Flying lessons...

Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German Ambassador to the US, writes in The Washington Post that when he arrived in Washington in the summer of 2001 he thought he would have enough time to refresh his pilot's license, such was the state of transatlantic relations. The former Ambassador is on his way to London now, and laments that there will be even less time in the future to take flying lessons because of the current state of affairs.

Post 9/11, the battleground of the looming conflict between “radical Islam and the likelihood of even greater terrorist threats and a potential for escalating political, cultural and religious tension between the West on the one hand and the Muslim world on the other”

will most likely not be in the continental United States, as was the case on Sept. 11, but rather in the European-Mediterranean space: Europe, or Europe's back yard.

The Ambassador suggests three thoughts on how to handle this conflict:

First, ..create… an effective regional security arrangement [that]would need to take into account the interests of Israel as well as those of Iran and the Arab countries, and …[which] would need to be led and supported by the United States, Europe and Russia. …the U.N. Security Council might provide a framework for the elaboration of such an arrangement.

Second, …NATO's role as the central forum for discussing and deciding transatlantic security issues should be strengthened. Europeans should make clear their desire for America to remain a European power.

Third, the West -- as a political and moral concept -- must remain united. This is about more than just NATO, the European Union and free trade -- it is about the legacy of the European Enlightenment. Opposing absolutism, and believing in people's ability to create self-balancing and self-regulating, just, relativist and secular political systems: That is the Enlightenment's gift to the world, and it continues to be the West's promise.

In essence, he argues that the West, led responsibly by the only superpower left, has to regain its moral authority, which the Ambassador says was lost after 9/11, because

...we are not united on the issue of war and peace. Are we at war, as the United States claims, or are we just fighting terrorism, as Europeans believe? This is a fundamental political issue with the potential to either unite or split the West.

And how does the West regain the moral high ground which he considers to be the “the central challenge for the West in 2006”? By fighting terrorism and yet showing the world that

…we are prepared to take into account the interests of the global community, of all those whose cooperation we seek, whose values and culture we respect, and whose development and prosperity we support.

We must refuse to see that as a false choice; we must refuse to pit one religion against another. The choice is between absolutism and relativism, between totalitarianism and the dignity of the individual. That is the post-Enlightenment lesson the West can offer, and it is a legacy worth
defending.

Surely, this conflict has been with us a long, long time, so that it is not new. The tensions between the West and the Muslim world have been boiling in a cauldron for decades now. What is new is that the cauldron is overflowing now, and the West, feeling the stinging burns, is beginning to pay attention to the problem.

Surely, again, Europe is in this state of affairs precisely because it has nurtured relativism and applying political correctness to the nth degree. How can the West gain the moral high ground if it cannot point out that Europe’s Judeo-Christian foundations were essential in providing this Enlightenment legacy?

The state of affairs pre-September 11 was just as dangerous as post-September 11. The problem is that the average citizen was unaware of these dangers… Why? Maybe, because many of our Western diplomats --who ought to have been paying attention to these dangers-- were thinking of taking flying lessons…



[diplomacy] [Muslims][West][Enlightenment][Relativism][Europe][Eurabia][9/11]