Americans Patience with Islamofascists Runs Out

Victor Davis Hanson:

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation -- but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation -- in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank -- would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war -- not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.

Hugh Hewitt likes to fret that America needs to be very sensitive not to make the War on Terror a war on Islam, pointing to the estimate of 1 billion Muslims in the world today. Of course, there are over a billion Chinese in the world today, mostly unified under a single police state, and if they decide to come across the Taiwan Straits, we'll probably be at war with them, a much more dire situation than ticking off a Muslim diaspora that includes Turks and Kuwaitis as well as Iranians and Syrians. I suspect that the danger is a lot less real than Hewitt and others think. If you listen to al Jazeera (not to mention CNN International), we're already the New Crusaders smiting the Mohammedans hither and yon anyway.

There is nothing to be gained from allowing the Syrian Ba'athists and Iranian mullahs to continue to sow death and destruction throughout the region. We should have put paid to both long ago, but the siren song of the Appeasement Chorus in Congress and the Columbia-trained typing monkees at The New York Times carried the day. No more.

The terror will not end until the Terror Masters are no more.