Many of us in the Blogosphere have argued for months that we are not at war with "terror," which is just a tactic, but rather with a particularly virulent sect of one of the world's major religions--Wahhabism. While true, it opens us up to the charge that this means that we are therefore not justified in going after Saddam's Iraq, which is after all a secular state, and the enemy of the Wahhabis to the south.

In today's London Times, Michael Gove has come up with a sort of "unified field theory" of the Middle East, which helps square this circle. We are at war with two toxic ideologies, fundamentalist Islam, and Ba'athism in Iraq and Syria, both of which find a very fertile petri dish in the corrupt governance and culture of the present Middle East. He compares them to Nazism and Communism, two ideologies opposed to each other, but even more implacably sharing a hatred of the West.

Against these evils there can be no effective containment, just as there could be no lasting appeasement of the Nazis or no meaningful detente with Communists. Weakness in the face of evil only encourages its practitioners.

The events of September 11 did not follow assertions of Western strength. They were the acts of extremists emboldened by our irresolution in the face of terror, our preference for peace processes and bombing aspirin factories over the hard business of tackling evil at its source.

The enduring tragedy of that day is that we did not act before, to save the West from terror by saving the Middle East from tyranny. The enduring legacy of that day is that we cannot rest until that work is done, until we dismantle the cultures in which the poison still ferments.

[Via Jim Bennett email]