Conclusion of S.’s Email

In the world’s impoverished and desolate expanses, naïve dreamers and psychopathic killers alike could always justify their quasi-allegiance to Stalinism on the grounds that a coercive socialism was closer to brotherhood than wide-open American capitalism.Islamist fascism entertains neither these utopian pretenses nor the air of shared struggle that trumps racial, religious, or geographical boundaries. If you are female or gay, your correct politics don’t really matter. If you are Christian or non-Middle Eastern, too bad. If you are addicted to Western freedom or consumerism, you might as well save the trouble and go straight to Hell now. So Khomeinism or al Qaedism is not Soviet-enhanced Marxism: It lacks not merely the resources of a vast continent at its call, but also an ideology that misleads and confuses with false promises of social justice. With the Islamofascists you get what you see — a return to the 13th century and all its darkness.What do such new realities portend in our current struggle? We must remember that much of our frustrations with our European allies can be attributed to the absence of a global rogue nation that could destroy Europe with a flip of a switch, and that their pique with us is not predicated on what we do or say but, rather, on the changing global realities.And if we are exasperated with Cold War institutions like the U.N. and NATO, it is precisely because they are paradigms of a bygone age that have remained fossilized rather than evolving to meet the challenges of a new era. So in most cases, the United States is at last in a singular position to promote freedom and democracy without either cynicism or the Realpolitik that today’s elected socialist will be tomorrow’s Soviet puppet. It is becoming quite a different world — and one, thank God, that at least a few in our government have sized up pretty well.

In short, for the first time in a half-century, Ronald Reagan’s threat to terrorists and their supporters that “you can run but not hide” is at last true. The world of al Qaeda is shrinking as we speak — and there is no person or force left that can bail any of them out from the doom that awaits them all.