“We will not rest until we stop all terrorists of global reach, and for every nation that harbors or supports terrorists there will be a day of reckoning,” says President Bush.
Let’s hope he means it. Until we overwhelmingly smash every government responsible for all the terrorism against the United States, Israel and the West of the last twenty years — we have not won. Until Saddam Hussein, the mullahs of Iran, the behind-the-scenes terrorists of Syria and the PLO all join the ash heap of history, we remain in mortal danger.
The easy U.S./British military victories in Afghanistan have not saved us from future terrorism in the United States. If anything, they have increased the danger. Why? Not because it was wrong to attack Afghanistan — but because it’s wrong to underreact to such a grave threat as the one we now face. Stopping in Afghanistan — or stopping with bin Laden — would be an underreaction of epic and catastrophic proportions.
It is now clear that World War III began with the Iran hostage crisis of the late 1970’s. Subsequent terrorist acts (throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s) against our embassies, soldiers, ships and civilians culminated in the (so far) worst events to date of 9/11/01. We fool ourselves if we think this current war in Afghanistan is a new war — or if we think it’s soon to be over, even with the capture of Osama bin Laden. The third world war is, at the core, a war of secular values against the values of the Dark Ages — that is to say, the values of the fundamentalists who inhabit and rule the Middle East, with Israel being the lone exception to the rule.
Just as Soviet Communism was falling back in the early and mid-1980s, the actual war against the United States was escalating. The determination of these fundamentalist organizations and nations to destroy us surpasses any prior desire of Communists or Nazis to overcome us. The Communists and the Nazis merely wanted to rule us; the Islamic fundamentalists want to destroy us, and take themselves with us. This is truly the greatest danger we have ever faced.
The war against terrorism will be over when the peoples of the terrorist nations — and we know full well who those nations are — become so frightened that they would never even say a word against the values of freedom, individual rights, capitalism and secularism of the West — much less raise so much as a slingshot against us, for fear of being bombed into the pre-Dark Ages. Can this be accomplished without an escalation to nuclear warfare at some point? It’s inconceivable to me that it won’t. The escalation which began in the late 1970’s continues to grow. Even our cautious current leaders such as President Bush openly acknowledge that the next terrorists are planning the next attacks as we speak. How can it not eventually go all the way in a war already more than twenty years old? Presently there are credible reports that Moslem terrorists are in the early stages of developing nuclear weapons. Do you think the concept of mutually assured destruction will stop people who crave destruction of self and others? If so, you are most naive.
Has our own military action so far, however successful, been enough to save us from those whose only purpose in living is to destroy all things Western, all things secular — all things which make life worth living? Of course not. Does President Bush recognize this? We can only hope so. Your or my very life may depend upon it. Our own days of reckoning are upon us.
