Pete DuPont, former governor of Delaware, writes an excellent editorial in today’s OpinionJournal.com. It’s today’s must read.
Is Old Europe finally learning that it must join the global war on terror?
Nov. 9, 1989 and Sept. 11, 2001 each changed the modern world. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of 75 years of communism, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks the beginning of what may be a similar period of global Islamic terrorism.
But not all of Western civilization wants to fight this not so cold war. Turkey, fearing attacks by Muslim insurgents, ended its anti-terrorism efforts in 2003. Spain followed suit after the 2004 Madrid bombings. Then Hungary and the Netherlands also all but capitulated, even without any dramatic, world-attention grabbing, attacks on their soil. Now Italy says it will withdraw its forces from Iraq by year end.
Old Europe may be falling apart before our eyes. This is a suggested by the opposition of Western Europeans to the American military action in Iraq as well as the defeat of the European Union Constitution in France and Holland last spring and the economic decline of European socialist economies. In any case, Old Europe has neither the political will nor the economic strength to combat terrorism. Without the United States, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq would be terrorist-controlled nations. Once again it will be up to America to defeat an assault on Western civilization, just as it was left to the United States to rescue Europe against Nazism and then against the global assualt of communism.
Within the European continent thousands of trained terrorists live and travel freely. Historian Walter Laquer reports that security authorities estimate more than 600—perhaps several thousand—British residents are actual graduates of Osama bin Laden’s training camps. Dr. Hani al-Siba’i, the director of the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London was quoted as approving of the subway bombings as a great victory, for it was legitimate to target civilians since “the term ‘civilians’ does not exist in Islamic law . . .” The Islamic fanatic who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh told the court: “I acted purely in the name of my religion,” and that “one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same . . .”
But none of this means continental Europeans or the British establishment are prepared to criticize terrorism. Christophe Chaboud, France’s antiterrorism coordinator, said last week that the war against Iraq—evidently not the blowing up of Spanish or British trains—is making Europe dangerous, and the BBC forbids the use of the word “terrorist” in its coverage of the London bombings.
France, Germany and their European allies believe the welfare state economic model—high taxes and welfare benefits, shorter work weeks, strong restrictions on hiring and firing of workers, huge government subsidies for industry and agriculture, and suffocating regulation by a massive bureaucracy in Brussels—is preferable to Anglo-American democratic capitalism and will lead to prosperity. But it hasn’t and it won’t, and without economic strength the military strength needed to fight terrorism becomes impossible to assemble.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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