Wednesday, November 08, 2006
[Revise]
Yesterday's Election Was A Serious Defeat: Not just for President Bush and the Republicans, but for the cause of freedom all over the world. The world will become even more dangerous, just as it did after the 1974 and 1976 elections. If we believe Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden is, even now, celebrating in his cave. And given how long Scheuer was following bin Laden, we should take his opinions on this question seriously.
But it is also a defeat I have been expecting, not necessarily in this last election, but some time soon. The grim future that I have foreseen for a decade — at least a century of fighting off terrorist attacks from radical Islamists — is not something most voters want to accept. (For that matter, I don't want to accept it myself, but the facts are too clear for me to come to a different conclusion about what we should expect in the next hundred years.) Eventually, most voters were sure to tire of the struggle and to gamble that we can somehow drop out of it.
But we can't drop out of it. As I have said before, the terrorists will teach us, however reluctant we are to learn, about the nature of this struggle. I fear that our tuition bill has just gotten even higher.
Yesterday's Election Was A Serious Defeat: Not just for President Bush and the Republicans, but for the cause of freedom all over the world. The world will become even more dangerous, just as it did after the 1974 and 1976 elections. If we believe Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden is, even now, celebrating in his cave. And given how long Scheuer was following bin Laden, we should take his opinions on this question seriously.
But it is also a defeat I have been expecting, not necessarily in this last election, but some time soon. The grim future that I have foreseen for a decade — at least a century of fighting off terrorist attacks from radical Islamists — is not something most voters want to accept. (For that matter, I don't want to accept it myself, but the facts are too clear for me to come to a different conclusion about what we should expect in the next hundred years.) Eventually, most voters were sure to tire of the struggle and to gamble that we can somehow drop out of it.
But we can't drop out of it. As I have said before, the terrorists will teach us, however reluctant we are to learn, about the nature of this struggle. I fear that our tuition bill has just gotten even higher.
