that, if only that Texan moron Bush had read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his Miranda rights and bowed as low as Obama did to the Saudi king, we wouldn’t have all these problems. So now Obama says, “We are at war.” But he cannot articulate any war aims or strategy because they would conflict with his illusions. And so we will stagger on, playing defense, pulling more and more items out of our luggage – tweezers, shoes, shampoo, snow globes, suppositories – and reacting to every new provocation with greater impositions upon the citizenry. (…)
You can’t win by putting octogenarian nuns through full-body scanners.
All you can do is lose slowly.
The president has now put citizens of Nigeria on the secondary-screening list. Which is tough on Nigerian Christians, who have no desire to blow up your flight to Detroit. Aside from the highly localized Tamil terrorism of India and Sri Lanka, suicide bombing is a phenomenon entirely of Islam. The broader psychosis that manifested itself only the other day in an axe murderer breaking into a Danish cartoonist’s home to kill him because he objects to his cartoon is, likewise, a phenomenon of Islam.This is not to say (to go wearily through the motions) that all Muslims are potential suicide bombers and axe murderers,but it is to state the obvious – that this “war” is about the intersection of Islam and the West, and its warriors are recruited in the large pool of young Muslim manpower, not in Yemen and Afghanistan so much as in Copenhagen and London.
***
Just one quibble:
“Wearily going through the motions” is the moral equivalent of surrendering my tweezers to airport security.
We need to stop doing that, too.
