mark Steyn - America Alone

4. Ensure that Islamic states that persecute non-Muslims are denied international legitimacy and excluded and marginalized in international bodies.

5. Throttle the funding of mosques, madrassas, think tanks, and other activities in America and elsewhere by Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others.

6. Develop a strategy for countering Islamism on the ideological front. Create a civil corps to match America’s warrior corps and use it to promote alternative institutions, structures, and values through a post-imperial equivalent to Britain’s Colonial Office, albeit under whatever wussy name is deemed acceptable: Department of Global Community Outreach or whatever (this, by the way, is what Washington should have created instead of the bloated bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security).

7. Marginalize and euthanize the UN, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and other September 10 transnational organizations and devote the energy wasted on them to results-oriented multilateralism. We need real allies now.

8. Cease bankrolling unreformable oil dictatorships by a long-overdue transformation of the energy industry.

9. End the Iranian regime.

10. Strike militarily when the opportunity presents itself.

Aside from numbers nine and ten, these are important but undramatic objectives — i.e., the kind of stuff our side does very badly. The problem with re-designating the “war on terror” as “the long war” is that it’s easy for it to degenerate a step further and lapse into non-war mode entirely. But what are the alternatives? Retreat behind Fortress America?

What fortress? The one Congress built on the Rio Grande as a Latino Welcome Center? The hyperpower has to be engaged with the world, if only because splendid isolation is rarely seen as such by others. What was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of young British Muslims? The then Conservative government’s conclusion in the 1990s that it had no dog in the Balkans junkyard. As Osama bin Laden put it: “The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that two million Muslims were killed.” How’d a list of imperial interventions wind up with that bit of non-imperial nonintervention? Because, for great powers, detachment from the affairs of the world is not an option: even-handedness by Washington will be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt in Wackistan or Basketkhazia. Isolation doesn’t travel. Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending. To a five-year-old boy watching Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession on the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his eightieth birthday — the greatest empire the world had ever known would have sunk to an economically moribund strike-bound slough of despond whose tax rates drove its best talents abroad, and whose most glittering colonial possessions now valued ties to Communist Russia over those to the mother country. It’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term. So think short-term: huge changes are under way right now.

The threat to U.S. power comes not principally from Chinese innovation or Indian engineering graduates but from America’s own cultural indolence, just as the sack of Rome was a symptom of the fall of the empire rather than the cause. The governing class found themselves, to quote Cole Porter, “fighting vainly the old ennui” — and that’s harder to do than fighting off an invading army. Bernard Lewis, the West’s preeminent scholar of Islam, worked for British intelligence through the grimmest hours of World War Two. “In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “In our island, we knew we would prevail, that the Americans would be drawn into the fight. It is different today. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy.” The advantage for the United States and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the Englishspeaking world is that Europe is ahead in the line, and its fate may wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the Atlantic. Islamism is militarily weak but ideologically confident. The West is militarily strong but ideologically insecure. The suicide bomber is a symbol of weakness, of a culture so comprehensively failed that what ought to be its greatest resource-its people — is instead as disposable as a firecracker. But in our self-doubt the enemy’s weakness becomes his strength. We simply can’t comprehend someone like Raed Abdel Mask, pictured in the papers in 2004 with a big smile, a checkered shirt and two cute little cherubs, a boy and a girl, in his arms. His wife was five months pregnant with their third child. So he kissed her goodbye and then big, smiling Raed strapped an eleven-pound bomb packed with nails and shrapnel to his chest and boarded the number 2 bus in Jerusalem.

We heard a lot about “root causes” in the weeks after September 11 — mostly the usual ones: “poverty breeds despair,” etc. But the September 11 murderers were middle class and educated, which is one reason why they were so skilled at their job that day. It was carefully plotted. They hijacked long-haul flights with the most fuel at the time of day when airport security would be even more careless than usual. It was brilliantly planned, superbly executed. The perpetrators trained to become jet pilots — a profession that would guarantee a good life anywhere around the world. They could be pulling down six-figure salaries instead of Manhattan skyscrapers. But they went to pilot school and trained in a highly disciplined fashion so they could make one flight, one time, one way: into a tall building. We cannot fathom men such as Mohammed Atta and Raed Abdel Mask. But, if you were the late Messrs. Mask and Atta following events in North America and Europe, wouldn’t we strike them as a little odd too?

When we hear about some guy in a cave dreaming of the new caliphate, we think he’s nuts. But if you were in the cave watching a CNN bulletin in which legal analysts explain why the U.S. Supreme Court decided to confer Geneva Convention rights on unlawful combatants under an unprecedented reading of Common Article 3 or watching New York Times executives explain proudly how important it was for them to reveal fatally damaging details of a national security terror-tracking program for no good reason whatsoever, wouldn’t you conclude that we’re the ones who are nuts? If you’d been in the cave and had your radio tuned to National Public Radio for the following exchange, wouldn’t you have been splitting your sides (and not because your suicide-bomber belt went off early)? This was an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition with the mayor of Toronto, after the arrest of seventeen alleged terrorist plotters. I was laughing so much I drove off the road. There ought to be a health warning before these cockamamie public broadcasting gagfests. Hizzoner David Miller warmed up with a bit of boilerplate Islamoschmoozing: “You know, in Islam, if you kill one person, you kill everybody. It’s a very peaceful religion. And they’re as shocked as Torontonians are. And — ”

Renee Montagne, the NPR anchorette, instantly spotted the ghastly breach of PC etiquette and leapt in: “Well, they sort of are Torontonians,” she pointed out.