Europe ought to be praying for America

or at least for us to successfully lead the charge against Islamofascist terror.

James Taranto at OpinionJournal expands and adds it a bit to the Mark Steyn argument we discussed before that Europe is much more at stake and is much more vulnerable to militant Islam than the United States.

This [the belief that the bombers were British born Muslims] is potentially a huge problem not just for Britain but for Continental European countries that also have large populations of unassimilated Muslim citizens. It does not appear to be a major problem for America, which has a proportionately smaller Muslim population and a long history of assimilating immigrants. If Islamist terrorism is potentially a domestic problem for Europe, then the stakes in the global war on terror are in a way much higher there than in America.

After 3/11 Spain's electorate blinked and elected the appeaser Zapatero who promptly pulled Spanish troops from the coalition. Doubtless Zapatero has been congratulating himself on 'deflecting' the next attack onto the UK. But, as Taranto argues, appeasement is an abysmal long term strategy:

But while deflection may work as a tactic, as a long-term strategy it is fatally flawed. If the terrorists succeed in inducing every European country to abandon the U.S., does anyone think the terrorists will refrain from bombing Paris or Frankfurt if it suits the next stage of their jihad?

Finally, let's say the thugs succeed and drive the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan either by attrition or by a devastating WMD attack.

...We'd like to think the response would be a redoubling of effort, but it could be a turning inward, which would be bad for the U.S. and catastrophic for Europe.

It is possible that a second 9/11 would lead to a decisive loss of public support for the Bush administration's policy of fighting terrorism overseas...If having troops in Afghanistan and Iraq couldn't prevent this attack, the argument would go, why not bring them all home?

Undoubtedly in the wake of a 9/11 sequel there would be increased pressure to step up homeland-security efforts. Currently the "liberal" position is that homeland security is better than war, but "homeland security" after another attack would mean more than just pork for New York. It could mean fortifying the borders, severely restricting legal immigration and deporting illegal immigrants en masse, curtailing the civil liberties of noncitizens and possibly American Muslims, and expanding police powers far beyond those in the Patriot Act.
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If the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan and Iraq, the Europeans would as well; they simply do not have the military wherewithal to win without America. These countries would then become terrorist bases, as Afghanistan was pre-9/11. With "fortress America" a daunting target, terrorists would likely turn their attention to Europe, which would have a much harder time isolating itself than America.