Robert Greer Cohn

Samuel Huntington's vision of clashing "civilizations" (more basically, as he fitfully agrees, cultures) came out before the East-West current showdown centered in Iraq. By its very complexly-balanced (sacred-secular) nature, the modern West--including the later Huntington--shies away from the notion of all-out holy war. Even the aggressively Christian Franklin Graham backs away from that. But radical Islamists have no such compunctions and speak often and openly of conquering Europe for their faith, as they had done in the past.

But they met their match in George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives around him. He tipped his real hand when he blurted out the term "Crusade," Judeo-Christian being understood by our enemies easily, but very few on our side--even they, including Bush are compelled, by concrete increasingly-secular societal and political evolution, to mute their true belief about the deep nature of our struggle: against our own obvious moral decline (weakening our military resolve) and against the fanatically motivated, ruthless enemy who sees the new opportunity there, aggravated by the partisan defeatism of many Democrats and the anti-American left.

This largely explains the difficulty of the hawks in explaining the war to perhpas a majority of Americans now: as a long range and profound response to something like a total challenge to our survival, as focused by 9/11. So we stumbled on the WMD fiasco because our leaders couldn't tell the reluctant masses what they were really in for (FDR had a similar problem): a bloody mess, which every serious war inherently is, but compounded by a particularly nasty set of folks who enjoy beheading people and blowing themselves up with many others, often women and children.

The main point is, like the Normandy landing, you just go in and start the almost-hopeless horror, chaotically, and "get on with it." If you thought too much about the aftermath, you wouldn't move. Public opinion and the media are particularly useless at this ghastly stage. But, the lucrative yacking took over big time and misunderstood and misrepresented everything important.

Sure, Bush and his team were too quick to celebrate, but the error of defeatist commentators was far graver. They simply wouldn't have moved in the massive, costly way that rose, however haltingly, to the true, hidden, earthshaking and history-shaking challenge, internally and externally, to Judeo-Christian culture in our time.

The President and his cabinet are still somewhat tongue-tied about this total crisis of our civilization which is, as noted, a hard sell to folks raised on endless illusion, entertainments, diversion, fakery and the fantasy of "entitlement," easy war through high tech, the "dragons of expectation." Even the rough Rumsfelds and Cheneys may find this public task daunting. They prefer to put it all in the relatively soothing and stunted modern rationalistic and civic terms of "democracy" which is fine, but isn't the gritty nub of the matter: the need to "show them" militarily, as we did Germany and Japan, and get them to behave better toward differing fellow-mortals, especially us.