Quit panicking every time a Jihadi figures out how to use Youtube.

Ralph Peters makes the entirely apt point that our leaders are over-bred and under-blooded. I particularly liked it when he wondered how many of the Obami had ever gotten a bloody nose. But he makes the typically conservative realist mistake of assuming that because our leaders are weak and selfish that our enemies are giants. Which is a leap that the Flying Wallendas couldn't make.

Outsiders rise to the top of unstable regimes all the time. But to become a transformational force they need to do so in great countries during revolutionary times. Without WW1 and the collapse of the Russian, German, Chinese and French empires,  Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao or Ho (if you assume WW1 caused WW2) would have lived their lives out in obscurity. Napoleon is nothing without the French revolution. As he would have been if he had been in the Saxon army or Hitler, had he grown up Bulgarian.

What characterizes today is how weak our enemies are and how disproportionate our panic is. And while the Ivy boys ARE flailing in obviously counterproductive ways, it is the so called "hard nosed realists" like Peters who are panicking. Calm down. If tiny Israel can see off the entire Arab world for almost 70 years and get rich to boot, then it is unseemly for a nation that is 50 times larger and almost 100 times richer to soil our dainties every time some hackemoff demonstrates that they've figured out the internet or an apparatchik like Putin gets temporary control of a fading oil kleptocracy.

The only thing that can kill the West is the West. It is what the Obami and their Eurocrat allies in fraud are doing as they busily jack hammer at the foundations of our civilization from within that should frighten us. Yet many of the realists assume that our internal strength is a constant - undiminished by the feckless cupidity of the post modern political class.

It would do these "realists" good to remember their history: it wasn't the barbarians that felled Rome - it had survived countless invasions only to rise stronger. It took the the incessant internal squabbling and greed of the Roman ruling class to smash an empire that had thrived for over 1000 years. The barbarians just gave the last push.

 Pogo was right: "we have met the enemy and he is us".