Since today’s post concerns the ongoing situation in Iraq, specifically the rise of the bloodthirsty savages of ISIS, let’s hope that the accompanying display of toothsome and free American totty pisses them off.
To any ISIS sympathizers who are offended by my Rule Five material, I will say only this:
Fuck off and die in a fire.
Now, on to Jonah Goldberg and The West’s Gaza. Excerpt:
In the early days after 9/11 there was a lot of talk about a “clash of civilizations” and a long “existential struggle” facing the West. I once asked the late Christopher Hitchens what he felt on that terrible day, and he said he felt no small amount of joy. Not for the suffering and death, but for the fact that the West finally had been awakened to the terrible but necessary struggle before us.
And for a time, many liberals bought into the idea that America was heading into a generational struggle with jihadism. There were a slew of books on the subject. Peter Beinart, for instance, wrote The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and 
Make America Great Again. As the subtitle suggests, there was a lot of partisan mischief in his argument, but it rested on the premise that liberals must accept that “Islamic totalitarianism” — his phrase — has replaced communism as our enemy. On this, at least, Beinart and company, briefly agreed with George W. Bush that the war against “Islamic fascists” (Bush’s term) was the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”
Like most Americans, I am of mixed feelings about our history in Iraq. The initial military operation was a walkover, nothing but – however, we were sadly unprepared for what came next. To some extent Colin Powell was correct in his “Cracker Barrel theory” (You broke it, you bought it) but in retrospect one wonders if we shouldn’t 
have simply utterly destroyed Iraq’s military capacity and the Ba’ath government and left the survivors to pick over the ruins.
But ISIS may have arisen in any case.
Barack Obama’s repeated (and repeatedly ignored) lines in the sand certainly do give the impression of weakness on the part of the United States, which encourages bad actors of all sorts. A more decisive President and a more robust foreign policy may have discouraged some of the Islamic radicals.
But ISIS may have arisen in any case.
Mr. Goldberg concludes:
No one in the West wants a generational struggle with jihadism any more than Israel wants perpetual war with Hamas in Gaza. The problem is the enemy always gets a vote. It just may be that the Middle East will become the West’s Gaza. And, so far, nobody has a good answer for what to do about it.
But we’re going to have to do something about it sooner or later.
