The real war

Joseph Rosenberger writes on today's American Thinker:

The current political squabbles in America between the liberal, socialist left and the moral capitalist conservative right are merely a skirmish line on the edge of two colliding civilizations. The combatants are not the free market, individual centric conservatives and libertarians vs. the Nanny State, socialist plantation liberal straw bosses. Not at all!

The Elephant in the room is Islamofascism - and President Bush and his brilliant General Petraeus, at the head of the greatest Army of our lifetime, are decisively engaged. What is at stake dwarfs the '08 elections topics of single payer medical care, unfunded social security, or our billions of dollars held by China and Saudi Arabia, for economic blackmail.

Life as we know it -- the profound blessings of the Age of Enlightenment and the spectacular technological progress in the arts and sciences that resulted -- is, absent a courageous defense, doomed to be devoured in the maws of a barbarian Islamofacism if President Bush's war leadership fails. Militant Islam means to convert, enslave, or exterminate the infidel non-Muslim world, depending on the degree of resistance encountered. The Koran demands it, and militant Islamists are implementing it wherever they have the critical mass to enforce it. Secular pluralism and a democratically established Rule of Law will not survive, absent protectors that exercise lethal force to defend it. This should be the litmus test of who should be our next president, and no other.

Mr. Rosenberger is correct in stating that the battle between Islamofascism and enlightened Western civilization is the great conflict which will determine the fate of the world. However he is incorrect to relegate the civil war of ideas being waged in America today between the Left and those who wish for America to survive.

The only force on earth which can stop the spread of Islamofascism is the United States. Europe could do this if they were willing to abandon their welfare states, expel their Muslim immigrant populations and mobilize their societies for war, but that is a choice they will never be willing to make and the demographic trends in Europe mean that in another 25-30 years they will no longer be able to make that choice even in theory as their nations will be majority Muslim.

China could probably do it, but they currently regard American liberty as their primary threat rather than Islamic sharia. They may come around in time, but I wouldn't count on it.

India will be able to carry on the fight on a global scale after a few more decades of economic development and military rearming, with US weapons.

Africa, Mexico, Central and South America are all useless for the coming fight and will probably be an active hindrance. Africa will supply manpower for the jihad and everything south of the Rio Grande in the Western hemisphere will just be more territory that the US will have to protect.

No, the fight against Islam hangs upon the United States willingness to defend itself and all of Western Civilization. The greatest threat to that willingness to act is the Left. The Left must be defeated at home before we can defeat the jihad overseas. If you doubt that look at the zeal with which congressional Democrats are attempting to engineer America's defeat in Iraq.