Our party seems quite happy to have the port fiasco around, as it gives Democrats a way to poke holes in the Administration's claim of national security strength. But I am somewhat alarmed about our party's failure to speak out more loudly against the riots and destruction "provoked" by the Danish cartoons.
You see, I think Daniel Goldhagen's article in The New Republic is pretty much dead-on. Goldhagen writes: "Within a blink of the political eye, we have witnessed political Islam's most widespread social mobilization--from Europe, through the Middle East, and into Asia--in response to the cartoons; political Islam's most significant assumption of political power since the Iranian Revolution a quarter-century ago, in the Palestinian community; and political Islam's most threatening military development since Saddam Hussein's attempt to put a stranglehold on the Gulf (and thereby the world), with his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and contemporaneous nuclear weapons program...
"It is a conviction that the modern world is fundamentally corrupt and must be reshaped, often through the annihilation of others. Therein, political Islam resembles the international communist movement in its heyday."
Goldhagen points out that many in the West are not taking seriously the threat by militant Islamists to attack Israel, even with nuclear weapons. And he notes a useful historical comparison: "Hitler, too, prophesied the annihilation of the Jews, saying that a world war would result in the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Most treated this as empty bluster. The history of genocide in the modern era is that, in the rare instances that political leaders publicly threaten to annihilate enemy peoples, they mean it."
I, unlike Goldhagen, am not optimistic that Europeans are taking this threat very seriously. I find it hard to believe that any European country aside from Great Britain and a few others are going to be motivated to act in defense of western culture and political tradition, to say nothing of continental security. But we have to be united here in the West if the crazies in the Middle East are to be defeated. Even in America, we hear politicians say they want to fight the War on Terror until victory is had, but I don't hear too many talking specifically about the kinds of evil we face over there.
So, how are Democrats going to address this problem? We can't readily withdraw from Iraq without opening the door to even more problems, and we aren't achieving our stated goals there, either. And Islamic fundamentalism, and its threat to the West, keeps growing. That movement is a threat not only to America's national security, but to the very existence of western civilization.