Soft on Our Enemies

I mentioned earlier that I've been reading Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. His last chapter on "The Soviet Menace" is the longest in the book. It starts with an existential warning that the U.S. was losing the Cold War (at the time, 1960): "Our enemies have understood the nature of the conflict, and we have not. They are determined to win the conflict, and we are not." Goldwater explains this as a largely a function of the unseriousness among many in the American elite who incompletely perceived the mortal nature of Moscow's threat to American security and world order.

In any case, much is different today, but there are eerie echoes between Goldwater's tocsin and the West's approach to the global Islamist challenge, especially among the global collectivist-left (many of whom are literally in bed with our enemies).

I'll have more on the U.S. homefront in upcoming posts. For example, I want to share my thoughts on Jamie Glazov's new book, United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

In the meanwhile, Con Coughlin has a chilling report out of Britain at the London Telegraph, "Britain is Fighting a War – And We Are Too Soft on Our Enemies":

It's not just soldiers who win wars. Governments also have a crucial role to play – and to judge by the response of most Western governments to the threat we face from radical Islamism, we are simply not competing on equal terms with the enemy.

No one can claim that we in Britain don't understand the nature of the threat we face. In recent months, there has been a succession of reports highlighting the increasingly pernicious influence British Islamists are having on the Nato-led campaign to bring stability to Afghanistan.

After senior officers confirmed last year that British Muslims were fighting with the Taliban in southern Afghanistan, it was revealed that RAF Nimrod surveillance planes monitoring Taliban radio stations were surprised to hear insurgents speaking in strong Yorkshire or Midlands accents.

More recently, officers based at the main military base at Lashkar Gah revealed that they had found British-made components in roadside bombs used to attack coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, sent to Helmand by Muslim sympathisers in Britain. This week three British Muslims, part of a terrorist cell whose leader was convicted of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier on video, were jailed at the Old Bailey for supplying equipment to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

The active involvement of radical British Muslims in the Afghan insurgency has led senior officers to claim that they are engaged in a "surreal mini-civil war" in Afghanistan. And yet, for all the compelling evidence that British-based Islamist radicals are actively participating in a jihad against Britain and its coalition allies, the Government, together with those who have opposed our involvement in the War on Terror from the start, seems determined to give the Islamist radicals the benefit of the doubt.

Read the whole thing, here.

I'm reminded of Snooper's warnings for today's domestic enemies. And I'm not reassured by the new administration in Washington, which seems not unlike many of those back in the '50s, identified by Goldwater, who "never believed deeply that the Communists" were in earnest.