As usual, there is alot of stuff out there written by people who can write a heck of alot better than I can.
At The Officer’s Club, Charlie Munn says that Europe needs to be a lot more scared than it appears to be at the moment:
Europe needs to get scared. Soon, they?ll have a fanatical theocrat with nuclear missiles capable of ranging their capitals. In many of the EU nations, there is a large, poor, unemployed, immigrant population from Muslim countries across Africa and the Middle East. Those two conditions could wreak havoc on the loose bureaucratic system that has governed France, Germany, Belgium, and the rest of Western Europe. Let?s take the US out of the equation for a moment and consider the security situation the EU would find itself in.
Why does this reminds far more than it should of 1936 ?
Also at The Officer’s Club, John Noonan wonders whether Europeans have lost their sense of honor:
Where has Europe?s honor gone? Or, more precisely, where has old Europe?s honor gone? Paralyzed by the new age enlightenment of multiculturalism and internationalism, the once stoic continent has become ripe with fear. It fears upsetting its Muslim minority, it fears tough decisions, it fears upsetting the world?s dictators, and ?oddly enough- it fears American hegemony.
Finally, writing in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins argues that the West cannot win the apparently coming fight with Iran:
Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it – macho phrases about “all options open” – suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.
Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid.
I’m not sure if I agree with Jenkins’ premise or not, but it deserves consideration.
Read them all and draw your own conclusions.
H/T: Vodkapundit
Technorati Tags: War on Terror, Iran
