As we near the 5th-year anniversary of 9/11, there is something strange in the air-almost a pause or lull-before-the-storm sort of feeling. Those who feel that Manhattan, DC, Madrid, London, Bali, Lebanon, etc. are all part of a larger pathology in a failed Middle East of radical Islam’s reactionary furor with modernity, and the West in particular for saturating the globe with it, expect more to come.
But even the doubters who prefer ignoring the Danish cartoons, the French riots, the murders in Holland, the daily hatred that emanates from Middle-Eastern state megaphones; or who wish to appease it; or who wish in their frustration to blame Bush (“Bush lied, thousands died”; “No blood for oil”) for inciting radical Islamists, themselves are ever more doubtful.
What, after all, is behind the plots to blow up the Holland tunnel in NY, or the German trains, or the London-based airliners? Are they all explicable by Bush and/or Blair, and are they really just minor near-misses, when even in failure they cause millions unease, discomfort, and the airline industry, to take one example, millions of dollars.
So we are in a sort of “Phony War”, analagous to the period after Poland but before the invasion of France (about October 1939 to May 1940), when Western Europeans still hoped Hitler would be satiated, or might turn reasonable, or might remember the nihilism of WWI, or might be deterred, and so did not take resolute, preemptive action, but waited for the blow to be struck.
And it was struck — and with a strong wind Churchill then blew in and Lord Halifax, Lloyd George, Duke Edward, Stanley Baldwin, and all that deranged crowd blew out. The Democrats should take warning and not suffer the same fate.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member