Robert Greer Cohn

    Madeleine Albright’s denial that we are in a holy war ignores the plain fact that our enemies have openly declared one against the West.  Either we resist that in kind, with a comparable faith-based conviction and effort or we will be overrun as Europe already alarmingly is, finally converted or beheaded.
    Albright describes herself as a “problem-solver.”  Sinclair Lewis (“There are no Solutions”) and Leo Strauss (“You can solve limited problems but not infinite ones”) illuminate the shallow petty-mindedness of her brand of liberalism, utterly lacking in “moral imagination” and the “tragic sense” (Lionel Trilling).
    The surviving SS who want, avowedly, to kill all remaining Jews, like Hamas and powerful Iranians, are not a “problem”—they are a catastrophe, like a mutated virus such as pandemic flu, calling for total resistance as in Hitlerian Europe and a looming Islamo-fascist “Eurabian” Caliphate.

    In the crisis moment of war, people with differing gripes against an enemy (like Germany before World War II) converge in a unified attitude of hostility and single-minded acts of war.
    Similarly, the threat to us from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and from Saddam Hussein’s more-secular racist imperialistic aims (closer to Hitler’s, whom he admired) also converged, whether they coordinated their efforts or not (historians will spell that out).
    Also: the hatred of faith on the part of modern secular-rationalists (defended by Hanson in a critique of D’Souza) converges with the hatred of Jews on the part of Christian anti-Semites, ingrained since the initial demonization beginning two millennia ago, as Vatican II acknowledges.  Comparable radical Muslim (Arab) hatred of the Jews arose earlier (as in Genesis: Ishmael) and grew in modern times.
    The secular-rationalists who dominate campus and media thought (engineering, liberal social engineering) would never admit the anti-Semitic bent in their mindset, but the converging reality is there.
    Israel is blamed on shallower, more superficial, civic-rational, one-worldist, secular grounds which mask the underlying existential drama between faiths externally and, internally, between faith and anti-faith.

    Those who say “Let’s leave and let the Iraqis defend their own country” totally miss the main point of our being there: to defeat and defang a fanatic and dangerous enemy bent on destroying us, as we victoriously did in World War II. We haven’t yet gotten that serious as a nation. It’s high time we did. The enemy isn’t quitting. Too many of us are. What future is there in that?

    Those, like Steny Hoyer, who want to cut and run from Iraq because they hadn’t bargained for a civil war there when they voted to go in, are like a climber on Mount Hood who wants down because he hadn’t figured on cold winds or snow.
    Those are ugly incidentals, backdrop.  The point remains that a good soldier fights his way to the top regardless.  The civil war is a problem only if the contestants turn on us.  If they just kill each other, they do our work for us, in terms of actual fighting.
    True, stabilization is made harder by the internal civil strife.  But that never should have been a short-term goal, rather, one achievable only after a “long, hard slog” as our leaders at one time honestly put it—there was never a chance for Iraq and environs to be other than a quagmire, like every serious war we ever fought: the price of survival.

    Global warming is, no doubt, a physical fact and we may be able to do little about it, as some leading climatologists aver, but the spiritual fact of global freezing of heart is far more threatening, and that is in human power to reverse.
    It’s called rebirth—resurrection—and we celebrate it every year on Passover/Easter, when spring light rises toward summer ripeness.  The pagan physicality of nature is at one with childish faith in the grassy Easter baskets we brought home from kindergarten, with glowing jelly beans and a semblance of bunny, and the grown-up sacred faith of Jews and Christians was originally (and remains the same) at one in the Last Supper, a Pesach Seder celebrating the escape from death-like slavery in Egypt together with a fresh version of it delivering us from evil with a renascent impulse to live.
    Mary, Jesus, Paul were nothing if not Judeo-Christians.  Foolish, selfish bigots denied the union and continuity and still do.  There are fierce new attacks on faith itself on all sides, and widespread evasions of reality in ingenious, arrogant gadget-ridden electronic and ideologized modernity, a worse inner danger than rampaging Islam externally.  The global warming campaign is itself part of the evasion, diverting us from the solemn double duty of facing the enemy within and without.  “The devil has power to assume a pleasing shape.”  But “a little child shall lead us.”