Two tremendous articles pinpoint the profound sickness of the west in turning upon itself over its defence against the war being waged against it rather than turning on its attackers. The first, by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post, savages the Guantanamo self-flagellation. Pointing out that among the thousands of interrogations carried out there the number of proven abuses of either prisoners or Korans has been less than miniscule, he slates the abjectness of the west and the rampant hypocrisy of the Islamic world:

'On the very day the braying mob in Pakistan demonstrated over the false Koran report in Newsweek, a suicide bomber blew up an Islamic shrine in Islamabad, destroying not just innocent men, women and children, but undoubtedly many Korans as well. Not a word of condemnation. No demonstrations.

'Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech. And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art -- deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.

'Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.'

Meanwhile, Victor David Hanson explores the exceedingly strange war the west is waging, in which

'we have not sought to defeat and humiliate the enemy as much as wean a people from the thrall of Islamic autocracy. That is our challenge, and explains our exasperating strategy of half-measures and apologies — and the inability to articulate exactly whom we are fighting and why.'

The result is an incoherent war being waged on the mechanism used to attack the west -- terror -- while displaying a suicidal forbearance towards the ideology of Islamic fascism that sponsors the terror in the first place. Meanwhile, the enemy is pressing home its advantages: the failure by the west to hold the sponsors of terrror to account, the oil weapon, and the moral equivalence and pacifism of the west:

'Europeans march with posters showing scenes from Abu Ghraib, not of the beheading of Daniel Pearl or the murder of Margaret Hassan. They do not wish, much less expect, al Qaeda to win, but they still find psychic satisfaction in seeing the world's sole superpower tied down, as if it were the glory days of the Vietnam protests all over again. How else can we explain why Amnesty International claims that Guantanamo — specialized ethnic foods, available Korans, and international observers — is comparable to a Soviet Gulag where millions once perished? So there is a deep, deep sickness in the West.'

This is, of course, where the Islamists first came in with their assessment of the west's decadence and its likely absence of any stomach for a fight. America surprised them; but the war being waged with escalating ferocity within the west by its decadent elites, along with some alarming moral and intellectual confusion within the Bush administration (see posts below) -- and, most crucially, a fundamental fear of confronting the religious ideology that is driving this monster -- could yet be our undoing.