Mumbai is everywhere

Mark Steyn has some thoughts about the Mumbai massacre from last week. He warns again that the enlightened elements in the West have not yet grasped the nature of the danger. We treat events such as this as isolated incidents notable primarily for their local color. To the extent we look further, we ask whether the incident was perpetrated by al Qaeda. If not, we go back to sleep. Steyn explains the obvious. These attacks are not isolated, but they are not directed by a central authority. They are perpetrated by independent groups who may be loosely connected in an organizational manner, but are united by a spreading ideology of radical Islamism that is ”a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.”

Nor, given the world-wide ideology and the local personnel connections, is Mumbai going to be the last such incident:

“What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets, and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.”

What to do? That’s not clear. What not to do? Steyn warns, “So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.”