The Disenchanted American

Victor David Hanson describes a battle-weary America in his column The Disenchanted American. (Hat tip Real Clear Politics.)

Along the way to making his point, he asks us to "Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years," then gives us a look at that world:

• Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes.
  
• Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide.
  
• The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations.
  
• The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America.
  
• Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well — the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas.
  
• Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs.
  
• Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ["Monstrocracies?!" What a great word-coining!] ensured a second holocaust.
  
• North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan.
  
• For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear.
  

Hanson fears that our growing memory of how much we are villified for being the only "sheriff" in this "wild west" will cause us to hang up our tin star and leave "such santimonious folk to themselves." I fear that, too, because I feel the growing frustration in myself.

Hanson also nails the big Islamic states for their stinginess:

The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves — swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices — to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims — as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.