WSJ Rings Out The Old Year

In its year-end summary Friday:

It is fitting that this was the year Yasser Arafat died. When the history of the war on terror is written, 2004 will be remembered as the moment when the romance of the terrorist finally faded away. . . .

Arafat's rejection of Israel's partition offer at the 2000 Camp David talks should have finished this romance, but it did not. Nor, really, did the attacks of September 11. For some people, terrorism directed against Israel or the U.S. will always have some justification, because Israel and the U.S. are ipso facto the world's original aggressors.

But what justification can be offered the killer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose sin was to have made a short movie about the mistreatment of women in Islamic societies? And where is the romance in slaughtering 500 children in Beslan, or 200 commuters in Madrid? Perhaps the latter atrocity could be explained as payback for Spain's support of the Bush Administration in Iraq. But then what about the kidnapping and execution of Margaret Hassan, the Irish-born Iraqi citizen who devoted her life to humanitarian relief and opposed the prewar sanctions as well as the invasion itself? Islamists, it turns out, issue no exemptions for the bien-pensant when drawing up their target lists.

In 2004, then, the world finally awoke to the fact that the only line worth taking against terrorists is a hard one, and this was reflected in political trends. In the U.S. and Australia, George W. Bush and John Howard decisively won contests framed as referendums on their handling of the war on terror. In Britain, Tony Blair survived every effort by the antiwar lobby to bring him down and looks set to win a third term in 2005. In France, the most popular politician today is Nicolas Sarkozy, who is outspokenly pro-American and pro-Israel. . . .

[T]he lesson is being relearned by the Bush Administration as it fights battles from which it flinched in April for fear of provoking a wider Sunni uprising. In fact, the Administration's most provocative act in 2004 was in not taking action then, creating a perception of American irresolution that emboldened Sunni and Shia insurgents throughout the summer. Notably, when Fallujah was finally retaken in November, the only voice to be heard from the proverbial Arab street was that of Zarqawi himself. "You have let us down in the darkest circumstances," he berated Muslim clerics for their failure to raise an army to his cause. Both their failure and his remonstrance are a good indication that, in Iraq, things are gradually turning America's way.

The corner's been turned--elections in January are the next step to peace.