Blair: Western Leaders See the Danger of Islamic Extremism, But Our Public Still Does Not

In an interview today, British Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly declared what is obvious to any informed individual: That although most Western leaders fully understand the threat of Islamic radicalism to civilization itself, most of the Western public lags far behind. The Neocon certainly agrees with PM Blair, but places the blame for that not on the public’s ignorance and intellectual laziness, but on a lack of leadership, which has been sending mixed messages ever since that fateful day five years ago tomorrow. From the ambiguous term “war on terror,” to describing the religion in whose name these attacks are perpetrated as “the religion of peace,” our leaders have been looking to wage war without waging war.

David Warren captures this truth well in his column today in the Ottawa Citizen. A small Sample: "There is something to be said for Fight, something to be said for Flight, but nothing to be said for anything in between -- given a real threat. This, anyway, has been my experience over a long and messy life. There are many battles best avoided, and prudence dictates a fairly careful avoidance of the battle we can't win. But there are battles that cannot be avoided, and that we must win. And there is nothing edifying, nor even intelligent, in trying to avoid the unavoidable…
Our task, is to defeat a fanatical and determined ideological foe, who uses conflict with the West to build his own power within the Muslim world. We defeat him by destroying him wherever we can find him, and we defeat him in the full sight of the Muslims he's trying to impress, ideally before they've joined his cause. This is not a war we could ever wish to fight, but one that is certainly thrust upon us…
The message we must convey, through force, is that we will do capital-letter Anything necessary to remove threats to the West. To Muslims everywhere, it must be unambiguous: "Don't join these people or you will share their fate." (We should have said the same thing to the Germans in the 1930s, before Hitler had succeeded in making Nazism and Germany indistinguishable; having failed then, we should not fail again.)…
And in rendering this message, and conducting this war, "brave" is the necessary foundation for "smart". We can't fight a war without fighting a war. The smarts should be applied to winning it, not to finding a way to pretend it's not happening.”

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