Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal.
Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the “electronic herd.” We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.
Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
I remember wondering what the future held, Dad, but I gotta tell you, it never, ever, struck me that the future would hold a president of the United States who thought that the best way to deal with the angers and rages of the Muslim world towards us was to offer apologies.
Then again, I’ve lived through a number of presidents and I never thought I’d ever live under one who genuinely didn’t really much like America–America, that is, that exists, not the one in his dreams.
Older, wiser, and sadder.