| Sounds like Rantburg commentary to me... |
In a long, rambling essay, startling for some of its neoconservative jargon, Peter Wehner of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, declares that the war against global jihadism will be long, with success and setbacks along the way, but the West must not grow impatient, nor withdraw from the fight. The enemy is “not Islam per se” but a global network of extremists driven by a twisted vision of Islam. “These jihadists are certainly a minority within Islam - but they exist, they are dangerous and resolute, in some places they are ascendant, and they need to be confronted and defeated,” he writes.According to Wehner, Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies are waging their war on several continents and will try to overthrow governments and seize power where they can. Where they cannot, they will attempt to inflict fear and destruction by disrupting settled ways of life. They will employ every weapon they can: assassinations, car bombs, airplanes, and, if they can secure them, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, he warns. He maintains that Iran is controlled by Shia extremists and today Iran is “the most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world”.
He writes, “It is the fate of the West, and in particular the United States, to have to deal with the combined threat of Shia and Sunni extremists. And for all the differences that exist between them - and they are significant - they share some common features. Their brand of radicalism is theocratic, totalitarian, illiberal, expansionist, violent, and deeply anti-Semitic and anti-American ... All of us would prefer years of repose to years of conflict. But history will not allow it. And so it once again rests with this remarkable republic to do what we have done in the past: our duty.”