What if they held a war and no one knew?
The mainstream press continues its strange avoidance of the Cartoon War and the underlying issues at stake - particularly (and ironically) press freedom.
Via Michelle Malkin, a wire report on attacks on the British and German embassies in Teheran. Unlike in Syria, the embassies were not destroyed and local security forces apparently made some effort to protect them.
But the provocation is clear.
The Posse remains optimistic about Iraq, but it seems to us that our success there may also be setting us up for difficulties elsewhere.
Namely, that much of the Muslim world doesn't believe the contest was a "fair" one and seeks to widen the war. The shame-based culture that has bred radical Islam still pines for the climactic clash between east and west. While the Middle East may be cooling off, the cities of Europe are now heating up.
What makes this particularly dangerous is that Europe is the ultimate "soft target." Its militaries are generally weak and degraded. Each boasts a hard core of elite units capable of overseas deployments, but the masses are nothing more than heavily armed police officers.
Our point is that were there to be a serious uprising - one bent on actual killing - Europe would have great difficulty responding and may well recoil from doing so. We saw this after the French riots - more apologies, more concessions.
In some areas, the indigenous population is pushing back, but the elites who call the shots are scared and have no fight left in them.
It is the 1930s all over again.
Everyone keeps comparing things to WWII, and while I see the appeal of that in terms of Islam as a shadow of fascism and Ahmadinejad leading a wild-eyed cast of would-be Hitlers, I think WWI might be a more apt comparison. June 28, 1914 and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand becomes the publication of the cartoons. Russia is playing their game with the West and Iran and meanwhile everyone keeps pretending that war can be avoided or at the least that the boys will be home before the leaves fall. Remember, this was the conflict that birthed the Sykes-Picot agreement and so much of the rest of the modern Middle East...
Posted by: niall | February 17, 2006 at 09:56 PM