We don’t have the time to wait for a possible Islamic Enlightenment

First They Take Jerusalem — Then Everything Else

The West sleepwalks through its conflict with Islamic imperialism — and risks awaking to a profoundly altered world.

March 18, 2009
by David Solway

In the so-called “war on terror,” which is really a war of attrition between two competing civilizations, the dilemma that confronts us is that we don’t have the time to wait for a possible Islamic Enlightenment: we are not living in the 18th century but in the calamitously weaponized 21st. The crisis we are now facing does not allow for that species of adjournment we call diplomacy or the illusion of “dialogue” with an interlocutor who does not abide by its formative assumptions.

What the situation cries out for today are deeply educated and farsighted statesmen and courageous national leaders. Democracies are notoriously slow, fractured, and cumbersome in reacting to threatening events and are thus always at an initial disadvantage against their enemies — this is why intelligent and determined leaders are needed, those who are capable of foresight and not, like Maginot Line generals, only of hindsight.

What we have here is only the latest UFO to bedazzle large numbers of true believers: an Unidentified Flying Obama the electorate swears by. A man without a discernible core identity has been given a free pass by a majority of bedazzled Americans whose need for a messiah has induced them to embrace a state of excitable fatuity and comfortable ignorance.
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