Existential Threat

Tigerhawk has an interesting post today, in which he makes this observation:

Despite the external controversy associated with Israel’s reaction to the Hezbollah assault and subsequent war, the entire Israeli polity, left to right, is unified in its support for the War against Hezbollah. All of Israel is threatened by Hezbollah, Iran and Syria. It makes war mobilization and warfighting much clearer and simpler.

By contrast, the US polity is not unified on the matter of warfighting in the Middle East. Some see an existential threat arising from Islamism, others do not. This has made it politically impossible to preempt Iran. Therefore, it seems to me that we are likely to face a very unpleasant surprise in advance of any significant military action to upend the current Iranian regime.

Do go read the whole thing, because Tigerhawk carries through with the implications of that last sentence…

The observation about Israel being united in the fight against Hezbollah (and Hamas, for that matter) is not new, nor is the observation that the U.S. is not similarly united against Iran. But what is new (to me, at least) is the logical conclusion Tigerhawk draws: that because of our political divisions (with regard to the war on terror), we will not make pre-emptive strike against Iran. Instead, we must wait for Iran to make the first strike — thus uniting the U.S. against Iran as Israel is united against Hezbollah — and then (and only then) will we be able to muster the political will to strike. But only in response.

It’s an interesting thesis, and one that he develops a bit. But one part of his argument surprised me, though I know I really shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s when he said “Some see an existential threat arising from Islamism, others do not.” For those of you with less-than-Ivy-League vocabularies, “existential threat” is just a shorthand way of saying “a threat so powerful that it threatens your very existence”.

The momentary surprise for me was that any rational American observer could look at the radical Islamic fundamentalist movement and conclude that it did not pose an existential threat. And yet it’s obvious from the behavior of many of our leaders that in fact they see no such thing. Just to (almost) randomly pick an example: having watched Harry Reid in action, would you conclude that he behaves like someone who actually believes his country is at risk? I certainly don’t think so — I think Harry Reid is far more worried about how many seats the Democrats can pick up in the Senate this November than he is by Iran’s activities.

So why is it that many people, myself included, look at the recent history of the radical fundamentalist Islamic movement and conclude that it poses a clear existential threat — while many other people look at the same history and conclude that the threat is much less significant?

Throughout modern history we have seen the same scenario played out in Western civilization. The example I’ve read most about occurred just prior to Britain’s entry into World War II. If you read the contemporaneous political debates of the period — both in Britain and in the U.S. — you see much the same dichotomy. There’s one group of people (including both Churchill and Roosevelt) who see Hitler and Nazi Germany as an existential threat, and another group (most famously Chamberlain, but actually a clear majority of the polity in both Britain and the U.S.) who sounded a lot like our anti-war politicians of today. They really didn’t see the existenial threat. Until, that is, Hitler decided to invade Poland — a treaty partner with Britain. For whatever reason, this action of Hitler’s was enough, at last, to push the British polity over the edge to all-out war with Germany. It was clearly short of the bloody and direct first strike that Tigerhawk postulates as necessary to move the U.S. polity, however. And in World War II, it was not sufficient to move the U.S. polity — it took the strike on Pearl Harbor to do that.

So maybe Tigerhawk is right. He postulates, toward the end of his post, that even if Iran directly attacked Israel the U.S. polity might not unite — that we might not all see, even then, that existential threat. He suspects that it would take an Iranian attack on Iraq, on Europe, or directly on the U.S. (through terror cells) to hammer home the extent of the threat.

I sure hope he’s wrong.

I’d love to see someone credible poll this exact issue, the question of whether people in the U.S. perceive the radical fundamentalist Islamic movement as an existential threat. I really have no clue what the results would be…