In case you missed this essay by Andrew Sullivan in the Sunday Times of London, it is very long and very good. Read it from the beginning, but here is how it ends:
It should be conceded immediately that the United States has been neither perfect in its conduct of the war nor innocent in its long history of engagement with the Middle East. Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, you could well argue that the U.S. committed too few troops to Afghanistan, misjudged the nuclear shenanigans in Pakistan, woefully under-estimated the security needs in post-war Iraq, and failed to mount as aggressive a diplomatic offensive in the months before the Iraq war as was necessary. It would also be hard to find characters more likely to rub Europeans up the wrong way than George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. So let’s concede all that. Let’s concede also that almost every Western government misread the intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The deeper point is still this: even if you concede all this, the Islamist war against the West was not created by these mistakes. It existed and grew in strength and potency throughout the 1990s. it draws its roots from the Egyptian Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s. It is quite candid in its goals: expulsion of all infidels from Islamic lands, the subjugation of political pluralism to fascistic theocracy, the elimination of all Jews anywhere, the enslavement of women, the murder of homosexuals, and the expansion of a new Islamic realm up to and beyond the medieval boundaries of Islam’s golden past. Bin Laden spoke of reclaiming Andalusia in Spain long before George W. Bush was even president. He was building terror camps and seeking weapons of mass destruction while Bill Clinton was in the White House. Blaming the policeman for exposing and punishing the criminal may feel good temporarily. But it is a fool’s errand.
And the result of the counter-attack by the West – for all its mistakes – is a real, if still fragile, advance in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m sorry, Mr Zapatero, but the liberation of millions from two of the most brutal police states in history is not now and never could be described as “a disaster.” Even to utter that sentiment is to have lost even the faintest sense of moral bearings. And it is in absolutely no-one’s interest either in Europe or America to see those two devastated countries implode or their fledgling democracies fail. Withdrawal from either place now would be catastrophic not just for those countries but for the momentum and power it would give those forces that now seek to destroy the West and any semblance of freedom in the Middle East. For Americans and Europeans to bicker among themselves about the past when their shared and mutual future hangs in the balance is close to suicidal.
We are in danger of missing the most important fact in front of us. It’s a fact that, to his credit, Tony Blair has long grasped and still refuses to abandon. That fact is that we are at war. Local terrorism by itself, rooted in territorial or ethnic grievances, might be perceived as something less than a war. But global terrorism, fueled by a unifying Islamist ideology, and potentially armed with weapons more powerful than anything used by terrorists before, is a far more formidable foe. Appeasing this force will strengthen it; blaming allies because they have dared to confront it is simply to play into the hands of the enemy. To say so is not McCarthyite, as some have claimed. In free societies, free people should be able to differ about this with no consequences at all, just as the electorate in Spain should be perfectly free to exercise its democratic choice. That freedom of thought and discussion is what we are defending, after all. But that does not mean that that choice to appease or avoid is not a disastrous and potentially fatal one. What happened last week in Spain was easily the gravest event since al Qaeda struck the streets of New York. It’s a portent of catastrophe for Europe. And only Europe, in the last resort, will be able to reverse it.
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