Does the West face a “crisis war”?

Writing in New English Review John Derbyshire answers, in effect, “not yet” …

but I do think it possible that, if we continue to permit the proliferation of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons—and all the evidence indicates we shall so continue—we could be in a crisis war in a decade or so. And Israel, a nation we regard as a friend, is in a crisis war right now, against an enemy that has sworn to annihilate her.

It’s a question one’s answer to which would appear to make “all the difference,” and I can’t say I agree with Derbyshire – about the “not yet” part, that is. For one thing, I’ve been doing a great deal of “what if” thinking since the London airplanes plot was foiled, and tried to picture in my mind what it would have meant had the plot been successful not only in its execution but also in its complete furtiveness. For example, I wonder if it would have been worse if the terrorists were somehow able to time the disabling of the jets during their descent, so that it was possible for the world to witness TV coverage of plane after plane after plane slamming into the land in sprawling somersaults of fire. Or, whether it would have been even more horrific if, literally out of the blue, 10 airplanes simply disappeared one by one from the radar screen over (-- and because they had splashed into and been swallowed up by) the Atlantic. Blip. Gone. Without a trace and without a clue as to why. And, because the wreckage is spread out for miles and at the bottom of the deep blue, the prospect of collecting clues and gaining understanding is bleak. The ensuing mystery causes cancellation of all transatlantic – perhaps even all domestic and international flights – for the foreseeable future. And the terrorists, apart from causing massive death and destruction, also succeed in bringing a tremendous amount of global freedom and commerce to a screeching halt.

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Obviously this description of events wins my “scariest scenario” contest. Whether it also matches the criteria of “crisis war” I do not know, but if it doesn’t, then I doubt I have too much use for the term.

Anyway, the point for Derbyshire isn’t so much whether the West has entered into a crisis war, but rather what it is prepared to do once it has. “Perhaps,” he modestly concludes, “it’s time to take out the doctrine of collective responsibility and take a look at it, make up our collective mind about it. Or else, brace ourselves to lose that coming crisis war, or—what really amounts to the same thing—to end it inconclusively.” In fact, his analysis shows it’s anything but a modest consideration:

For Israel this is a “crisis war,” at least as much as WWII was for us. Hezbollah has been firing missiles into Israeli cities, killing Israeli civilians. Eighty percent of the population of South Lebanon voted for “Resistance Party” candidates in last year’s election—that’s mainly Hezbollah, joined with a few like-minded groups.

Now, that peasant who just got killed in an Israeli airstrike might very well have belonged to the twenty percent who did not vote “Resistance”; and the seven-year-old girl whose legs were blown off by another Israeli bomb while playing with her favorite doll, wasn’t even in the electorate. How can their killing be justified? By the doctrine of collective responsibility, which, if you allow its validity, applies even more strongly to Lebanon, where there have at least been elections, than to North Korea. This is your government. You have permitted this to be done to us. You—all of you, any of you, and your children too—are to some degree liable.

As a solvent of guilt, the doctrine of collective responsibility is hard to beat. When push truly comes to shove, when we find ourselves in the nightmare landscape Orwell describes, where the correct response to the bombing of one’s mother is a double bombing of his mother—when human beings are in that dark place, I think history shows that there is no nation too civilized to do what is necessary; nor any so un-civilized as to feel no need to cook up a doctrine of self-exculpation. A conservative commentator recently wrote the following thing, in respect of mass killing of civilians: “I think it's fair to say that we would rather our civilization die than that we commit such acts.” Speak for yourself, Sir. If our grandfathers had felt that way, I’d be writing this in Japanese.

If the Heathrow Airport plot was to have taken place, according to reports, this Wednesday, 8/16, I have to wonder whether, upon waking 8/17, we in the West would have made up “our collective mind” that it was time to do “what is necessary” to keep “our civilization” from dying. And, though mindful of the severity of whatever those actions might be, I also have to wonder, further, whether they are any less necessary just because the plot failed.