Gerard Baker On the Current Crisis

Gerard Baker has a must-read column in today's Times.

He starts by capturing perfectly the ritual of cultural self-abuse that seems to be the Left's response to any terroristic incident:

THERE’S A familiar ritual each time an operation to thwart a putative terrorist incident dominates the news. After the public’s initial expressions of relief and shuddering contemplation of what might have been, a rising chorus of sceptics takes over, with a string of questions and hypotheses.

Was it really a serious terrorist plot, or only a bunch of misguided, alienated Muslim kids larking about with a chemistry set and a mobile phone? Sometimes, unfortunately, as with this summer’s ludicrously overplayed Miami “plot” to blow up buildings in Chicago, in which the plotters had got as far as purchasing some boots but not much else, overzealous authorities bring this sort of suspicion on themselves. But you can guarantee that every incident now, whatever the evidence, will be treated with such derisive doubt. If the police had got to the 9/11 hijackers or the 7/7 bombers in time, a sizeable chunk of respectable opinion would have dismissed them as idealistic young men with no real capacity or intent to cause harm.

The scepticism is then embellished by the conspiracy-as-diversion theory. How convenient, cluck the doubters, with rolled eyes and theatrical sarcasm, just as the Government’s got some new bonfire of civil liberties planned; or just as President Bush’s poll numbers are collapsing; or just as Israel is stepping up its ground attacks in southern Lebanon.

Then, of course, whether real or imaginary or government-authored, the cynics will say the plot inevitably has its roots in our own culpability. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq, if Tony Blair weren’t George Bush’s agent of oil-fuelled imperialism, if Israel weren’t killing innocents in Lebanon, this wouldn’t have happened.

It is a neatly comprehensive schema of cynicism. If the plot turns out to be a damp squib, or the police have made some ghastly error, the sceptics will triumphantly claim that it was deliberately overdone to scare us. If the plot is real, or God forbid, as with 9/11 or 7/7 it isn’t foiled in time, then they can switch seamlessly to the claim that we’ve only ourselves to blame.

This maddening mode of discourse has become all too familiar in recent years. It's been with us for a long time, but until recently it was limited to marginal venues -- the precincts of academia, various socialist workers' publications, the rantings of the village crank, and such -- but now with the advent of modern communications technology the lunacy, as this week's Connecticut elections have shown, has infected the mainstream of western political culture

Baker continues:

If the police and intelligence authorities have succeeded in foiling... a murderous plan , the correct response is one of immense gratitude to them, pride in our security institutions and continued vigilance against future plots.

But we should also remember that our continuing existence lies not just in inconvenient security measures and uncomfortably intrusive intelligence activities, but in a grand global strategy. Success requires, in addition to the tiresome banalities of long check-in queues and tighter limits on hand luggage, a commitment, whatever the costs, to eradicate the deep global political causes that threaten us.

Note his emphasis on "political" -- not "social", "economic", or "cultural" movements. He is right to do so. What we face is first and foremost a political movement that situationally invokes various social, cultural or economic grievances and causes. Baker is quite right to cut through the social science sophistries and expose the essentially political nature of the beast.

And he is precisely right to note that self-flagellation is not the appropriate response to the challenge we face.

And for this it just won’t do to claim it’s all about bad US foreign policy. It is repetitive but necessary to point out that we didn’t start this war when we invaded Iraq. The attacks on 9/11 were planned not only before we invaded, but during a time when the US was expending extraordinary effort to try to forge a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

And if our actions have radicalised the jihadists we should remember that they are animated at least as much by our ridding Afghanistan of their spiritual brethren, the Taleban, as they are by whatever crimes the US may have committed in Baghdad.

The same applies to Israel and Lebanon. Not only is the current war the direct result of Hezbollah’s aggression, its deeper causes lie in the continued determination of Israel’s enemies, increasingly emboldened by Tehran, to liquidate the Jewish state.

Few can look at events in Iraq or Lebanon today with optimism, but it would be dangerous folly to assume, as some do, that the West should retreat, beating its breast and promising never to offend again.

He is right. It just won't do! Yet so many of our public figures' first response to overwhelming crisis is to retreat into abject apology, or to indulge in nasty backbiting and jostling for political advantage, or to succumb to a temptation to kick the crisis down the road for someone else to confront at some other time. Such words and actions have no place in the new, radical and dangerous world ushered in by 9/11. Gerard Baker does us all a service by bluntly and clearly pointing out that basic fact.

Read the whole thing here.