The world darkens

9/11. Al Qaeda. The Taliban. Pakistan, and its unwillingness to expulge the terrorists in its northern regions. Its caving to terrorist demands. Its tensions with India. Iraq, and its insurgencies. The guerillas funded by Syria and Iran. Syria, who is aiding Hezbolla against the Lebanese government. Hezbolla and Hamas, striking against Israel. Iran, developing nuclear power and nuclear weapons at a daunting pace. Iran, who threatens to nuke Israel into oblivion. Iran, who seeks a day without the United States. Iran, who negotiates with China. China, who holds our economy in its hands, and who backs North Korea. North Korea, who has nuclear weapons and hates the United States. Indonesian riots. The caving of Europe to Islamic threats, especially France and England. The relapse of Russia. Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, and their expanding influence. There is no corner of the globe where some threat does not exist to the United States.

This is not a failure of President George W. Bush and his foreign policies. This is the natural consequence of opposing ideologies. What people fail to realize is that any friend who demands we change our entire identity and bow in subservience to them is not, in fact, a friend. If the only way to be friends with someone is to abandon our identity, our dignity, and our integrity, then we are better off without them.

Why do these people hate us? Petty dictators like Hugo Chavez hate us because we are powerful enough that we diminish their power. Our words carry more weight, and we can ignore them without much worry. It can be infuriating to be taken so lightly. We threaten them with the possibility that we might step in and remove them from power, a very real threat when their people are oppressed and look to the United States as a model and potential savior. We can make their lives difficult through sanctions, and we have economic might to make those sanctions uncomfortable at the least. We threaten these dictators merely through what we can do, through what we are, because we are what the world could be without petty kinglets like Hugo Chavez. People, when they see what that world is like, do not tolerate dictators for long. Thus those dictators have to hide the truth from their people and demonize as best they can in a Machiavellian attempt to maintain power.

Alone, these dictators offer very little to worry about. We can play at negotiations with them when they have no allies to make contention troublesome. We can use peaceful measures to cripple them when they have no allies to resupply them. But when these dictators have allies, they can be bold and fling defiance at us and believe themselves removed from threat through strength in numbers. And it seems these numbers are growing at a frightening pace.

The Islamic people hate us for the same reason that evangelical Christians are so fervent in their hatred of evolution. Just as evolution contradicts their most sacred text (by saying it cannot be literally true, at least in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis), our very way of life--the freedom of religion, freedom of expression, our free market, our civil rights movements--is abhorrent and contradictory to Islam. Everything about us breaks their code of ethics, contradicts the will of their deity. Our very existence is temptation, a path to what they see as corruption and darkness. As long as we in the United States value those traits we hold the most dear, the Islamic people will ever and always fight us, for our beliefs are anathema under their tenets.

There can be no compromise with these people. Either they conquer us or we abandon our identity and take on theirs. That is the only outcome they will accept.

And their numbers are growing. They gather allies. Islamic terrorists and petty dictators see a common goal in our destruction. They work with cunning and guile against us. They have no benevolent intentions for us. Any reform they wish to force on us would revoke every founding belief we have.

And so few people understand what it is we face. So few people understand where we came from. Why does our prosperity exist? They do not know. They display their lack of knowledge in the succor of our enemies, in the protest of every move we make against our enemies, in endless efforts spent to make the United States the guilty party.

They do not understand that we are guilty in our enemies' eyes simply because we exist. There is no other reason. To accept that guilt is to embrace annihilation.