Europundits

Interesting extract from an essay at Europundits, apparently a blog that collects notable works by European writers:

A substantial part of its population is still unconvinced of the nature of the dangers. That means that there’s the probability of an administration being elected that will begin to retreat in all significant fronts. As a result, the Jihadists will get a badly needed respite, they will regroup and launch their counteroffensive. Then the Americans will be reminded about who their enemy is and will either force the administration to act or will vote in a different one in the next elections. In the meanwhile, the US mainland will be imperiled and the human and financial costs of fighting the Jihadists will sky-rocket. Still, the US is a big, rich and powerful nation and maybe it can afford such losses. However emboldened the Jihadists become in the short-term, in the long one the odds are against them.

Blame has to be laid at the door of the current administration. The truth is: it hasn’t been candid with the American people due both to lingering political correctness and to some kind of elitism. Thanks to the first, I’m coming to believe, it didn’t objectively define the central enemy, a Muslim but mainly Arab movement based on extreme nationalism and a supremacist religion. Thanks to the second, the administration didn’t think it fit to present the whole data to the public. In ways similar to what the MSM did, Bush and his people didn’t want to exacerbate the American population’s anger. They talked much less to the general public than was needed. I understand how complex the game is, how they tried to avoid being branded “Islamophobic”, how much they didn’t want to alienate potential Muslim allies or even Old Europe.

When, during the debate, Bush was asked who the enemy is, he answered by using the now tired euphemism about WMDs in the hands of terrorists and rogue states. In three years the ground work was not done that would have allowed the public to immediately read through this euphemism and translate it as “the Jihad”. Afraid of defining the enemy up, he eventually defined it down. Maybe it would have been better to state clearly, with all the risks involved in this, that the enemy is Islam. One day that’s what most of the Americans will think, but it seems it will take more than one 911 for them to reach this conclusion. If, after a century under attack by their Arab/Muslim neighbors, the Israelis could still in the late 90s “feel” the Palestinians’ pain, it is obviously hard for any more or less normal people to understand how hated they can be. The Americans have for too long been protected by their media, their intelligentsia and their government from the hatred, or rather, from the knowledge of the hatred directed against them. Besides, America’s power allowed its people to shrug off such hatred as the impotent ravings of a few madmen.

It is also easy to understand why the liberal elites wanted to “get over” 911. That day meant the end of transnational progressivism and for them to give up a project in which they had invested so much for so long because of what happened in a single day would have been impossible. It’s not only that transnational progressivism fought back vigorously: most of us actually only came to understand this ideology when it started to fight back in the open. Until 911 we had seen many disparate trends, groups and events, from multiculturalism to ecological activism, from Eurabia to the ICC, from the demonization of Americans and Jews to the antiglobalist mob, without being able to understand they were all different manifestations of the same ideology. And it took us even more time to realize that Jihadism had become their ally, at least in tactical terms. It is as if, at the beginning of the Cold War, nobody knew as yet of the existence of Marxism and Communism, as if the nexus between the USSR, the conquest of Eastern Europe, the Chinese Revolution etc. were then still something to be discovered.