Courting catastrophe: America five years after 9/11.

• Author: Scheuer, Michael
• Position: 9/11/06: Five Years On: A Symposium

AMERICA WILL be attacked by Al-Qaeda again, and more destructively than on 9/11. Why? Simple. Our bipartisan governing elites willfully refuse to recognize the severity of the Islamist threat. They are waging a feckless war that misrepresents the enemies' motivation, keeps borders open, applies insufficient force, and pursues status quo foreign polices, ensuring the next Islamist generation is more anti-American and numerous--and still has the opportunity to strike the American homeland.

Time is short. America faces an existential threat the Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc foresaw long ago. Belloc had great respect for Islam's vitality, mobilizing skill, latent military power, patience and endurance. He wrote the following in 1938 but, in Munich's aftermath, it went unnoticed. "The future always comes as a surprise", Belloc said,

but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise might be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam ... It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it was in the past ... It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between Christian culture and for what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent. (1) CALLING THE threat unrecognized does not mean that policymakers, academics and generals are unaware of it. To the contrary, Islamism is constantly debated and written about. What I mean is that U.S. leaders have failed to understand their enemies' motivations. Ignoring Sun Tzu's advice, they have not prepared citizens for the price they will pay in blood, treasure and lifestyle to defeat the Islamists--if indeed there is time to understand and prevail.

An essay by Rami Khouri, editor-at-large for Beirut's Daily Star, is pertinent. In it he wrote,

Sensible middle class Americans get on with making a living in challenging times, while their federal government in Washington conducts a fantasy foreign policy based on make-believe perceptions and imagined realities ... Washington's policy is a mishmash of faulty analysis, historical confusions, emotional anger, foreign policy frustrations, worldly ignorance, and political deception all rolled into one...