[SeattleUte]

Chris Hitchins believes radical Islam poses every but the specter of evil and physical danger to the United States as did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But having grown up under the specter of mutually assured destruction and Warsaw Pact tanks and troops vastly outnumbering NATO's along the Eastern European divide, and reflecting that in the mid-twentieth century the Nazi flag flew over Paris, and appeared likely to stay there for generations, I have my doubts.

I think I'm in Waters' camp believing these Islamic terrorists live in caves and are relics of medieval times. In the Looming Tower Richard Wright demonstrates that Al Queda really needed near-criminal negligence by the CIA (knowing full well two of bin Ladin's henchmen were in the U.S. and taking flight lessons and doing nothing about it and telling no one including the FBI for over a year) to pull off 9/11. Even getting a VISA is tough if you're a Middle Easterner, and you need to be legal to buy large amounts of fertilizer, take flying lessons, buy deadly weapons, etc. And even terrorism as spectacular as 9/11 doesn't really threaten American military and economic primacy.

I continue to believe that freedom is ephemeral and doomed in the long run as it has always been, but it's not radical Islam I fear in this sense. It's probably ourselves, our own leaders. I think radical Islam will go the way of all underfunded etreme minority terrorist groups in modern times who fade away as their founders die of prostate cancer or become addled if not die violently.