Humiliation After Humiliation

Are we in a war with the Islamists? Andrew C. McCarthy is worried that we don’t really take the Islamists seriously. But they are very serious about us. There is no doubt about what Sheikh Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, thinks. It’s war, war to the death.

“We consider [the United States] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources.... This American administration is our enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’”

No doubt there are thousands of Levantine antiquities in American museums that ought, in the fullness of time, to be returned to their lands of origin. But plundering oil and resources. Please! When paying $75 per barrel?

The real beef, of course, is the humiliation, the way it all went wrong and Islam became not the glorious expanding fist of God but a collapsed cultural backwater sustained only by the heroin of oil revenues.

The refusal of the United States to take the Islamists seriously, and to brand them as an enemy—the complaint of McCarthy—is not necessarily negligence: it is yet another humiliation for the Arabs of the Middle East.

As the Israelis uncover the surprising extent of the military infrastructure in southern Lebanon we can understand the meaning of all those reports from Iran about workers not getting paid for months at a time. Now we know where the payroll money went. It was sent to Lebanon to build up Hezbollah. And now a lot of it is being blown to blazes. Another humiliation.

If we review all the brave revolutions of the last century that promised death to America and death to capitalism we can observe a common problem. After all the fighting words there came the problem of delivering. And in every case the revolutionaries never had the power to carry out their boasts. The Bolsheviks wasted the fruitful land of Russia. The Nazis didn’t have the economic and military power to conquer Russia. Mao nearly starved China to death trying to become a world power by selling the seed corn of China’s peasants.

You have to wonder. How close is Iran to economic ruin? All these foreign adventures don’t come cheap.

It is relatively easy to find soft spots in the world and entice teenage thugs into the streets. But you have to create a power base if you really want to strut in the world.

The record of the last century is that if you want to lead a powerful nation then you need to create a powerful, capitalist economy, featuring a free people. It is a lesson that the Chinese seem to have learned in the last generation.

It seems to be the one thing that the Islamists cannot bring themselves to do. It is the final humiliation that the Islamists cannot even begin to face.