How Many Warnings?
Topic: World War IV
(What are "political devotions"? Click here.)

Eventually, God is going to lose patience with us.

As the always-eloquent Charles Krauthammer put it last night on Fox, it appears Al Gore is off his lithium again. But for the fact that a few farmisht Florida seniors accidentally marked their ballots for Pat Buchanan, this barking lunatic would be president. For those who say there is no God, I point to the results of the 2000 presidential election. Let's call the narrowly averted catastrophe of a Gore presidency Big Warning A, and let's call 9-11 Big Warning B.

Will God in his grace give us another chance in the form of a Big Warning C, or will he allow us to reap that which our narcissism, laziness and cowardice have sown? How long before Al Qaeda's dream of slaughtering 4 million Americans is realized?

And of course the dream doesn't end there. The Islamist's vision is a worldwide caliphate, what Krauthammer has called "Taliban Afghanistan, writ large."

Allow me to repeat my familiar refrain: Anyone, including a rogue state or a terrorist network, can win a war if they possess nuclear weapons and are willing to strike first.

The World War II generation, the Greatest Generation, never questioned the morality of annihilating America's enemies before they could annihilate the US. Can an America populated with the Baby Boom generation, the Worst Generation, find that resolve? The central question is: What are we prepared to do?

Are we prepared to do whatever is necessary to win in Iraq, what President Bush properly characterizes as the major overseas front in the war on Islamic terror? Are we prepared to take the battle to other necessary fronts, such as Iran and North Korea?

And on the home front, are we prepared to deport, at least for the duration of the war, all non-US citizens from terrorist-sponsoring states? To place armed forces and an Israeli-style fence on our borders? To employ racial, ethnic and religious profiling in immigration, transportation security and law enforcement? To institute strict immigration controls to avoid a demographic shift that would gradually transform the US into just another Islamic hellhole, as is occurring in Europe as we speak?

Will Western historians one day recount the early 21st century as the era in which the US used all its powers to avert a new Dark Ages? Or will there be no future Western historians, only a glorious history of Allah's destruction of the Crusaders' empire, written by authorization of the world's ruling mullahs?

Our resolve, and our action, will decide these questions. God has warned us twice. We should not expect his indulgence forever.