Curing the disease, or merely mutating it?
Reader comment on item: Radical Islam as Its Own Antidote[, Argues Reuel Gerecht]

Submitted by Joshua Truax (United States), Jun 23, 2005 at 12:28

Mr. Gerecht's approach seems to be "short-term pain for long-term gain". The trouble is that the short term may not be nearly short enough, and judging from the aftermath of the Cold War, there is no guarantee of a lasting long-term gain anyway. Communism was also its own antidote, but the self-curing process took almost 75 years, and tens of millions of deaths in wars and politicide across the globe, to take hold, and yet today not only does the disease still exist today in places like North Korea and Cuba, but has mutated into many different strains, from communist-capitalist hybrids like China to ostensibly egalitarian despotisms in places such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

This is because even though communism discredited itself long ago amongst the masses it purported to liberate, there remains no shortage of doe-eyed, idealistic true believers in that ideology who are bound and determined to make it work at any cost. The same is undoubtedly true of militant Islam in all its forms.

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