Events in Afghanistan and the Middle East have awakened the Western world to the existence of an existential threat. We are not confronting a specific grievance that could be remedied by negotiation.  We are not faced simply with rogue regimes and insurgent groups that can be dealt with through sanctions and reciprocal menaces. The threat is rooted in biological and cultural conditions that we cannot change by politics, and which have in any case pushed politics aside.

The Middle East is, as we are discovering, not one thing: on the contrary, it is a patchwork of communities whose peaceful coexistence depended on conditions that no longer exist. And many of those communities are in the habit of producing the two greatest scourges of the human race: young men without women, and puritanical rage. These same scourges have visited Afghanistan and North Africa, and they lie dormant throughout the Islamic world.

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