Written by: Beck

Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.

AQ antagonism towards Egypt has nothing to do with Iraq, Palestine, and Chechnya and everything to do with assuming control of the ummah in its entirety. It attacks the US and Britain because we oppose the radical takeover of Southwest Asia by the lunatic Islamofascists. Does that involve Iraq? Certainly; right now it's the hot front in the war on terror, along with Afghanistan. But to claim that these attacks spring from our presence in Iraq exclusively, or even our presence in Arab lands, flies in the face of all evidence. Where are the American troops in Egypt?

The media, especially the British media who keep haranguing Tony Blair about causing the London bombings as a price for liberating Iraq, need to start adding two plus two and quit getting three for an answer. AQ operations point to a long-term strategy of isolating and crippling Middle East governments that (a) oppose radical Wahhabism and (b) operate in a secular manner that maintains ties to the West, especially Israel. That is the scope of the war Islamists have fought for twenty years under different banners -- Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and now al-Qaeda. They want to seize power by force, cast a Taliban-style tyranny over the entirety of Southwest Asia and North Africa (to start), and bring the infidel world to its knees through the control of petroleum.

Why, four years after 9/11, does the media and the Left still fail to grasp this? Could it be because acknowledging this fact requires a stark choice to either fight or surrender, and they would prefer to create a fantasy through sophistry to allow them to simply go AWOL instead?