Check out this superb essay by the incomparable Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times yesterday. Here’s the money paragraph:
I find myself somewhat surprised to be so much on the Bush side. I call myself a neo-pacifist because I do not believe in dying either for forms of government or to have rulers of one ethnic or national origin rather than another. The choice between living under the Kaiser and living under Lloyd George was not worth the millions of deaths in the trenches, as Lloyd George himself came to appreciate. And I am old enough to have been opposed to the Vietnam war as well as to the Falklands war and was dubious about the Gulf war.
“Neo”, because if our very lives and the right to exist are threatened, as my family’s were by the Nazis in the second world war and as the whole western world is threatened by al-Qaeda and by rogue states, I believe in fighting back with every available resource.
Islamist militancy is a self-confessed threat to the values not merely of the US but also of the European Enlightenment: to the preference for life over death, to peace, rationality, science and the humane treatment of our fellow men, not to mention fellow women. It is a reassertion of blind, cruel faith over reason.
I’m feeling a little better now.
The Dish 