Wednesday, January 25, 2006

"What This War is Really About"

Jeff Harrell usually blogs at The Shape of Days, but yesterday he guest-blogged this worthy piece over at Wizbang:

The conflict with al-Qaida began not on 9/11 but on December 29, 1992, when an explosion ripped through the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden, Yemen, killing a Yemeni and an Austrian national and injuring many others...

...we've got no choice at all but to radically change the rules governing a third of the world...The days of measured responses and Realpolitik are over. On September 11, 2001, we realized that tyranny anywhere poses a direct and immediate threat to freedom everywhere...

Tyranny anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere. That's the war we're fighting. And it's bigger than al-Qaida. It's bigger than Iraq and it's bigger than Palestine, and it's sure as hell bigger than Osama bin Laden. It's a war to decide the fate of the entire world. And it's a war we mean to win.

Read it all. The perspective that the West has been in a slowly gathering war spanning decades is taking root, and soon the movement to destroy the ideological foundations of Islamic terrorism will take firm shape. Neither Islam nor the West will ever be the same, but their peoples may be happier and more mature in the end -- if we of the West maintain the will to tough it out.

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