Part I of a three part series on The Global War On Terrorism appearing in American Thinker online magazine.
Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives, Part I
March 21st, 2006
The first campaigns of the Long War are drawing to a close. The Jihadis have lost the opening rounds. What next?
The first campaigns of the Long War are drawing to a close. The Jihadis have lost the opening rounds. What next?
There’s an unconscious conviction that what happens next is… nothing. We go back to everyday life, the way things were before all that unpleasantness in lower Manhattan and Washington those long years ago. We shut out the harmful, hateful world once again, go our own way, and forget about jihads, and suicide belts, and dirty bombs, and beheadings, and all the other nightmares that have filled our days since 2001.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
What happened on 9/11 was not an earthquake, over and done quickly, but a long, slow and complete reshuffling of the tectonic plates that comprise human civilization; something comparable to the deaths of empires and the passing of eras. Such events are not over in a day, or a year, or a decade. They take their time. And when it ends at last the world will be a different place, in ways that we now have no way of knowing. But the part we have played in it will, in some shape or form, match our position when it’s all over, American or European or Arab, Muslim or Christian or Secular.
We are still amid early days, roughly the days of Midway and Guadalcanal and El Alamein in a previous great struggle. “Not the beginning of the end,” as Churchill put it, “but the end of the beginning.”
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