Appeasement has become the non-violent solution our Open Society Elite employ in search of a universalized democracy in what they term the Global Village.

Since the 1960’s, liberal social science has made an academic industry of researching, publishing, teaching, and generally spreading the gospel of “peace studies” (AKA “conflict resolution,” which we will argue here is a euphemism for “appeasement”). The success of peace studies-conflict resolution-appeasement is predicated upon the premise that irreconcilable differences can somehow be reconciled by talking about or by just ignoring the issue in contention.

In order to pursue peace studies, the daily life of nations is categorized, dissected, and theorized into ethnic groupings, politico-economic creeds, religious motivations (although religion counts for less than other factors in peace studies taxonomy), environmental situations, migration pressures, national and international organizational behavior, diplomatic negotiating approaches, etc. Of course, all of these peace study endeavors are based on the concept (arising out of our embrace of the symbolic mathematization of all existence) that human behavior can be “modeled” to the degree that it is scientifically predictable.

From this academic industry has emerged the unshakeable (science = certainty) diplomatic mindset that all international disputes can be solved by talking about them. The rationale for this mindset is that nothing in human affairs outside of science pertains to certainty. If all diplomatic disputes arise out of the uncertain political affairs of men, these disputes ought to be resolvable through method – in this case, diplomacy and compromise.

Think about how the high priests of this ersatz faith, men like former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and James Baker and former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, have preached that just such a non-violent solution should be available to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. All that is required, according to the Science = Certainty / Political Affairs = Uncertainty reciprocal, is to lay the groundwork with sufficient “shuttle diplomacy” followed by the opposing parties coming to the diplomatic table to seriously listen to one another. Then, as if by a magical metamorphosis, enemies make peace. The modern expression of this has become, “Friends and allies don’t need to make peace; only enemies do.”

In the context of the Islamic Jihad against Israel, for example, this “conflict resolution” theory suggests that once the parties face each other in a serious “dialogue,” political and religious differences can be overcome. The difficulty in such a view of course is that we witnessed hours, days, weeks, months, and years of such dialogue throughout the eight-year Clinton term. When presented with a Clinton-architecture peace replete with a wholesale capitulation by Israel’s Ehud Barak, Yassir Arafat rejected the offer without a counter. The “Clintonistas,” including remnants from the previous H. W. Bush administration (i.e., Dennis Ross, designated as a special envoy) and the Israelis went into shock. They had no explanation for this.

But this failure to understand certain fundamentals of the Islamic world is of course absolutely no different as a species of ignorance than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s current diplomatic efforts or President Bush’s political-military ones to build an Open Society liberal democracy in the heart of the Muslim world. For the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process to have worked, or to work in the future, one of Islam’s fundamental tenets expressed as binding law — that once a territory like the current State of Israel has been incorporated into dar-al Islam (under the sway of Shari’a and the rule of Islamic law), it can never again be otherwise – must be swept from the minds and hearts of the Muslim world forever. For peace to blossom in the Middle East while there remains a single Jew (or Christian for that matter) living as an equal in a sovereign non-Muslim political society, would require the Muslim world to reject its ideological constitution which demands that the Islamic world will not merely oppose unbelievers (kuffār) living on holy Islamic soil, or what was previously dar-al Islam, but will not cease the jihad until these infidels are converted, subjugated, or murdered. (Subjugation, or the status of one from ahl al-dhimma or “the protected class,” is an option traditionally available only to the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, but it has been extended to pagans by some Islamic leaders. It is nothing more or less than a form of serfdom.)

Needless to say, the desired negotiated outcome to achieve neighboring Jewish and Palestinian states living in peace in dar al-Islam will require a good deal of diplomatic “flexibility” on the part of Palestinians and the broader Arab Muslim world. To suggest that “once dar-al Islam, always dar-al Islam” (the Islamic equivalent of “the Brezhnev Doctrine”) can be negotiated away is quite a thesis in and of itself. But this is no hindrance to the peace studies school of thought, which holds that fundamental religious concepts like “dar-al Islam in perpetuity” can be modified (typically engendered by a unilateral transfer of “goods and services” by the appeasing party), or more likely diplomatically ignored. Since academics and politicians in the U.S. and Europe, where peace studies flourish, usually do not subscribe to irrevocable religious principles, why should Palestinians? Or why, for that matter, should the wider Arab Muslim world care about such fundamentalist religious strictures? After all, for most Americans and Europeans, the desire to avoid deadly conflict, while not offending anybody, outweighs all else. And aren’t all humans the same? Are we not all equal in our humanity and our desire to live in peace?

With the Western assumption that “anything is negotiable” because Uncertainty is the underlying premise, the question arises in the media and what passes for “intellectual discourse:” Should the U.S. abandon any pretense of a military victory over the hostile elements in the Middle East, relying instead on peace studies-conflict resolution-appeasement methods in containing the jihadist-sponsoring states of Iran and Syria? And the follow-on media question is: Isn’t it better just to stop the killing by the U.S. military and instead to engage and talk to those who have vowed to kill us?

It is over these two questions that political debate rages furiously in the U.S. The remainder of this essay will look at the likelihood of success peace studies-conflict resolution-appeasement might offer in safeguarding the American people in what has been improperly referred to as the Global War on Terror. This analysis will be based on a brief survey of appeasement attempts in the past to forestall warfare. This examination is a worthwhile undertaking if only because what we know to be the “bumper-sticker wisdom” most often found on the rear bumpers of Volvos and Volkswagens with Vietnam-era peace-symbols on the windows and composed of pithy declarations such as, “War never solved anything,” “Support the troops, bring them home,” “Give peace a chance,” is in fact the underlying rationale for almost all of the State Department’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East (if not everywhere else).

So what happens when peace is given a chance?

A natural and understandable human response to the threat of the violence of war is to attempt to avoid warfare’s inherent destruction and death. This fact, while institutionally constituted today, has been a factor in human relations throughout history. It should, therefore, be instructive, although not conclusive, to briefly survey what we might term the more instructive of the cases where pre-hostility negotiations have resulted in the aggressor agreeing to a non-aggression arrangement in exchange for financial or diplomatic concessions, thus fulfilling the human desire to avoid war. Another form of avoiding violent conflict is to just ignore aggressive actions by a foreign power in the hope that they themselves will curtail their hostile conduct over time, if they are not aggravated or confronted directly. How successful have these negotiated non-aggression agreements and the approach of purposeful disregard been in preventing the chaos of war?

The first historical case involves a name well known to most Americans – “Attila the Hun” (AKA “Attila the Scourge of God”).  Before Attila ascended to shared leadership of the Hunnic nation with his brother, Bleda, in 434 (A.D.), the Byzantine Empire had already begun paying the Huns an annual indemnity of 350 pounds of gold sometime in the mid-420’s, in exchange for “non-aggression.”  A decade later Bleda was killed in a hunting accident in 445, but in 435 Attila and Bleda demanded that the annual Byzantine “tribute” to the Huns be doubled to 700 pounds of gold, which the Byzantine court reluctantly agreed to in a negotiated “peace” treaty.  In 441, Attila made new, increased demands on the Byzantines, who baulked and sent an army to confront the Huns.  This army was defeated in 443, and Attila upped the annual tribute to 2,100 pounds of gold, accompanied with an additional “punitive payment” of 6,000 pounds of gold due immediately.  In the year 448, Attila’s demands were again raised, and his demands were again met by the Byzantine Empire, which nearly exhausted its resources.  Fortunately for the Byzantines, at this point, Attila turned his attention to the Western Roman Empire.  Although the Byzantines outlasted Attila, the fortune annually paid to the Huns arguably put the Byzantine Empire in slow, irreversible decline.  Historical fact thus allows the conclusion, although we would not say it is demonstrably so, that the Byzantines’ negotiated “peace” with the Huns resulted in unceasing military intimidation on their borders, the destruction of an army, and imperial impoverishment.

The second historical case involves the United States in its early nationhood, the Barbary pirates, and spanned a period from 1784 to 1815.  Soon after the successful conclusion of the American Revolution in 1783, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin were commissioned by Congress in 1784 to go and investigate the marketing potential of U.S. commercial products in Europe and the Mediterranean world.  The first major impediment to American commerce in and around the Mediterranean that the congressional delegates encountered was piracy against U.S. merchant ships carried out by international outlaws under the sponsorship and protection of Muslim rulers of “statelets” along the North African coast. From his vantage point in Europe, Jefferson learned that the “pirates” were not buccaneers in the traditional sense in that they didn’t drink or chase women or simply desire the accumulation of booty; instead their motivation was “religious” in carrying out Islamic jihad. The Muslim sailors, preying on innocent non-Muslim seafarers, called themselves “mujahideen” (strugglers in the cause of Islam) and not pirates. We recall this nomenclature arising among the Afghan fighters who first struggled with the Soviet army.

The Muslim pirates looted merchant ships and used their ill-gotten gains to procure cannons, guns, ammunition, and ships to further their jihadist cause. In accordance with the religious instructions contained in the “noble” Qur’an, they also captured, ransomed, and traded in slaves from the looted merchant vessels.  The American congressional delegates in Paris also learned the way in which the European powers like Britain, France, and Spain dealt with the Barbary pirates’ threat to their commerce: they payed mafia-like protection money to the Muslim rulers of the “Maghreb” (“Land of Sunset” – that is, looking west from Cairo on Islamic conquests). For context, the Maghreb takes in the modern-day states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.  Although opposed by Thomas Jefferson, in 1784, Congress decided to follow the lead of the Europeans and appropriated $80,000 as “tribute” to the Barbary States of the Maghreb, and it then instructed Jefferson, as Ambassador to France, and John Adams, as Ambassador to Britain, to undertake negotiations with the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain to obtain safe passage and to buy immunity from the jihadist piracy for American merchantmen in the Mediterranean and Atlantic.

When these two future presidents questioned the Tripolitan ambassador why the Barbary States were attacking U.S. vessels in light of no provocative or hostile American actions, he replied that the mujahideen were acting on the instructions of the Prophet Mohammed to make war on all who did not worship Allah and acknowledge the authority of his prophet. Jefferson and Adams were further informed that every Muslim killed in these attacks went immediately to Paradise. This now rings as déjà vu to those of us now living through this reinvigorated jihad in the 21st century.

From that meeting in 1784 until 1815, when Commodores William Bainbridge and Stephen Decatur won naval victories that led to treaties finally ending all U.S. tribute payments to the Barbary States, the American nation paid appeasement bribes off and on for 31 years. Additionally, during this period there had been a four-year war (1801-05) against the Barbary States during the first Jefferson term of presidency. So, once again the conclusion established by the preponderance of the evidence is upon us: the Americans’ negotiated payment of protection money cost the U.S. millions in appeasement bribes and resulted in two Mediterranean wars.  Finally, we have what is far more conclusive with the historical record open before us. The U.S. Government ended the extortion payments in 1815 by winning a war against the Barbary jihadists, a course of action Thomas Jefferson had initially advised the nation to take in 1784.

The third historical case differs in form from the first two examples of failed appeasement. While these first two involved negotiated bribes to effect non-violent conflict resolution, the third case is a tale of appeasing the Japanese Empire by ignoring their aggression against Pacific neighbors between 1894 and 1941. Following Japanese victory in the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, Japan forced China to relinquish its suzerainty over Korea, which Japan sought to include in its imperial empire. But Japan could not exercise a free hand in Korea until they defeated imperial Russia in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War and forced the Russians to acknowledge Japanese suzerainty in Korea in the Portsmouth Peace Treaty of 1905.

Korea was formally annexed to Japan by the 1910 Treaty of Annexation, which was universally opposed by the Korean population. Koreans were forced to live under conditions that amounted to slavery imposed by Japanese rule for the next 35 years. In 1931, Japan set out on its next overt and illegal military conquest, this time in Manchuria. The Japanese Imperial Army expanded its war crime atrocities on the Asian mainland from Korea to Manchuria. In 1937 Japan yet again increased its military aggression by attacking China. Japanese atrocities against the Chinese were well documented and known throughout the world, as with the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937-38, when an estimated 150,000-300,000 Chinese were murdered in a six-week period.  The Korea, Manchuria, and China aggressions committed over 47 years by the Japanese were simply ignored by the three nations, America, Britain, and Australia, which had the power in the Pacific to do anything about the egregious Japanese conduct. 

This purposeful disregard continued on the part of the U.S. in spite of the fact that the Japanese deliberately killed American citizens in China and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River in 1937.  American, British, and Australian rationalizations for inaction included such classic appeasement excuses as “we should avoid friction because, if we don’t interfere in their business, they won’t brother us,” “it’s not our business because vital national interests are not at stake,” “international markets and trade shouldn’t be interrupted,” “the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere actually benefits Asian nations under Japanese colonization,” “we’re not prepared for war,” and “once they get what they want, they’ll stop,” to name some of the more commonly heard appeasement dodges (does anything sound familiar?). 

Emboldened by the demonstrated cowardice of the leading Western nations, the Japanese did what aggressors always do when offered appeasement, they continued their militaristic expansion into Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and Burma causing the shooting war to finally break out. So, while negotiation and pay-off bribes are no guarantee to curb the appetite of an international aggressor, neither is purposeful disregard. Aggression refuses to be ignored. The U.S., Britain, and Australia paid dearly in lives and fortune for ignoring Japanese aggression until total war could not be avoided any longer, and consequently combat commenced when the circumstances were most favorable for Japan. 

The fourth case in this survey of appeasement is the one that is most often cited to illustrate the folly of appeasing tyrants – Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich. Of course, appeasement of Germany began years before when Hitler announced in 1935 that Germany was going to re-arm itself in clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Since this rearmament treaty violation went unchallenged, Hitler took the next step of militarily reoccupying the Rhineland, again in violation of the Versailles Treaty.  And, once again, Hitler met no opposition, and history treats us to the fact that Nazi political aggression continued with the peaceful unification, “Anschluss,” of Austria with Germany. 

In light of the continuing lack of opposition, Hitler then renewed his aggression by demanding the detachment of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, and its incorporation into Germany. At this point, the two leading European powers, Britain and France, finally grasped that they faced the stark choice of opposing Hitler by force, or negotiating and ultimately caving in to his demands. Naturally, in character, Hitler claimed that annexation of the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition. Pacified by Hitler’s reassurance of finality, Prime Minister Chamberlain returned to Britain from Munich waving a piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it and proclaiming that Hitler’s signature guaranteed “peace for our time.” However, as Winston Churchill observed, “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.”

Hitler’s observation is also interesting and worth remembering. In remarking about Chamberlain and the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, Hitler said: “'Our enemies are little worms; I saw them at Munich.'' So much for buying respect, friendship, and good will through appeasement.  In addition to condemning the Czechs to six years of hell under Nazi tyrannical rule, the British-French capitulation at Munich demonstrated Western cowardice to yet another tyrant on the rise, Joseph Stalin, but more of the Soviet aggression in the next case. 

By 1939 it was clear to all but the most stubborn and obtuse in the peace-at-any-price movement that appeasement was a failure. What cost comes with appeasement? There is a speculative, albeit reasonable, school of thought, which concludes, based on the opposition to Hitler’s aggressive plans of conquest by German Army generals like Ludwig Beck, that had the West confronted Hitler when he announced rearmament, when he occupied the Rhineland, when he declared Anschluss, or when he demanded the Sudetenland, the Army General Staff would have had reason and inspiration to overthrow Hitler. The German Army General Staff’s opposition to Hitler was founded on military institutional loyalty that feared Hitler’s aggressive plans were going to involve Germany in another two-front war, like World War I, which they knew they could not win, resulting in almost certain destruction of the German Army. But all of Hitler’s masterful diplomatic triumphs reversing the hated Treaty of Versailles so solidified the confidence of the German people in Hitler that displacing him became a political impossibility. Consequently, Hitler was so firmly entrenched politically by the effects of appeasement that it took a world war, 50-60 million dead, and the utter destruction of Germany, to dislodge him.

The fifth case again involves negotiated appeasement, but is somewhat unusual because one aggressor, Joseph Stalin, attempted to appease another, Adolf Hitler. As was mentioned in the previous case, Stalin saw stark Western cowardice in their refusal to stand up to Hitler at Munich and their willingness to sacrifice their ally, Czechoslovakia, in an attempt to save themselves from Hitler’s aggression. The 1938 Munich sellout convinced Stalin that he could not depend on Britain and France as allies and that he had better make his own peace with Hitler. The result was the August 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which is credited with beginning World War II in earnest. What is the strategic logic of that assertion? 

As the next step in his strategic plan, Hitler saw the need to conquer and occupy Poland as a way to gain a gateway to the agricultural and energy resources of the East which he believed were required for his Thousand Year Reich. However, Hitler feared that Stalin would see a German attack on Poland as a threat to the Soviet Union and would consequently enter the war on Poland’s side. In order to still Stalin’s apprehension over a Nazi threat on his western border, Hitler sent his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to negotiate a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, while ceding part of Poland to Stalin following the Nazi attack in a secret codicil to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Having outlined Hitler’s motivation for negotiating this non-aggression pact, the question arises, what was Stalin’s motivation, given Hitler’s known propensity for duplicity? While the proven perfidy of the British and French was certainly one reason for Stalin to make his own diplomatic move, probably the main reason was the sorry state of the Red Army. Stalin himself was the direct cause of the fact that the Soviet military was in no condition to take on Hitler’s Wehrmacht, as he had purged just about all of his most capable army commanders, like Marshal Mikhail Tuckachevsky, as Trotskyite traitors during the late 1930’s in Moscow political show trails. Stalin was well aware of how deeply his purges had hurt the Soviet Red Army because of the army’s subsequent abysmal showing in the Soviets' war of aggression against Finland, 1939-40. Stalin wanted time to rebuild the army’s command structure. Stalin believed that his appeasement would deter war with Nazi Germany until 1943 and that the 1939-43 interval would give him sufficient time to bring the Red Army up to the standard necessary to battle the German Army on an equal footing. Stalin strongly desired that Hitler should believe that the Soviets would not attack the Nazis, forestalling the need for the Nazis to attack the Soviets.

Appeasement, however, does not even work among tyrants. Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, two years before Stalin anticipated. And the Red Army’s performance in the opening days of that conflict was just as abysmal as Stalin had feared. So, appeasement proved inadequate, ironically, even as an effort to buy time during which one aggressor’s army geared up to do battle with another’s.

Is there a pattern here?

Obviously, there is no way of knowing the course of history in each of these cases if, instead of attempting appeasement, the appeasers had confronted the aggressors immediately. Also, these five cases are in no way an exhaustive examination of the history of appeasement, nor is such a review possible or even meritorious for the reason that the historical records are only partially available and even the fuller ones omit much of what produces political action in a society. But, withal, they do clearly show that appeasement has failed totally different nations, with totally different forms of government, seeking totally different objectives, in totally different periods of history.

It is a brute fact that appeasement has become the non-violent solution our Open Society Elite employ in search of a universalized democracy in what they term the Global Village, but which is better termed the World State. Appeasement’s failure, however, seems to be a related universal that the Open Society Elite consistently ignore. For a rational observer these historical facts alone should at least give pause to the more sanguine among the advocates of peace studies-conflict resolution-appeasement when it comes to trusting the lives of Americans to a policy of appeasement. After all, it is certainly arguable that appeasement has resulted in the unnecessary deaths of millions upon millions in one horrendous failure after another.

But the record of man’s failures is rarely a deterrent to foolish behavior. The maxim (drawn from George Santayana’s famous quote about remembering the past) that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it bears mention. For example, a great deal of hype was generated out of the recommendation in the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group (ISG) that the U.S. engage in "more robust" regional diplomacy, including engaging with Iran and Syria. But Iran has been “engaged” in nuclear negotiations with the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency and European representatives from Britain, France, and Germany since 2003. The results of these negotiations have been that the Iranians have violated every agreement which they have entered into pledging they would curtail their nuclear weapons grade fuel enrichment process. The fact of Iran’s duplicitousness has become so patent that even Russia and China voted on a U.N. Security Counsel resolution calling for sanctions.

Again, do we witness a pattern in this behavior? With this kind of disregard by Iran’s leadership for Iran’s international commitments, even the fanatical peace-at-any-price activists should begin to ask themselves: “What’s the point?”

Indeed, there is a point. Thus, (a) while it is a fact that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) under which it has already agreed to the provisions it is now violating; (b) while it is a fact that Iran is the main source of weapons, such as advanced-design improvised explosive devices, the weapon of choice and an effective one, for the Iraqi insurgency, and (c) while it is a fact that Iran fuels the ideological and strategic chaos in Iraq through al-Sadr and in Lebanon through Hezbollah, the ISG and many others in Washington have concluded that only diplomacy with Iran is a viable option. This leaves the thinking person to wonder why the ISG and others conclude that the Iranians would agree (1) to assist the U.S. in establishing any form of government in Iraq that would plant a Western-style liberal democracy in their backyard; (2) to reverse three years of successful terror policy by shutting down the arms re-supply to the Shia militia; and (3) to honor such an agreement once entered into in light of their wholesale failure to treat agreements with the West as anything more than polemical tools?

Another way to think about the ISG’s “engagement” recommendation is that, having correctly identified Iran and Syria as the linchpins of the Iraq war, the Baker-Hamilton Elites wish to make the preposterous leap of faith to assert that we should negotiate with these countries "because it is in their interest to have a stable Iraq." To go from the fact that Iran and Syria are supplying the jihadists with the necessary weapons to foment instability and chaos to the assertion that they have an interest in a stable Iraq defies all logic. Moreover, it is obvious to any serious observer that what the Iranian Shia wish to do is to create an environment from which the U.S. retreats, thus affording them the opening they seek to impose a Shia-based order. If this is indeed their strategy, nothing less than the U.S. abandonment of this theatre to Iran will appease the mullahs calling the shots in Tehran.

But instead of the obvious, we read page after page of platitudes. We are bombarded by such platitudes from the “talking heads” covered so exhaustively by the media. But the problem we face in the West is that the opposing view to the radical appeasement camp is the Democracy Open Society appeasement camp. Expressed in and represented by the Democracy-building ideology of the Bush administration and notoriously a part of the so-called “war mongering” neo-conservative world, is the notion that if we can just satisfy enough of the social scientific conditions to establish a liberal democracy of sorts among our committed enemies, these primitives will be thrust into the light of the Enlightenment and come to understand that there is no truth worth fighting for. Indeed, the “conservatives” among us like to point to the “fanaticism” of the religious mullahs as proof that all purported truth outside of the certainty of mathematical physics is the equivalent of political order. That is, it does not exist beyond its existence as Uncertainty.

Uncertainty in the affairs of men can only be resolved in one of two ways; but in truth, the two are one. Totalitarianism in its active phase, or tyranny; and totalitarianism in its resting phase, or the Open Society Democracy, where there is no truth, only method. Islam moves toward a world state of the first kind. The West, and here in the U.S. in the guise of both Democrats and Republicans, we march in lock step toward the World State Open Society Democracy where all men know that there are no truths which permit discrimination between peoples, races, societies, or cultures. These are but anti-scientific “social constructs” which modern men must understand as “beliefs” or “prejudices” and ultimately eliminate, whether by force of arms and law or by natural biological selection. Progress, however, is the transcendent truth provided by science. It is unavoidable.

Can negotiation as opposed to appeasement be useful?

In our final word, we return to the pragmatic. Is there room to negotiate without appeasing our enemies? At the risk of being labeled cynical, we must conclude that while negotiations can be useful, they will only be so if they are declaratory. In other words, diplomacy now must be used to make certain that Iran, Syria, and the other Muslim belligerents understand that the U.S. will treat hostile actions with certain and definitive destruction of their leadership, command and control centers, and their infrastructure for waging war.

Unfortunately and tragically we find ourselves in an impossible situation precisely because we have no credibility. The Muslim world understands both the threat of the Open Society Democracy and its inherent weakness. The Muslim leadership knows full well that any embrace of the modern Western creed will destroy Islam much as it has destroyed Christianity and Judaism. And, they also understand that the modern liberal democracy has no will to fight a long and bloody war.

The answer which lies exposed before us is one we are not yet capable of accepting. The ability of the West to fight a war, a total war against the ideological and existential threats we face, has been reduced with every “democratizing” step we have taken since the Civil War. For good or for bad, the West no longer treasures national existence. We belong to a “Global Village” in search of a sweeping majority surrounded by an ever growing number of “minority rights.” There exists the time tested and quite sensible military answer to our enemies that Clausewitz has provided to the students and artisans of war. But, unfortunately, this solution has moved almost impossibly out of reach to the West because the first element of the formulation of successful war making, War = Motivation + Capability, can no longer be found in the "Global Village" polity. That what we have written on this subject should fall on deaf ears is not surprising. What would be tremendously surprising is if our political and military leadership took it seriously.