huntington wrote a very influential article for foreign affairs magazine and this was right after the cold war of the early called war. the early end of the cold war where people were saying now that the soviet union is now breaking up the west doesn't have an enemy what are we going to do there was this fear and huntington talked about it a lot that the liberal democracies become flabby and decadent fall into a kind of crass commercialism and materialism and that you need to be sometimes have an enemy a proper enemy to get your society mobilized to fight for higher values and to. you know continue strength of your civilization and so the speculation became well the new enemy now that the cold war is over is going to be islam the history of. doing say france and the ottoman empire theory of long stretches of history where western societies were able to work with islamic societies but that kind of gets brushed aside just to say we are deep down we hate each other and to some void this conflict is going to have to come to a head and there were a lot of ideologues that really got behind

and steve clemons, who writes on foreign affairs as editor-at- large at the "atlantic" magazine. mish dunn, let's start with you. what is behind israel's strikes into syria? what are they after. >> the israeli strikes intended to eliminate missiles that were shipped from iran to hezbollah to be put into lebanon because these missiles would have brought about a qualitative change in hezbollah's capability, particularly they have much more precise targeting ability than the missiles that hezbollah currently has in lebanon, and they also can carry a bigger payload. so do greater damage inside israel if they were used. >> you see it as a fairly narrow or limited project or effort? >> yes. this is the second time that israel has done this. israel carried out an air strike previously against some other missiles that were on their way to hezbollah. this, of course, though was a larger attack. it was inside damascus and the damascus area. it caused significant casualties, more than 40 syrian soldiers killed. and i also think there's a broader message that israel is send. it has a specifi