MICHAEL WALSH: Unconditional Surrender.
[In the wake of 9/11] we know from history what other, more secure and confident, cultures would have done. The imperial Romans would have gone full delenda est on Saudi Arabia, razed its cities, destroyed the Kaaba, leveled the mosques, occupied the oil fields, seized its wealth, executed its leaders, and sold the populace into slavery; they knew an existential struggle when they were in one. Constantine would not have stopped until Greco-Roman writ applied without resistance across his realm. Bohemond would immediately have known the holy warriors for what they were: dedicated, merciless enemies in a religious war in which there could be only one victor, and helpfully converted their mosques back into churches as he put them to the sword.
Napoleon would have as handily defeated them as he did the Egyptian mamelukes—former slaves who had risen to power over the centuries—and added their territory to his empire, sending scholars and scientists to preserve and protect the ruins and artifacts and where possible restore the preexisting nations and faiths that had been overwhelmed by the Islamic conquest, especially in Persia, a once-great nation that has not been the same since the Arab conquest in 654 A.D. Americans, however, have never had a taste for empire.
True, the U.S. successfully rehabilitated Germany and Japan as allies, in large part by Americanizing them via its pervasive popular, even vulgar, culture. But that was only possible after both nations had been convincingly beaten. As for Russia, the Cold War foe, it is still feeling the effects of its loss of manpower during the Great Patriotic War, the collapse of its moral structure under atheistic Communism, its reliance on abortion as birth control, its corresponding declining birth rate, and a host of other ills brought on by its self-imposed, prolonged absence from Western civilization during most of the last century. Once an enemy, Russia is now simply an adversary, and not a particularly potent one at that.
The Dar al-Harb, however, is still out there, itching for a fight.
Read the whole thing.
(Bumped.)