Through The Glass Darkly

Saudi "scholar" Suleiman al-Omar declared in June 2004: "Islam is advancing according to a steady plan. America will be destroyed." He may be right and here are some of the reasons why:

* American dependence on Middle East oil. Although American nuclear scientists had learned how to neutralize and dispose of nuclear waste, the US Department of Energy shut down the only facility in this country that could accomplish that safely and without risk. It would take 20 years to reactivate it.

* American insistence that entrepreneurism and free markets, competition and freedom of choice are the way to a better life for Muslims. Islamists reject that. "The West calls for freedom and
liberty. Islam rejects such liberty. True liberty is obedience to
Alla," as Sheikh Mohammed al-Tabatabi said in 2004. Judeo-Christians understood that and built America on those principles in the first place. America has lost her moral focus.

* The division in America over the war. Some don't believe we're at war at all, others want to take the fight to the terrorists. Some advise "dialogue," others want to nuke Islamic sites. "A house divided against itself" cannot win.

* The fact that the Muslims use the media and the Internet quite skillfully to con Western politicians and especially the Western media. The fact that al-Jazeera is aided and abetted by Western journalists is an example of this.

* The low level of Western political leadership. There is no FDR on the political scene with the ability to con, charm and downright lead this country into the kind of all-out effort to win this war or any other. The nation must be rallied the way it was in the 1940s, to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to get "down and dirty" to win this thing. The position of Secretary of Defense should NEVER be held by a civilian, especially in wartime.

* The lack of understanding, especially among American "progressives" of the true nature of the Islamic revival. They prefer to blame the revival on colonialism, ignoring the truth of Islam -- its oppression of dissent, its maltreatment of women, its hatred of groups like Jews and gays and its committment to use violence against them. "Progressives" prefer to overlook those little details and instead call attention to the mistakes Western governments have made in the past.

* Inconsistency in US policy. The "experts," academics and commentators who are the apologists for the worst that is done in the name of Islam. Bloggers and pundits who believe that their opinions are more important than the issues. With all this conflicting advice, US policy has become increasingly inconsistent.

* Underestimation of the Muslim world community and misunderstanding the nature of Islam. It is not a "religion of peace" nor is it a "religion hijacked" or "perverted" by "the few". Its moral intransigence and its jihadist ethic along with the refusal of most Muslims to share a common set of values with non-Muslims is justified by the Koran.

As David Selbourne wrote recently in the London Times, "Islam is not even a religion in the conventional sense of the term. It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind's problems. It therefore holds that it is in mankind's own interests to be subdued under Islam's rule. Such belief therefore makes an absurdity of the project to "democratise" Muslim nations in the West's interests, an inversion that Islam cannot accept and, in its own terms, rightly so. It renders naive, too, the distinction between the military and political wings of Islamic movements; and makes Donald Rumsfeld's assertion in June 2005 that the insurgents in Iraq "don't have vision, they're losers" merely foolish."

If we pull out of Iraq and leave Afghanistan, it is entirely possible that the best that could happen would be that we in the United States will have to learn to live as the Israelis do -- with terrorist bombings in our restaurants, hotels and theaters because Americans refuse to see the true nature of what we're up against. It's even more likely that we'll face nuclear suitcase bombs in our cities once Iran acquires capability to spread that technology around.

It's certainly not the future we invisioned for our grandchildren.