The Voice Of One Crying Out In Suburbia

The price of appeasement...

The Russians have long been a neutral bystander in America's war on terror. Perhaps it is, as Putin suggests, a throwback to the Cold War era distrust between the two nations but whatever the situation the Russians haven't been a ton of help. They actively fought against us removing Saddam Hussein both for their own profit and perhaps as a bone thrown to radical Islam, but now they see what happens when you try to be limp wristed with Islamic terrorists: they see it as a weakness to be exploited, not a commendable trait. Clinton tried to pursue Islamic terrorists with the FBI and it led indirectly or directly to the events of 9/11/01. In his defense, no one could have known what was going to happen and even if they did no one would have listened to them. Bush sees the war on terror as a war, and in war we don't send in the FBI we send in the Marines.

We cannot win the war on terror through negotiation or containment. We must crush them so unmercifully that they will either be eradicated or sent into hiding. These are NOT freedom fighters. In a salient editorial in today's OpinionJournal.com, this point is rightly raised:

Whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin's mistakes in Chechnya...they don't justify the deliberate targeting of innocents. Nearly all nationalist movements--from the American revolutionaries to the Irish Republican Army--have had enough restraint to avoid the systematic murder of children. But there is something dysfunctional within the soul of modern Islam and its supporters that deems such depravity acceptable. Perhaps after Beslan more of the world, and especially much more of the Islamic world, will begin acknowledging this as the deadly poison it is.

This is an enemy that not only has no compunction about killing women and children, it actively seeks to do so in a cowardly attempt to horrify us into submission. Make no mistake, losing the war on terror will not bring peace but rather subjection. To radical Islam, success can be measured by having only two types of people, those who convert to Islam and those who die as infidels. The very existance of free, non-Islamic people is an affront.

President Bush is right, we may not be able to win the war on terror by conventional means but we certainly can lose it.