From Mark Steyn.
The snapshots of the post-9/11 era are not attractive: the failures in Basra, the Brit prisoners in Iran, and Her Majesty's subjects turning up on the other team's side everywhere from Kandahar to Bombay to the London Tube. The question is whether a nation that's "lost the stomach for a fight" has also lost its survival instinct.
I really really wish I could disagree - but I can't.
2 comments:
Hi Stan. I always read your excellently constructed posts. Seldom comment because you say it all.
Glad you still read Steyn. He won his case and the battle continues....
Got to say here that the Right - at least the isolationist and libertarian Right - are as much at fault as the Left.
I EXPECT much of the Left [at least its dominant cultural leaders] to side with/excuse/encourage our country's enemies as a default setting. That's what the Marxian Left is all about [honourable exceptions, of course, and the rank-and-file Labour and Liberal parties may fit in here, but who listens to THEM in Nu Labour's Big Tent?]
Nope, it's the anti-war Right that gets on my 'pecs about this.
It's not enough to 'support the troops' while opposing the war; not over the medium to long term.
Whinge all they can about crappy Landrover death-traps and missing body armour, the Right should have backed the war to the hilt in all its theatres. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Yorskshire, London, Glasgow: doesn't matter the locale, this war was declared 1300years ago by a killer called Mohammed.
It's not Tony Blair's war (except inasmuch as he identified something evil coming this way and dealt with it). It's not Nu Labour's war, or the centralising bureaucrats' war. It's not even the evil neo-Cons' war or Mister Bush's war.
It's Islam's war. It's against us all, and they'll not stop until they know defeat and depair - or we do.
So every little-Englander, every 'realist' and 'bring them back' advocate and every 'traditional Tory' needs to get a grip and look at the history of Islam and its wealth, confidence and ruthlessness. They should recognise that leaving the world's largest in-production oil reserves wholly under the command of an utterly remorseless and world-absorbing ideology is not going to delay Islam's final triumph in the West for one moment - it will hasten it.
Oh and however annoyed our non-anti-semitic Right is, distaste for Israel and its imagined or exaggerated crimes doesn't absolve us in the West from the moral responsibility of actually protecing them from Iran's nuclear intentions.
We in the dextrosphere can't control or much effect the Left -we're trying to weaken and defeat them after all, but we should all be clueful enough to realise that this IS the long term, and that our troops need to know that it has never been so important as now that they fight with the full confidence and support of patriotic opinion behind them.
We win this one, or we go down and die. So forget about the tax cost and the 'missing' WMDs and the fact that Mister Blair led our country into it.
Conservatives and others on the freedom-loving Right who cover their ears to the truth need to get with the programme.
Then you'll see the national bottle back again.
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