The Senate Goes Wobbly

WITH THE UNITED States Senate voting in one week to let federal judges rather than military commanders determine who is an enemy combatant and to send a sense of the Senate resolution to President Bush to tell them how he plans to get out of Iraq we must look at the possible consequence of “going wobbly.”

Here we are, what Lee Harris calls the western team arrayed against the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” What happens when come of our chaps go all wobbly and work to weaken the current western effort to contain the ruthless men?

We have a historical reference for the current situation, because the history of the twentieth century was largely the story of the western commercial empire battling against the ruthless secular religions of fascism, Soviet communism, and Maoist warlordism.

Except for the advent of Soviet communism, each eruption of the ruthless men could have been easily contained: the Hitler phenomenon in the mid 1930s, the Mao phenomenon at any time up to about 1947-48.

The comparison of the rise of Mao and the current eruption of Islamo-fascism is apt. Mao was a ruthless man who maintained an army in China for twenty years courtesy of the Soviet Union and the vacillation of the United States. When he gained power he used the entire wealth of China to try to project himself onto the world stage as a superpower. But it couldn’t be done. China was an agricultural country, and didn’t have the wealth to sustain a bid for global hegemony in 1950.

If the Islamo-fascists gain control of the Middle East they would, of course, obtain the oil income of Saudi Arabia, say about $180 billion a year. It might not be enough to sustain global hegemony, but it would certainly be enough to cause global mischief and disruption. It might be enough to conquer Europe.

For two hundred years the peripheral world has fought against the emerging global commercial empire, represented in the 19th century by the British and in the 20th century by the Americans. The Islamo-fascists are just the latest reactionary movement that has arisen to oppose it.

For a long generation, since the emergence of the McGovern wing, the Democratic Party has flirted with the reactionaries, only getting serious when they were in the White House.

Maybe we need to elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2008 to force the national Democratic leadership to deal with global reality and stop playing footsie with the Angry Left crazies.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.