Daniel Greenfield
America faces two major policy challenges today: Government Reform and the War on Terror. And neither is optional. We have to reform government to create a leaner and meaner America, one that offers more personal freedoms and much less spending. And we have to fight the internal and external Jihad converging on us. If we choose only one of those, we lose. It's that simple. Fighting the War on Terror with the same kind of bloated, politically correct nation building approach of the Bush administration is a formula for a prolonged conflict that will fail to destroy the sources of Islamic terror and leave us vulnerable to another attack. It will crank up the deficit and cost thousands of lives without producing definitive results. It will leave us vulnerable on the homefront while CAIR officials trot in and out of the White House, just as they've done under two administrations.
To win the War on Terror, the nature of government needs to change to one that is leaner, meaner and better representative of the American people. A government works with them to aggressively fight terrorism, instead of relying on a vast bureaucracy to impose restrictions that make life harder for all Americans. A government that spends money on killing terrorists, not on bribing them to lead a good life. A government that cares more about protecting Americans than about the views of the UN or the ACLU. A government that slashes wasteful spending and secures American political, economic and energy independence. In other words, a truly American government.
And to reform government without fighting terrorism is an utterly pointless mission. Why bother reforming Washington D.C. when the next aircraft headed for the White House might not just be a hijacked passenger plane, but carrying a nuclear or biological cargo? That is, of course, a very farfetched idea, almost as farfetched as the simultaneous hijacking of four passenger jets in order to ram them into major targets in NYC and D.C., including the White House and the Pentagon.
As far as electing people to reform government who don't believe there's a terrorist threat, who are blinded by their ideology into believing that Islamic terrorists are not training and preparing to attack us inside and outside our country, they are not engaged in political and economic subversion at a global level. That all we need to do is pull out our troops, see their side of things and we'll be fine... is a prescription for mass death.
We've seen the escalation in terrorist threats under Obama. And it is painfully clear that trying to ignore Islamic terrorism does not make it go away. Politicians who are weak on the War on Terror endanger the lives of all Americans. They embolden our enemies and encourage them to strike at our perceived weakness. Politicians who are soft on terrorism, who talk about shutting down Gitmo and releasing the terrorists there, are the best gift that al Qaeda could hope for.
But at the same time there are people willing to discard the War on Terror as expendable in order to support libertarians who are trying to ride the current wave of political change by running as fiscal conservatives. And that kind of thinking is dangerously shortsighted. While I've talked about terrorist attacks, like the economy, terrorism is something that happens in the background. Ninety-nine percent of terrorism is just background noise, until something actually occurs. And it's very easy to ignore all that background noise, just as it's easy to ignore out of control government spending. But that kind of laziness climaxes with a catastrophic wake up call.
A terrorist attack is only the visible 0.01 percent of an ongoing secret war taking place all around us. When a terrorist attack does take place, or almost succeeds in taking place, it demonstrates that we've lost another round in the war. Because the terrorists only have to be lucky once; we have to be lucky every time. We have to do more than rely on reactive security measures, we have to aggressively go after the sources of terrorism, or all we can do is stand there in front of the goal, waiting for another attack.
People who do not believe that there is a vast network of terrorists inside and outside America, following a murderous ideology that calls for world domination as much as Communism ever did, are completely unqualified to play any role in government. Certainly, they are unfit for any role that would require them to make decisions about protecting America from terrorism.
And when those same people instead believe that there are no "real terrorists,” just agents of shadowy political elites who also run our government, or pander to those who do think that way, they are as dangerous as a Police Commissioner who believes that there is no such thing as armed robbery, or a District Attorney who believes there is no such thing as rape.
Would you vote for a "fiscal conservative" Mayor who believed that we need to open up all the jails, free the criminals inside them, and hope that they don't come back? Would you support a "fiscal conservative" District Attorney who believed that rape is the result of a misunderstanding? Supporting a candidate with views like that on the War on Terror is just as dangerous and just as bad – except it isn't just bad for one town. It's bad for the whole country.
Liberals are supposed to be the great relativists. Conservatives are supposed to believe in an absolute wrong and right. If compromising the fight against terrorism for political expediency is wrong for liberals, then it is wrong for us too. Otherwise we end up standing for nothing at all.
And beyond the moral case for it, there is the practical case. Like it or not, we are at war. Tightening border security will not put an end to terrorism; neither will deporting a few thousand illegals. Both of those will help, but they don't make the problem go away. And while there are plenty of politicians who don't want to be at war with Islamic terrorism... there are plenty of Islamic terrorists who want to be at war with us.
Wars don't go away because you stop paying attention to them. Killers don't put away their weapons if you ignore them. The people plotting the mass murder of Americans are not going to go away. Not unless we make them go away. Anyone who doesn't support that supports the consequences of it. It's that simple.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Daniel Greenfield is a blogger, columnist and freelance photographer born in Israel, who maintains his own blog, Sultan Knish.
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