an open question

Does America face an existential threat? Andrew Sullivan introduces the question by quoting Daniel Larison’s Pshaw response to Jed Babbin:

Rhetoric that speaks of an “existential threat” is simply not credible, and anyone who deploys such an over-the-top argument will rapidly lose credibility with everyone outside an intense core of true believers.

But what Babbin actually said was much more nuanced—and is also at least partially true:

The enemy is a two-headed monster. First, it is an ideology: radical Islam. Islam is a religion, radical Islam is an ideology. And like Communism and Nazism before it, it must be defeated. The second head is comprised of the nations that sponsor terrorism.

This brings the inevitable conclusion: Regardless of what happens to Iraq’s nascent democracy, a war must be fought to defeat the terrorist ideology, and to compel the nations that sponsor terrorism against us and our allies to cease doing so. Unless and until that occurs, the war goes on.

Babbin makes it sound like a bloody kinetic war that will go on forever. That’s not very smart. Thus, Larisan is correct when he warns that Babbin’s argument—which stresses a true threat to the West from radical political Islam backed by indiscriminate bloodthirsty carnage—even if the argument is true, will discredit you with most people outside a tiny circle of “true believers.”

But that doesn’t mean that the people inside that tiny circle are wrong—or that the vast majority of people who profess to think about such things and instead parrot one another inside a vast echo chamber—i.e., the biens-pensants—are right. What it means is that Babbin isn’t very adept at making the argument.

There are many ways to fight the battle, and we will need every weapon we possess, but there’s no doubt that there is a challenge—and a threat—to America and the West to freedom and democracy from radical political Islam.

Whether radical political Islam backed by blood-curdling intimidation tactics, aka “terrorism,” constitutes an “existential” threat is a semantic argument and, as such, a distraction.

The reality is that the freedoms we take for granted here in the West are under persistent attack from political Islam, in ways large and small. The other reality is that there seems to be only a small fraction of people who care enough to keep talking about it in public.

Here’s a group that is serious about getting the message out. It includes the Danish newspaper editor Flemming Rose, who first published the Mohammed cartoons.