Will Iran Strike First? - Part 2

No, no cause for concern here. Back to sleep everyone.

TEHRAN (AFP) - Under pressure over its nuclear programme, Iran flaunted its ballistic missiles and warned any nation considering attacking the Islamic republic would face a "destructive and fiery" response.

On show at an annual military parade on Thursday were thousands of troops and a range of hardware including six of Iran's Shahab-3 ballistic missiles -- which sported banners saying "Death to America", "We will crush America under our feet" and "Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth".

The slogans prompted a diplomatic protest by European military attaches.

The event marked the start of "Sacred Defence Week" -- the anniversary of the outbreak of a destructive eight-year war with Iraq in 1980 -- and began with another tough speech by hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Will Iran Strike First?

Michael Ledeen pulls no punches and (unfortunately) is mostly correct:

The mullahs are altogether capable of deciding that events are now running strongly in their favor, and that they should strike directly at the United States. They look at us, and they see a deeply divided nation, a president who talked a lot about bringing democratic revolution to Iran and then did nothing to support it, a military that is clearly fighting in Iraq alone, and counting the days until we can say "it’s up to the Iraqis now," and — again based on what they see in our popular press — a country that has no stomach for a prolonged campaign against the remaining terror masters in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden came to similar conclusions, and ordered the events of 9/11. Why should the Iranians — who have been major supporters of the terror network ever since the 1979 revolution — not do the same?

Innocent Moslems and a Terrorist Flight Attendant

No, this is not satire. It's the key plot point in the new Jodie Foster movie.

A Providential Warning

I'm ashamed to admit I only yesterday discoverd Tony Blankley's fine Sept. 7th column on the most important lesson from Katrina:

Collectively, the country: 1) failed to listen to credible warnings, 2) assumed that our good luck would continue unabated, 3) failed to adequately assess the magnitude and likelihood of the danger, and 4) permitted the compelling pressures and benefits of business as usual to drive from its mind a serious consideration of a radical, bad change from the status quo.

. . .

Because, as heartbreaking, appalling and disgraceful as this event covering an area the size of Kansas is, it is merely a warning, writ small, of the danger facing the entire country (indeed, our entire Western civilization) if we continue to face the Islamist threat with the same complacency with which we have faced the threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

. . .

I happen to think that regarding the Islamist threat, President Bush has shown more concern and provided more action than most of politicians and journalists. But even the president's actions and thoughts are very dangerously short of what is needed. As much as he has done, it still falls within the category of complacency if one seriously thinks about the threat.

The mortal danger we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic world -- one-fifth of mankind -- in turmoil and insurgent as it has not been in at least 500 (if not 1,500) years.

We don't yet know whether this passion has touched 1 percent, 10 percent or 50 percent of over a billion souls. But combined with the sudden and untimely availability of weapons of mass destruction to any sufficiently determined large group of people -- and facilitated by the dangerously interconnected globalized world -- the threat to us all must be as urgently dealt with today, as New Orleans should have been last week and last year and last decade.

I argue that across the board -- from cargo containers searched, to Arab translators hired, to borders guarded, to domestic and foreign intelligence collected, to rational scrutiny of Arab and Muslim young men, to political correctness snubbed, to the size of our military, to our (and Europe's) willingness to defend our culture from Islamist intimidation, to our international diplomacy -- we remain as complacent and exposed to mortal threat today as were the poor dead souls of New Orleans last week.

But at least we, the still-living, have been given a providential warning.

Just one question: What would happen had Harry Smith said this to a Moslem?

Jihad Watch features a rather lame attempt at Stalinism by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

9/11 and the Death of Art

Among the fine insights in the latest issue of the American Enterprise Online:

Militarily and diplomatically, an enormous amount has been accomplished across different parts of the globe since September 11, 2001. Back home, though, in our own politics and culture, much of America has been surprisingly little changed by the most deadly attack ever on our homeland.

You can see this in many places. For instance, for more than two years now I’ve been trying to gin up an article for TAE cataloguing some worthy art inspired by 9/11. Surely, I assumed, an event of this historical moment and psychological impact must have hatched lots of powerful poems and plays and pictures. I was wrong.

Here was a cataclysm whose Ground Zero was literally a stroll away from the main centers of American painting and sculpture, music composition, filmmaking, literature production, and other imaginative work. You would think the sheer magnitude of this event in their own backyards would have grabbed the imagination of many artists (not to mention editors and producers and gallery owners) and sent cadres of long-haired men and short-haired women running to their studios to produce arresting works.

Yet this hasn’t happened. There is no “Guernica” painted for 9/11. Nothing like The Red Badge of Courage, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or Slaughterhouse-Five has been written. No "Music for Prague 1968," or anything close, is now being played. The Manhattan creative class hasn’t produced even a Forrest Gump to capture in popular form the circumstances and emotions of that searing day.

Why not? My conclusion, after watching this odd black hole spread through America’s creative communities over several years, is that most contemporary artists are unwilling to absorb the hard lessons of this event. They’d rather not face the implications. [Or maybe it would cut into their work for the Leftist-Islamist alliance's fifth column - ed.]

Lord knows, the creative class mobilized their artistry in response to the AIDS epidemic. Remember the endless AIDS Quilt projects? The interminable string of Broadway plays documenting the personal horrors of HIV?

But recognizing that America has ruthless and evil Third World enemies who will kill us unless we kill them first? Umm, I think I’d rather work on my novel about the secret repression of gay pastors in Dallas, or polish my screenplay assailing greedy corporations for selling infant formula in Africa.

C.S. Lewis on Katrina

I think it was Dostoyevsky who once noted that humans are three dimensional beings in a four dimensional universe, meaning there is a dimension only God's mind can comprehend. Devastating events like 9/11 and Katrina always seem to generate discussion of the "How could God let this happen?" question. Our small human minds may be unable to arrive at a satisfying answer, but I find C. S. Lewis' explanation to be as good as anyone could formulate:

That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you concede everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you would have no game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

The Problem of Pain, P. 21-22