Bush: we’ll defeat jihadism with hope and compassion

Yesterday I wrote about J. Podhoretz:

[H]e makes big noises about how much danger we are in, and calls for our enemies to be “stopped.” By which he means what, exactly? Increasing our efforts to defeat the Iraq insurgency, by redoubling our efforts to spread democracy in the Mideast?

When I said this, I meant it in part as a humorous exaggeration of the dangerous and absurd Bushite position, that we can protect our countries from domestic jihadist terrorists by “spreading democracy” on the other side of the world—which in practice means that we can protect our countries from domestic terrorists by occupying Iraq and stirring up an endless terrorist war in that country. But, to my near-despair, it turns out that this absurdity is exactly what Bush and his acolytes believe. Here’s the president himself, speaking yesterday in Scotland:

It’s a war on terror for us all. I was most impressed by the resolve of all the leaders in the room. Their resolve is as strong as my resolve, and we will not yield to these people. We will find them, we will bring them to justice and at the same time we will spread an ideology of hope and compassion that will overwhelm their ideology of hate. [emphasis added.]

The idiocy of this statement virtually defies analysis, though I will try to analyze it later today. For now I just want to say this. As a result of the hopelessly moronic, sentimental, escapist, clichéd Western reactions to the London bombings yesterday, I’m starting to believe the worst. Liberal fantasies about the Other in general and Islam in particular are so deeply engrained in the Western mind that only repeated, catastrophic attacks, virtually wrecking our society, will be enough to cure us of them. To paraphrase Wordsworth’s “Intimations Of Immortality,” our liberal delusions

lie upon us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 08, 2005 09:21 AM | Send