Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Prepare for the worst?

Both Ralph Peters and David Warren - two old hands in the Middle Eastern game - seem rather pessimistic to say the least. Their basic intuition - no more than that, at present, is that we are seeing the first stages of an implosion of the entire Arab culture. The money quote from Peters:

"The Arab Middle East has become the world's first entirely parasitical culture; all it does is to imitate poorly, consume voraciously, spit hatred, export death and create nothing."

The whole area hasn't exactly been on my own travel destinations 'one-day' list, but if this goes all the way one of the consequences will be the sequestration of the whole mess. If, as other writers have argued (see, perhaps, Belmont Club) the terrorist is an entirely parasitical method of warfare, then a simple and quite reasonable response is to exercise far stronger border control and movement vetting. That's certainly absent in the EU now. See it while you can?

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