The world has been at war for sixty-eight of the past hundred years.  World War I lasted four years, World War II six years, the Cold War 44 years and the war with radical is now fourteen years old and counting.

Western civilization eventually won the first three global conflicts, but started out all three cases losing.  It is now losing World War IV.  In every case the initial losses were due to a lack of will on the part of the West, and that lack of will was manifested by two interlocking phenomena: 

(1)  A refusal to recognize the threat for what it was and therefore to guard against it and

(2)  A large group of Western fellow-travelers, or what the Soviets called “useful idiots”. 

There is no lack of those factors today.  The West is at war with radical Islam and has been since September 2001.  Repeat:  the West is at war with radical Islam. 

This obvious fact is denied by a remarkably large number of politicians; a majority of the mass media; academics, intellectuals, artists and students throughout the Western countries, not to mention businessmen who would do business with the devil incarnate in order to make a few dollars or euros. If you cannot or will not identify your enemy, you cannot combat him.  The Nazis and the Soviets made no secret whatsoever of their goals and the means they intended to use to achieve them.  The same is true of radical Islam.  But, as always, “None are so blind as they who will not see.  None are so deaf as they who will not hear”.

At the same time radical Islamists are slaughtering innocent people in Paris, Beirut and in the skies over Sinai, American campuses are the scene of violent protests by “sensitive minorities”, including Muslims, who are protesting being subjected to contrary or even neutral ideas and opinions to their politically correct one.  In a debate among the three candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, none of the three would identify the terrorists as Islamic. 

The president of the United States declared that Islamic State, which he refuses to mention by name, has been contained and declares that he will continue to allow thousands of “refugees” from Syria (and elsewhere) into the country.  The European Union, having nothing better to do, decrees that goods produced by Jewish settlements in the West Bank be labeled so they an be boycotted by consumers.  In short, the fellow travelers and useful idiots are in full hue and cry as they were in 1914, 1939 and 1947.

As Pogo was famous for saying:  “We have met the enemy and he is us”.  That is the case now as it was prior to the previous three world wars.  All of them were immensely more costly in lives and wealth than they needed to have been because of that fact.  Indeed, they might have been prevented entirely if instead of embracing delusions, the West had steadfastly opposed those who wished to destroy it.. 

Instead of that, those on the front lines, such as Israel and president al-Sisi of Egypt, are systematically demonized and denigrated or betrayed and abandoned, as were Czechoslovakia in 1938 and all of eastern Europe in 1945.  Munich and Yalta will live in infamy for all of history as a result.  Vienna in 2015, the scene of the capitulation of the West to the bloody tyrants of Tehran, may suffer the same fate. 

If we are unable or unwilling to confront the fools, cowards and traitors in our midst, we will be forced eventually to confront an enemy vastly more powerful and dangerous.  In the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939 four columns of troops converged on Madrid.  The supporters of the insurgents within Madrid were referred to as the “fifth column”.  In the West today the fifth column numbers in the hundreds of thousands, including thousands of actual agents of the enemy. 

President Hollande now says that France is at war.  Indeed all of Western civilization:  Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman, is at war with a new horde of savage, blood-thirsty Barbarians. 

Which side are YOU on?

*Norman A. Bailey, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor of Economic Statecraft at The Institute of World Politics, Washington, DC, and teaches at the Center for National Security Studies and Geostrategy, University of Haifa and a Senior Fellow at ACD.

* This article is to be published by Globes