Conventional wisdom maintains that America and the West are not under attack. The terrorist incidents are either dismissed as passing epiphenomena, or presumed to be the regrettably violent expression of a legitimate sense of Islamic grievance against the West.
The Islamists themselves keep adding to the list of alleged/imagined grievances, which the Left obligingly picks up and uses to attack those governments that do contribute to the world's defense against terror.
This defense is primarily being waged by the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world: the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, and India. The conservative governments in these countries are under relentless attack by the Left.
A majority of polemicists have taken the position that the West in general, and America in particular, is fragile in the face of a protean enemy: Islamic fascism. The Left is not in this fight. Indeed they do all they can to undermine our defense, in effect to assist the enemy. The Left has, in word and deed, joined the enemy. The sooner we acknowledge this truth the better.
So it is true that in the short and medium term the West will be increasingly fragile in meeting these two enemies: Islamic fascism and the international Left.
Orson Scott Card, in his article "How Our Civilization Can Fall", brilliantly argues a parallel between ancient Rome's Pax Romana and a modern Pax Americana, that the military of each provided the defensive bulwark behind which a trans-border trading system developed. Globalization is a system of global trade that America's military has made possible. Card explores how in the Roman world the system broke down as the Roman military's protection was gradually compromised.
The international Left compromises America's military from inside the West. The projection of American military power is constrained so routinely now, in a myriad ways, it's hard to see America ever launching another elective, pre-emptive military mission after the media circus of defeatism and negativity over Iraq of the past 3 years. The American military's protection of the global trading system has already been seriously compromised. Card's point is well-taken.
Gerard Vanderleun, in "Toying With Genocide", takes the opposite view. He maintains that the Islamists will be defeated, but only in the long term, when the West finally grows tired of the endless homicide bombings, hijackings, kidnappings and beheadings. A serious co-ordinated response will begin when that weariness sets in. In those early stages it will still be a war waged with the West's modern conceit of self-restraint.
Victory will only occur when the gloves come off, likely after a series of devastating terrorist attacks on Western and American targets. In that context, as many European cities continue their transformation into Mogadishu, Vanderleun sees Europe reverting to form. It will use those techniques of localized genocide "it perfected in the last century. Europe is very, very good at police states, purges, death camps, massacres and Gulags." The U.S. he sees deploying a 'remote genocide': nuclear strikes on population centers in the Moslem world. Not only can the West survive "another 9/11, it can survive another hundred 9/11's."
In the short and medium term the West will continue to be fragile, by choice. Inevitably, however, if the Islamists' terror attacks continue, a horrific reckoning will befall the Islamist forces and their Moslem hosts. It is an outcome the West would do almost anything to avoid.
The international Left will almost certainly continue its campaign of subversion, though it's hard to see how their credibility will be maintained once the endgame starts.
We have the Left to thank for this delay in the West's struggle for cultural self-defense.
