What Will the Brits Do Next?

Everyone is hanging out the British Union Jack today
in solidarity with our British
friends after the Tube Tragedy on 7/7, and so we should. But we’d better not expect
the Brits to be sticking their necks out any more in the War on Terror. Actually,
as official pessimist John Derbyshire suggests, we
won’t really have a real war on terror until a western city gets hit by
a nuclear device. Only then will things get “tribal.”

Ever since World War I the Europeans have believed in appeasement
and a quiet life guaranteed by the welfare state. The British got tricked into
going the distance in World War II and they won’t make the same mistake again.
And they have developed a good expertise in appeasement in their dealings with the
IRA.

The excellent Mark Steyn
agrees. The British government. Tory and Labour, did a real
appeasement job on the IRA—after all, who really cares who governs Northern
Ireland? Bottom line for Steyn:

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle,
for Britain and the West. It’s hard not to be moved by the
sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual
in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about
business as usual,
that’s not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

The New York Times’s man Thomas Friedman
reminds the moderate
Arabs that this is their problem. Hardly, old chap. They will be saying that
they really don’t have a dog in this fight.

But the wise Lee Harris thinks that we are in a blood feud. Our Islamicist
adversaries do not think in terms of the Clausewitean decisive battle but in
punishing the West for its insults and its crusades.

For what it is worth Thomas Sowell, in his Race and Culture trilogy, observed that the immigrants
that struggled to thrive in the United States were those who had not known law and self-government
and who had lived in a culture of force and feud. But, of course, every immigrant wave thus
far ended up assimilating to the American Way of law and self-government. Even the Hatfields and the McCoys got over
their blood feud and moved to the suburbs.