The Churchill Doctrine

Daniel Mandel discusses "The Churchill Doctrine":

... In the case of militant Islam, it was another long awakening: from the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran in 1979 to the mass-homicides in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. The U.S. decamped from Lebanon (1983) and Somalia (1993), and responded with rhetoric-coupled-with-pinpricks to the terrorist outrages of the 1990s. Only after September 11, 2001, did the U.S. raise a posse to confront the latest totalitarianism, which has had decades to consolidate, plant terrorist cells, and orchestrate its deeds. Three years later, it is all too apparent that we are also in for a longer war than would have been otherwise necessary. Yet Americans, like the rudely awakened Europeans of 1939, have also rejected al-Qaeda’s psychological warfare. By and large, they understand that they face an unappeasably cruel enemy. The understanding has dawned that utopian political claims – and here is where Islamism takes up company with Nazism and Communism – are violent doctrines, achievable purely by unbounded force. ...

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Posted by Andrew Jaffee at January 27, 2005 11:30 AM