Facing Reality

One wonders how many more terrorist attacks in different countries it will take for the left to understand that this is not all about Bush. (A lot more, if you read Leonard Pitts' editorial in today's Journal/Sentinel. Link here to the online version at the Detroit Free Press).

I quote...

Here's my take: Staggered and made to feel helpless by the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation needed something to hit. So we hit those that needed hitting -- the Taliban, which had sheltered Osama bin Laden -- but we didn't stop there. Apparently, we bought into the xenophobic notion that taking down a Muslim tyrant who wasn't threatening us was the same as taking down the Muslim extremists who had hurt us so badly.

Hopping mad and led by a president spoiling for a fight, we attacked the wrong guy. And many of us didn't care because it gave us the sense that we were doing something. It gave us false comfort.

It is past time we faced that fact.

Yes, I would agree with Leonard that many in this country and elsewhere are operating under a sense of false comfort.

But for very different reasons....

Contrast Leonard's predictable response to the London bombing with Nick Cohen's piece in The Observer.

In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought.

All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him....

But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot....Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows.

And this from Charles Moore, in the Telegraph, "Where is the Gandhi of Islam?"

The strength of a civilisation is shown not only in its great monuments and works of art, or in its famous people: it appears also in the instant, instinctive behaviour of millions at a moment of crisis. By this measure, London is part of a great civilisation.

Yet there seems to me to be a radical disjunction between our heroic capacity to deal with the immediate effects of terrorism and our collective refusal to confront what lies behind it. The effects of this disjunction are, literally, fatal.

The inimitable Stephen Hayes (from Milwaukee!) has another great article on the linkage between Iraq and al Qaeda, The Mother of all Connections.

Perhaps it is simply too frightening for the left to confront the reality of terrorism. It is more safe and comfortable to blame our government for the extreme hatred that drives these Islamic extremists. Somehow, that gives them the feeling that the situation really is under our control....

False comfort indeed.