War without End

Doing my duty at PJ today, I also came across Dan Drezner’s post on John McCain’s opening speech at the Brussels Forum. It seems the Arizona Senator buried his lede, adding as an aside that we would probably be dealing with the WoT for the rest of the century.

Whoa…. This century is only six years old. My daughter was born in 1998. If McCain’s right ( and I am afraid he is), that means she will be confronting this horror until she’s roughly a 102. (Talk about getting a dad depressed. ) Kind of puts the ultimate kibosh on Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” doesn’t it, not to mention adds a soupcon of skepticism to one’s evaluation of his recent attack on his former neocon friends. The problem for the neocons these days is that everyone seems to be picking on them, although they are the only ones who ever came up with an idea of how to solve this mess in the first place. Right or wrong they’ve made an attempt (had a theory). No one else really has.

Which is why part of me would like to see the Democrats elected in ’08. If McCain’s correct about the time frame and we are engaged in a reupped Hundred Years War with Islamism, all our political parties (and ones unknown) better be prepared to deal with it. The frivolously hostile Bush bashing persona of a vast portion of the Democratic Party must be replaced by some serious foreign policy thinking. They literally have to grow up and, sometimes, in order to grow up you have to be thrust into the middle of the process, have responsibility.

Ironically, in the midst of writing this brief post, a delivery man appeared at my door with a copy of my pal John Podhoretz’s new book about Hillary – Can She Be Stopped? I picked it up and, like everything John writes, it’s compulsively readable. He makes the case against Hillary as well as anybody could. Still… and I’m sure John would agree with this… no one knows the state of our world next week, let alone the first Tuesday in November 2007. So if Hillary is ultimately the one to swear on the Bible before John Roberts (the nightmare vision in John’s introduction), I sincerely hope she realizes her first and by far most important mission is the preservation of Western Civilization as we know it. I believe and hope for that more than I could possibly care whether she or anyone is a Democrat or a Republican.