Reacting to Fecklessness

A couple of opinion pieces today underscore the price we're paying for being so pusillanimous, both here and in the U.K.

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe has the smell of irresolution.

What could Al Qaeda have hoped to gain by shattering this relative lull with last week's horrific attacks? The carnage included a suicide bombing in a Baghdad market that killed at least 60 people, mostly women and children, and a triple car-bomb massacre in Diyala province that left 28 civilians dead. But why now? With Washington's top Democrats embracing the surrender agenda -- Senate majority leader declared on Tuesday that "this war is not worth the spilling of another drop of American blood" -- why would the terrorists unleash a renewed wave of slaughter and mayhem?

For that matter, why would Iran have chosen this moment to seize 15 British sailors and marines? One of the hostages was forced to write a letter urging the British government "to start withdrawing our forces from Iraq and let them determine their own future." But Britain has been withdrawing its forces from Iraq, reducing troop levels from 40,000 in 2003 to just 7,100 as of February. Prime Minister Tony Blair recently announced that 1,600 more troops will be pulled out this spring. So what was the point of Iran's unprovoked ambush?

The answer in both cases is that this is how totalitarian aggressors react to faintheartedness.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn laments the timidity with which Great Britain has responded with after their sailors were taken hostage by the Iranians.

On this 25th anniversary of the Falklands War, Tony Blair is looking less like Margaret Thatcher and alarmingly like Jimmy Carter, the embodiment of the soi-disant "superpower" as a smiling eunuch.

But this is a season of anniversaries. A few days ago, the European Union was celebrating its 50th birthday with the usual lame-o Euro-boosterism. I said up above that the 15 hostages are "British subjects." But, as a point of law, they are also "citizens of the European Union." Even Oxford and Hoover's Timothy Garton Ash, one of the most indefatigable of those Euro-boosters, seemed to recognize the Iranian action was a challenge to Europe's pretensions. "Fifteen Europeans were kidnapped from Iraqi territorial waters by Iranian Revolutionary Guards," he wrote. "Those 14 European men and one European woman have been held at an undisclosed location for nearly a week, interrogated, denied consular access, but shown on Iranian television, with one of them making a staged 'confession,' clearly under duress. So if Europe is as it claims to be, what's it going to do about it?''

Short answer: Nothing.

Actually, as LGF notes, they will do something: capitulate.

I'm all for the plan put forth by Jules Crittenden, who also has the Kharnival of the Iranities.