David Brooks writes:
Worse, more and more people are falling for the Grand Delusion — the notion that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone. On the right, some believe that if we just stop this Wilsonian madness of trying to introduce democracy into the Arab world, we can return to an age of stability and balance. On the left, many people can't seem to fathom an enemy the U.S. isn't somehow responsible for. Others think the entire threat has been exaggerated by Karl Rove for the sake of political scaremongering.
Perhaps it's understandable that many Americans would fall for this Grand Delusion. The Israelis, who have more experience with Islamic extremism, recently did. They imagined that they could build a security barrier and unilaterally withdraw from their historical reality. It took the war in south Lebanon to make them see there is no way to unilaterally withdraw. There is no way to become a normal society. Even if they pulled out of Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank, they would still have to confront an existential foe, so long as the forces of political Islam continued to wage their competition for anti-Semitic glory all around.
The Israelis "fell" for the delusion after 50 years of running a society entirely oriented towards repelling Arab enemies. They've reordered their society so every citizen enters the army, every hi-tech weapon falls into their hands, and every counterinsurgent and intelligence stratagem is adopted by them first. And despite so many years of Grand Clarity, their problems never mitigated, their fight never calmed. They didn't start with unilateral withdrawal, they sought to end with it. And that's because the aggressive, arrogant alternative David Brooks sets up to the "Grad Illusion" doesn't work, and never has. Call it the Grand Delusion. That Brooks would actually deploy Israel as a counterexample shows how little he's actually thought about all this.
