Mark Steyn: A War Without Polkas

A week and a half after the VE Day anniversary, here’s a date that will get a lot less attention: May 19, 2005. On that day, the War on Terror will have outlasted America’s participation in the Second World War. In other words, the period since 9/11 will be longer than the period of time between Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945.

Does it seem that long? For the most part, no. The War on Terror has involved no major mobilization of the population at large. In contrast to Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me),” “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “Victory Polka,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin,” American popular culture has preferred to sit this one out, aside from Michael Moore’s crockumentaries and incoherent soundbites from every Hollywood airhead who gets invited to European film festivals. And the response of U.S. government agencies hasn’t been much better: In his testimony to the 9/11 commission, George Tenet said blithely that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the CIA’s joke of a clandestine service. In other words, three years after 9/11, he was saying he needed another five years. Imagine if FDR had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS. In 1942, he’d have told the president not to worry, we’ll have it up and running by 1950.

So, while this war may have started with the first direct assault on American territory since Pearl Harbor, it’s clearly evolved into a different kind of conflict, one in which after three and a half years it’s hard for many Americans to maintain the sense that it’s a “war” at all. By now, National Review’s British, Commonwealth, and European readers will be huffing that the Second World War wasn’t three-and-a-half years long, you idiots; it was six years, except for certain latecomers who turned up halfway through. Fair point. But if the Americans were late getting into World War II they were also late getting into the War on Terror: Al-Qaeda’s bombers, Saudi moneymen, and Wahhabi clerics had been trying to catch Washington’s eye for years only to be dismissed, as then-defense secretary Bill Cohen said of the attack on the USS Cole, as “not sufficiently provocative.” You’ll have to do better than that, Osama!

So he did. And you have to wonder whether, despite the increased T-shirt sales among the impressionable young men in the Egyptian and Pakistani bazaars, that was such a smart move. When bin Laden started yakking on about his “war aims” — taking back Spain, the restoration of the Caliphate — it was easy to scoff, yeah, dream on, loser. But a cursory glance at demographics quickly made it clear that, insofar as Europe has a future, it’s likely to be an Islamic one. That being so, why louse things up by flying planes into buildings? Why not just lie low and in the fullness of time everything you want will come your way? The Wahhabists have successfully radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Albania to Indonesia; they’ve planted their most radical clerics as in-house padres throughout U.S. prisons and even the armed forces. Why screw things up by doing something so provocative it meets even Bill Cohen’s criteria for a response?

Here’s why. It’s always useful to test the limits of your adversaries, and, though it cost them their camps in Afghanistan and much of their leadership, the 9/11 attacks exposed many useful tidbits about the decadence of the West — the worthlessness of the post-modern NATO “alliance” and the active hostility of many of its key members to the United States, the immense deference accorded not just to Islam but to the most radical Islamic groups, especially when it comes to immigration and other aspects of national security. Many Islamists might have suspected all this, but it’s heartening to have it confirmed: If the “sleeping giant” is hard to wake up, his European pals aren’t sleeping so much as in irreversible comas.

Thus, if this war is, as existential struggles go, much closer to the Cold War, there’s one key difference. The Cold War was fought mostly by proxies and clients out on the periphery: Vietnam, Yemen, Chile, Afghanistan, Grenada . . . This time round the periphery’s falling into place rather easily: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon — moves in the right direction throughout the Middle East, swathes of Central Asia falling under U.S. influence . . .

But the real battleground is the West itself, the heart of Europe, where bombs in Spain, murders in the Netherlands, “honor killings” in Germany prompt only shrugs or preemptive capitulation from the political class. Perhaps in the end the comparison isn’t World War Two or the Cold War, but the one that created the modern Middle East in the first place — the First World War, which began with one specific act of violence and unraveled all the great European empires before it was done. Four years after 9/11, a war that started with a bang seems to have fizzled to a whimper — whiny Dems, bureaucratic Homeland Security, nothing much on the horizon. Not so. There’s plenty ahead.

" But the real battleground is the West itself, "

Always has been. It's such a shame that Mr. Steyn is just about the only one who seems to understand that fact.

21 posted on 05/11/2005 8:27:27 PM PDT by Lurker (Remember the Beirut Bombing; 243 dead Marines. The House of Assad and Hezbollah did it..)

Europeans are tumbling to the fact that in this anarchic world, America is the closest thing we have or ever had to a world ruler. They are very annoyed at this fact. The odd thing is they can't really help us fight the evildoers and can't really hurt us all that much either. In the span of human history the 60 years since World War II is an eyeblink, but in the ebb and flow of world power, World War II and its seriously nasty multipolarity is an eon ago.

Europe is limping along, attached to a mobile oxygen unit, but it will never be a world power again, not even as a unified EU.

Perhaps in the end the comparison isn’t World War Two or the Cold War, but the one that created the modern Middle East in the first place — the First World War, which began with one specific act of violence and unraveled all the great European empires before it was done.

One of those empires, interestingly enough, was the Ottoman. The Arabic resurgence has been fueled by oil wealth and propagated by radicals who were kept successfully repressed by the Turkish Sultans. T. E. Lawrence might not have done us all that much of a favor after all.

27 posted on 05/14/2005 5:29:37 AM PDT by knighthawk (We will always remember We will always be proud We will always be prepared so we may always be free)

Truth spoken. But don't forget to open your borders for those of us in the Old World who are not yet sedated. Some of us are not yet addicted to the multiculturalist laudanum.

Just come in legally. We would not want to be accused of hypocrisy.

Welcome.

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