Pat Dollard

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(IBD)

The terrorist assault on Mumbai is the latest clash between civilization and nihilism. From the Somali pirates to the Taliban, this is what the world would be like without America.

Mumbai (formerly Bombay) now joins London, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Baghdad, Fallujah, Washington, D.C., New York and a field in Pennsylvania as battlefields in the war on terror.

The motives and the identity of the perpetrators are not clear, but they don’t really matter. The assault on freedom, democracy and civilization itself continues. India is a booming economic power rooted in democracy and capitalism and open to Western culture. These are reasons enough.

That the Mumbai bombings occurred on the Thanksgiving holiday may or may not be significant. We certainly can be thankful that the war on terror has prevented similar events here or a repeat of 9/11 since that tragic day the war on terror began.

Yet, as the assault on Mumbai was under way, Amtrak cops with M-16s flooded Penn Station Wednesday after the FBI said it had received a “plausible but unsubstantiated” report that al-Qaida operatives discussed a plan two months ago to bomb New York City’s mass transit system. We are safer, but we are not yet safe.

Those who find the very existence of Guantanamo and the FISA statutes an offense to American democracy need to recalibrate their moral outrage. These legacies of 9/11, and the continuing vigilance of the Bush administration, have kept us safe.

As commentator Alan Caruba noted, there have been some 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide since 9/11. Virtually all of them took place in a country called “OTTUSA” — Other Than The USA. It’s no accident.

Some will say this proves that the war on terror was being fought in the wrong place. They will say we should have left Iraq alone and scoured Afghanistan until we had Osama bin Laden’s head on a stick. All Mumbai proves is that terror’s battlefield can be anywhere and is everywhere.

Little mentioned in the news accounts of the terrorist atrocities was the comment from Mumbai’s security chief that several of the terror suspects seemed to be British citizens. Maybe the test on Mumbai, India’s financial center, was a dry-run for something bigger in London’s financial center or even on Wall Street.

It’s been tempting to believe the war on terror is winding down. Violence in Iraq has diminished as democracy takes hold. Bring the troops home. In reality, this is the kind of “long, twilight struggle” President John F. Kennedy talked about.

Analysts will ponder what India did to become a target just as some said 9/11 was America’s foreign policy chickens coming home to roost. But the targets of terror are hated for what they represent and not what they do. Terrorist groups from al-Qaida to the Taliban and everywhere in between are at war with Western ideas, ideals, culture and societies, not just with states and their foreign policies.

In a speech before a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush rightfully called the 9/11 terrorists and their ilk “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.

“By sacrificing human life to further their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism.”

As columnist Charles Krauthammer once observed: “If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism, are animating radical Islam,” how do we explain that one of the first acts of the Taliban in Afghanistan was to blow up two massive 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha carved into a cliff?

The statues represented an alternate faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, to al-Qaida and to radical Islam, the presence of both was and is intolerable, as is democracy and freedom in Iraq or anywhere else.

The war on terror is not a bumper sticker, and if the United States wasn’t waging it, if we had hunkered down in a fortress America, Mumbai would not be the exception but the rule, soon to be joined by places such as Memphis and Miami.

Calling this a clash of civilizations is too simple. It is a clash of civilization and nihilism. They are at war with civilization itself, the advocates of a new dark age, and in this war there can be no substitute for victory.