Victory Patience Precision

(fm the BC thread "At the Summit")

Habu,
(who desires an immediate and final reckoning)

I am not naive about the aggression at the core of Islam. The founding myth for the religion is built around an effort to exculpate the betrayal and murder of his hosts by a guest who was given shelter as a suppliant. That is the original sin of Islam and they can never escape it. The crimes perpetrated by Mohammad at Khaybar and Yathrib were so fundamentally incompatible with not only most cultures standards of decency but were specifically regarded as abominations by the codes of Arabs themselves that they can never confront them or purge them from the legal and spiritual system they have been fused into. To do so is more hopeless then the efforts of romantic leftists to separate the nature of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin in an effort to revive the reputation of Communism. It is only possible for them to simply go on without acknowledging the nature of how the edifice was constructed and averting their eyes from poisons that leak from the basement. The foundation is no good however and in the long run, and that may indeed be a very long run, the edifice will collapse.

My optimism and patience rest on three facts;
1. Islam was not just stagnant but in decline before the infusion of
     petro-dollars,
2. Oil revenues are declining and new technologies are coming on line,
3. Loyalty to Islam is brittle thin and rivals are gaining outside of Europe.

My vision is not one of a long decline that exalts endurance for it's own sake without any hope for recovery in this world. That was the fate of Byzantium or the doom foreseen by mad Steward Denethor of Gondor. My goal is victory under terms that leave the West not just intact but revived both materially and morally. If we can do that better by enduring the slow ebb of Islam, as we endured the slow ebb of Communism, to emerge without having wounded ourselves with genocide, then I think it will be worth the time and cost involved. That does not mean that I reject all confrontation. Merely that as John Foster Dulles said of our strategic policy in his day, we should respond in a time place and manner of our own choice.

My expectation is not that the intentions of Islam as a system will change. My expectation is that their capabilities will decline, at least relatively and probably absolutely. Further I hope that with targeted efforts some members of that community will see these changes and then may be lead into more productive belief or behavioral systems.

Many years ago I asked my father why we didn't just keep rolling East in 1945. Couldn't we have avoided the costs and fears of the Cold War? Leaving aside the fact that we really didn't have the bombs to support that strategy then, his reply that focused on our moral unwillingness to wage aggressive war and confidence that if we had the right answers we would be OK, that we should not destroy ourselves to preempt our enemy, made sense then. It is hard to hold back, knowing that innocents are suffering while we wait. If we really believe and are not passive, if we fix our own house, and intervene to effect critical changes where they can do the most good, we can build a world more just than the 19th centuries web of cynical imperial alliances but freed of the 20th century's blight of totalitarianism.

How long will it take for Islam to be no more of a threat to Western Civilization than it was 100 years ago? Why don't we give it a hundred years and then you can tell me if I was wrong.