By Dave Petteys (dpetteys@comcast.net) There is a perception on the part of the “progressives” that we have the option to walk away from the struggle with Islam without consequence. (Was this not the case in Vietnam?) It is consistent with the belief that "we are the problem," that "fighting the war on terror is what’s causing terror."
But that’s like saying a police department is what causes crime in a big city. And as the world ignored what Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, so do the progressives choose to dismiss the fatwas of Osama Bin Laden and the pronouncements of the President of Iran and other various blood-thirsty Islamic clerics.
Apparently, the subconscious conviction of the progressives is that since we won our war in 1945, our place as the preeminent power in the world is set forever. You see the nostalgia and continual praise for the Army of 1945 while they undermine the Army of 2006. The real issue for them is the need to dismantle “American arrogance and tendency to empire”. (Though they immediately blame America for the 1994 massacre in Rwanda because we failed to "do something"! They also urge intervention in Darfur to fight the same Islamic militias in the Sudan that they would cease to fight in Iraq!)
Progressives are convinced that anything can be solved by dialogue and negotiation. But, to dialogue with the wolf in the sheep pen doesn’t change the motives of the wolf. The flock can actually be put in greater jeopardy if the shepherd refuses to recognize the danger when the wolf assures him that his only intention is to “fight hunger, and what more nobler cause could there possibly be?”
What the progressives forget is the fragile, interdependent nature of modern society, and the very real threat of nuclear weapons that could be placed in US urban centers by very small groups of people -- to whom those same progressives would give free run of our society in the interest of "civil rights."
When one contemplates the disruption caused by the destruction of two buildings in New York on September 11, 2001 (dismissed as something we "deserved" by the progressives), what would be the effect of the simultaneous destruction of several cities with the death toll in the hundreds of thousands? Evidently, it will take a further ocean of blood to wake up America.