Israel Matzav

Seizing Missing the moment

Pam Geller explains how George Bush, Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar and John Howard blew it on radical Islam.

There are definite points in history when things are on the cusp of real change. More specifically, there are defining moments when the direction of history can go either way.

When José María Aznar was Prime Minister of Spain, the world was a wholly different place, as recently as 2004. He served at a time when men -- not appeasers, shills, and tools for jihad -- were driving the bus. There was Bush, the inestimable John Howard (Australia), Blair (no great shakes, but light-years ahead of brick-brain Brown) -- and one of the best of the group was Aznar.

Yet this group did not seize the moment. They thought they had time and reason on their side. They did not. They blew it. "The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy," Ayn Rand wrote. "Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies." To fight it, we must understand it.

Yet Bush described Islam as "a religion of peace" in the wake of the Islamic jihadi attack on America. It wasn't that Bush was a shill for jihad; it was just that he was uninformed, and worse, not curious. He had whispering in his ear the stealth jihadist Grover Norquist and his band of Muslim Brotherhood brothers propagandizing the nonsensical meme that it was "just a few fringe extremists" who "hijacked" the religion" -- as well as the planes. Ten years and 15,511 Islamic attacks catastrophically demonstrate what a turning point that window of opportunity really was.

I have never understood how George Bush put hundreds of members of the Saudi royal family on a plane back to Saudi Arabia a couple of days after 9/11 without even questioning them. What the heck was he thinking?

But that wasn't the only defining moment recently. There was the summer of 2006:

A second historic crossroads came in the summer of 2006, when the jihadist terror group Hezb'allah (Party of God) attacked Israel. For the first time in recent history, Israel had the tacit support of the U.S. and two Arab countries to rout the barbaric Islamic jihadist group in Lebanon. Apart from their aim of promised Jewish genocide, Hezb'allah followed in Arafat's bloody footsteps in Lebanon and destroyed what once was a prospering, thriving Christian nation.

In the summer of 2006, they attacked Israel, kidnapped and killed Jewish soldiers (torturing them in ways unimaginable), and went to war.

...

Israel should have destroyed them. Instead, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went to the United Nations, which was then and is now largely controlled by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and sought a resolution, the conditions of which have never been met by the soldiers of Allah. This was another historic turning point. Bush and Co. expected Israel to hold up her end in the strategic alliance in the war on the global jihad. The U.S. was in Iraq and Afghanistan doing just that. A defeat of the Iranian proxy Hezb'allah would have been a crushing blow to the mullahcracy in Iran. What a Sun Tzu move.

But Olmert hesitated, and the coalition of the willing suffered a grave loss. It was a TKO in the bout between the two camps duking it out in the Bush White House: the struggle between Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bolton, etc. vs. Colin Powell, Armitage, Nick Burns, and Steve Hadley, etc. had been finally decided, and things would never be the same again. Individualism lost to collectivism. Reason lost to irrationality. American sovereignty lost to international law.

What followed was inevitable: the relentless anti-American six-year Bush-bashing campaign in the media succeeded. Bush lost Congress, Rumsfeld resigned, Bolton did the same, and Cheney went on mute.

The lights dimmed in the west as Atlas shrugged.

And then we got Obama. Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:08 PM