The new fear-mongers have a new way of saying "we only have ourselves to blame"

DATELINE: In the Shire, Indy, 4 January 2006

Interesting batch of articles fired off to me as attachments and hot links today. The disturbing trends I find in these pieces are: 1) "We're losing badly and don't even know it!"; and 2) the "clash of civilizations" argument of "fighting fire with fire" and mirror-imagining ourselves into something that can fight radical Islam symmetrically is stronger--and more myopic in its vision--than ever.

First up is this strange Department of State career-specialist in public diplomacy with this amazing diatribe about how we're losing the Fourth Generation Warfare that Al Qaeda has clearly mastered (Tony Corn, "World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare" in Real Clear Politics, go to http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_4_06_TC.html). His answer? Of course, lots of very intensive public diplomacy and "info ops."

Missing in this whole piece is any semblance of the role of global economics, except, at the end, to bring in the Chinese as our natural enemies and key allies of Islam (so very Huntington, who likewise has indulged his old-scared-white-guy leanings a bit too much in recent years). Instead, we get the usual choice between net-centric and 4GW, an idiotic choice I spent a lot of time in BFA dismissing. Having just spent a lot of time at Quantico and Leavenworth, I have to say, I just don't meet the counter-insurgency and 4GW types who argue the irrelevancy of NCW. But this is the level of sophistication, I guess, we are to expect from someone who thinks, as so many at State seem to do, that it's governments that run the world and control most of reality (except when those devious 4GW warriors are attacking The Man and The System so effectively).

All in all, a weird piece with so little sense of the private sector's role in this (save a brief toss-off reference). Instead, we get so much faith in propaganda, which is that fight-fire-with-fire stuff I can't stand for two reasons: 1) Americans don't trust their government's propaganda, so I don't know why this guy is so sure it will work and 2) we already have plenty of Western propaganda that's way too effective already and it's called Hollywood. Hollywood's so effective, that's why we get this desperate Salafi jihadist response, which, as a recent Stratfor piece notes ("Al Qaeda in 2006: Devolution and Adaption," by Fred Burton) gets less coherent with time. But alas, as so often is the case with the most gung-ho 4GWers (and a State dept. hand at that!), all that "devolution" is yet another sign of Al Qaeda's growing mastery of "netwar" and our growing incompetence in both recognizing it and fighting it.

We are so screwed (or perhaps we don't screw enough, but let me finish with Corn before moving on ...).

Corn's piece employs some funky math in a sort of Carl Sagan-like whirl: basically he talks about 1.2B Muslims and if only 1 percent go all jihadist on us, that's 12M, and if only 1 percent of them go suicidal, that's 120k suicide bombers--(just like that!).

It's that wonderful focus on numbers and demographics which gets me to Mark Steyn's gloriously frantic and fear-mongering piece in the WSJ Opinion Journal:

THE CENTURY AHEAD

It's The Demography, Stupid

The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.

By Mark Steyn

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West ...

Those frickin' Muslims are breeding like rabbits and infiltrating us like crazy. Europe will be lost within a short historical timeframe. Hell, it may be too far gone already. Like Corn, Steyn pushes for an aggressive sort of re-education campaign, where, apparently, we outdo the House of Saud in brainwashing (of course, they're winning like you wouldn't believe, multiculturalist pussy that you are!).

In fact, Steyn's frantic assault on multiculturalism is the piece's most sad aspect, doing poor Sam Huntington's scared-old-white-guy philosophy a big step better (actually, even making Sam's crankiness seem quaint in comparison). Dig this bit:

What will Europe be like at the end of this process? Who knows? On the one hand, there's something to be said for the notion that America will find an Islamified Europe more straightforward to deal with than M. Chirac, Herr Schroeder & Co. On the other hand, given Europe's track record, getting there could be very bloody. But either way this is the real battlefield. The al Qaeda nutters can never find enough suicidal pilots to fly enough planes into enough skyscrapers to topple America. But unlike us, the Islamists think long-term, and, given their demographic advantage in Europe and the tone of the emerging Muslim lobby groups there, much of what they're flying planes into buildings for they're likely to wind up with just by waiting a few more years. The skyscrapers will be theirs; why knock 'em over?

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan--like Bill Clinton's "It's about the future of all our children." We on the right spent the 1990s gleefully mocking Mr. Clinton's tedious invocation, drizzled like syrup over everything from the Kosovo war to highway appropriations. But most of the rest of the West can't even steal his lame bromides: A society that has no children has no future.

Wow! Somebody get a lynching party together. We better hang some of them dark-skinned pagans before they start screwing our women! You there--start having some babies for Der Fatherland!

I mean, where do they get dinosaurs like this? And why, in our fear about others not like us, do we reach for such racists?

It's just so sad to see so many "opinion leaders" with so little faith in this country, and the myriad of cultures that built it. We're winning the globalization war, and yet we are so filled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

The reality is, we'll need plenty of foreigners if we want to remain rich and strong:

U.S. Faces Severe Worker Shortage in Future

By JIM ABRAMS, Associated Press Writer

Wed Jan 4, 1:42 PM ET

WASHINGTON - The United States faces a severe worker shortage in the near future, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday in advocating better education for Americans and changes in immigration law to allow in more foreign workers.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060104

But instead of seeing that sort of economic logic, we're treated to this sort of strategizing: those we can't re-educate, maybe we just sterilize. The private sector does nothing, the government is the answer for all.

I get asked a lot why my vision seems to be winning more and more converts.

Is it that good?

No, my friends, the competition just sucks so goddamn bad.