Got fear?

David Warren takes on the liberal myth that we rushed to war and that we should wait and see with Iran.

One of the common, or "plausible" fallacies of the post-modern mind is that we should never act immediately on a provocation. We should instead wait until we have calmed down, for that is when we will have a clearer view. This fallacy was expressed even in the first days after the terror strikes of Sept. 11th, 2001. Our Left argued that, before thinking about a response, we must first get answers to such essay questions as, "Why do they hate us?" We must "address the root causes of terrorism," and so forth.

Actually, the war in Iraq was an affirmative effort to "address the root causes of terrorism" by giving Arabs hope for democracy and a modern economy.

The point of Warren's piece, however, is that 9/11 occurred because the Clinton administration dithered, and failed to do anything serious about Al Qaeda's increasingly lethal attacks. He says that we're not facing a larger threat from Iran:

But if Iran can continue to exploit American diplomatic weaknesses, by keeping the confrontation in the diplomatic arena, the ayatollahs can raise the stakes much higher. They could, in an easily foreseeable future, use nuclear blackmail in combination with an oil embargo -- and with the cooperation, subtle or overt, of Russia, China, a post-Saudi Arabia, perhaps a client Iraq, and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Such a challenge could bring about the sort of "new world order", compared to which a few million casualties might seem a lucky break. It would create an order in which North America, Western Europe, and Japan, were deprived of the use of high technology, by the loss of the fuel to move goods around; and likewise deprived of the food supplies that require oil at every stage of production and distribution. All the cards of power would be suddenly transferred from the bourgeois democracies to the planet's most ruthless dictatorships.

Look into the eyes of an Ahmadinejad, or a President Hu Jintao (currently tightening controls at all levels of Chinese society, in direct response to the perceived weakness of the West), and ask yourself whether you wouldn't prefer to be ruled by men like Bush, Blair, Harper. The reader who is tempted to answer, "What's the difference?" may live to find out.