A LETTER TO LIAM
Liam….. Finally I’ve time to respond to your thoughtful letter, and to thank you for the time spent on this correspondence.
Your note responds to two articles that I sent previously, one by Gerard Vanderleun and another by Charles Krauthammer, which were sent to illustrate opinions that are being formulated here in America. As I said before, I was surprised to find that opinions in Europe are so poorly informed about what really goes on in the US. People who have strongly held and very negative views of our politics and our positions are quite ignorant of what they actually are. It’s striking, really, and for that reason I sent some examples. In my mind Vanderleun’s is a radical one, and Krauthammer’s a more reasonable historical review and conclusion, but neither one is known in England, judging from what I read in your papers or see in your TV analyses.
Here’s a German website that analyzes some of what I find unimaginably common. In fairness, the existence of this site itself indicates that all Europeans don’t share this journalist’s view, but the journalist’s opinion is pretty much what I find in much of the European press, and among citizens with whom I spoke. The website author’s critique speaks for itself.
http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/financial_times_deutschland/index.html
Apart from their arguments, the articles I sent are important because of their authors. Vanderleun is a former radical of the 60’s, an early adopter in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, he became an editor of one of the sex-mags…I think it was Hustler…and lived for a while in the New York literary, liberal politics, anti-establishment scene till he was hustled by a wife and left with a different point of view. For such a person to have the strong Pro-Active, “go it alone and to Hell with the weaklings of the Left” attitude represents a serious conversion; it might yet prove to be a conversion on a road to Damascus, if you’ll forgive the “not-intending-to-be-blasphemous” pun. The mere fact of such an opinion being formulated by such a person and influencing other Americans, is itself a point of information that Europeans need to have.
I submit Vanderleun’s piece as an example of what could easily become America’s attitude if European anti-Americanism becomes manifest to a majority of Americans. Krauthammer has it right….we really just want to go about our business, and to be left to our own devices, but if that proves impossible, Vanderleun may persuade a lot of us.
You’ve responded to his rant, correctly in my opinion, and I’m grateful to know that we agree on several points. Particularly I appreciate your understanding that we could do as he suggests, for the reasons you acknowledge, but that we shouldn’t. Not because it’s impractical, nor even wrong, but because it would be a violation of what makes America, well, America. Yes. I agree completely. It is really tempting to take a “blow ‘em all to Hell” attitude, but in the final analysis we can’t and still be true to what we are; and therefore we won’t. But his prediction may be accurate if there’s another major attack on US soil.
I remember seeing the hugely diverse population of London….undoubtedly including some who’d just as easily kill you and me as the passengers in the Underground…and asking myself, “Could I really just blow this man away….kill him in cold blood, just because he’s a Muslim?” When I told you of that query, you and I responded simultaneously, “Of course not.”
Liam, I’m a locked and loaded gun totin’, whiskey drinkin’, cigar smokin’, bad mouthin,’ gas-guzzlin’ SUV drivin’ American, and severely proud of it, but I’m also afflicted with the American Curse of having to “Do The Right Thing.” Can you imagine another people flagellating themselves over whether or not murderers and killers in the most barbaric ways have “rights,” like those we guarantee to ourselves?
Until it’s proved to be the only way, if not the right thing, we’ll not be able to kill them simply because they’re Islamofascists. “Of course not” is the correct answer, and because of that simultaneity of answer I know that we can be friends, and so I’ll speak openly. While I believe that to be the correct answer, I frankly wish it were not, as then Vanderleun’s plan going forward would be more clear and more easily focused. As it is, the reality is messy and difficult. In many ways we’re unclear and uncertain, and we’re seemingly in a mess, and endlessly negotiating with ourselves about what’s right and what’s wrong.
It will take another attack here in the U.S. to end that negotiation. When it does, the world will never be the same; never. That’s Vanderleun’s point. That is a point which Europeans, with so much to lose, seem not to consider. There are others, but about them, later.
We agree on some other things. “That there should be a war on terror is self evident,” for one. Your assertion that the might is right proposition “blinds itself to America’s historical support for the weak and the dispossessed…” is also true. “…Islamic Terrorism presents a threat to virtually all of Western Society, and not just to American interests. Consequently, in the face of such a threat…it is unthinkable that America should act unilaterally,” is also true; but none of these is the entire truth.
You object to the term “unconditional victory over Islamic Totalitarianism” as reminiscent of a call to Jihad. Really, Liam, that’s hardly so. An American Jihad? A religious call to murder?
Just what alternative is there and on what basis shall we negotiate? What shall we be prepared to negotiate away? We did not start this fight; they see themselves as continuing a fight that’s a thousand years old. They have nothing to negotiate, as the only thing they admit to wanting is Us as Them or Us Dead. Not negotiable, my friend. They demand total victory, and they’ll continue to kill us till they get it, or until we do.
There are millions of the “reality challenged” in the Muslim world. Note that by huge percentages across the Muslim world, people claim to believe the U.S. brought down the WTC towers and killed those thousands of us on behalf of an Israeli cabal. Remember the joy in the streets of “Palestine” on the very day of 9/11. Discuss the reality of Hamas, openly dedicate in its very charter to eradicating Israel, freely rocketing Israeli towns over a course of months, and now expecting to “negotiate” a “prisoner trade”….murderers for soldiers. Here’s who they want to trade:
I’m willing to negotiate that there will be peace someday, a peace which preserves Muslims’ rights to their culture, their beliefs and habits, their money and the proceeds from a huge trade in oil…anything other than their right to kill us all.
But this isn’t what they’re talking about, since they already have it. America is not attacking Pakistan, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Turkey nor even Syria, yet, and our President’s going out of his way to avoid war with Iran. We have proposed “talks” on Iraq and other issues which divide us, which they refused; so what’s to negotiate? They make war by proxy on Israel and threaten to kill all those people; so what’s to negotiate? If there can be no negotiations with someone who threatens the entire Western Civilization on the command of a Mullah of the 7th Century in the personage of the Mullahs of the 20th, just what’s left?
Well, we can ignore it, and hope it goes away. That’s what we’ve done for the past twenty something years. We’ve been at war since the Mullahs took hostages and the US Embassy, about which a different kind of American President, one beloved of Europeans, did nothing.
There have been multiple battles across the world since, (See the attachment: Catalogue of Terrorism, that brought it up to last October) but now we’re fighting back. That is what’s different. It frightens a lot of people, but that’s a new reality, too.
If negotiation isn’t possible and fighting is all there is; then your point is that it should not be “unilateral.” I agree, if possible, and so would Vanderleun, although he says it’s not possible. I say it is, and is being done as best we can.
The war, which I call World War Four, is being conducted with the variable assistance of much of the rest of the world, from India and Pakistan to Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Canada and Great Britain, much of Eurasia, indeed, most of Europe, especially Central Europeans who know something about totalitarianism…just not those who we know now were always on Saddam’s payroll, France, and Russia. This is hardly “unilateralism.” Not all those people agree with us completely, but they’re helping, nonetheless, as they understand there’s little alternative.
North Korea is at the heart of a lot of this. It is they who supplied the technology to the Pakistani, Dr. Khan, who sold it to Libya and Iran. It is they who are building rockets capable of reaching across the world, and which Iran is trying to acquire. It is a seriously dangerous world, and the U.S. is trying to deal with it, for now without more war, but insisting on multiparty action and negotiations as a guiding principle, a principle for which the US Administration is excoriated by its so called friends in Europe and by the semi-treasonous in the US itself. Unilateral? Come on Liam, get real.
What other unilateralism are we guilty of? Kyoto….now there you have it…a “treaty” that was signed even though no one has honored or met their “goals.” Even the Canadians are withdrawing, I believe. The Chinese and Indians are excluded, and the treaty was dead before it was signed. Clinton negotiated it, but didn’t even try to get it ratified by the Senate, as required by U.S. law. The Russians first refused it as unworkable but then cynically signed on as it became clear nobody would enforce it. Our refusal to share such cynical and meaningless “diplomacy” isn’t a sign of unilateralism, it’s a mark of realism. Meanwhile, US proposals for alternative environmental steps are being accepted, and may even be effective.
How about withdrawal from the ABM treaty? That treaty forbade us from developing the very anti-missile technology that is the current technological hope, in light of North Korea’s threats to Japan, Australia, South Korea, and even the U.S. Perhaps it would have been better to symbolically remain signatory while cheating a way around it, but symbolism over action is not going to protect anyone, not even the French.
I think it’s not really unilateralism that’s the heart of the debate. Then what is it? I think it’s the fear that we in the U.S. will take seriously the threat to us, and act to stop it. Not necessarily unilaterally, but act to save ourselves, not automatically including those who have made a passion of anti-Americanism. The Vanderleun Alternative.
Whatever transpires, it will be painful, costly, deadly, possibly fatal to you or me, and scary as Hell. I understand that; it’ll change the way we live in ways that’ll look too much like where we thought we’d never have to go again.
We can’t bear to admit it, and as long as one holds out the phantasm of something other than unconditional victory, there’s hope that we’ll stop short of the unbearable. That’s what’s uncomfortable about the concept of victory. We have people in this country, as you do in Europe, who just cannot imagine a U.S. victory as a desirable goal, for fear that reaching it will be unbearable, but at the same time they ignore the unbearable alternative.
Whatever happens, the conditions have been set by our enemies, not by us. It is they who declare Jihad. It is they who see no choice but death for infidels. It is they who define Dhimmitude. It is they who attack, and tell us again and again that they’ll always attack.
You named the places, and they’re not just places where “the West” is involved at all.…Bali, Chechnya, Bombay, Philippines, western China, Thailand….places where there’s not an American nor a Jew in sight.
It is they who define the unconditional. If we fight, it’ll be unconditional. If we surrender it’ll be unconditional. They have defined the rules of engagement, not we, and fight is what we must do. Slavery is not an option. The loss of Western Civilization and the replication of the Dark Ages is not an option.
Which brings me to your issue of “international institutions,” the existence of which you claim to be the “bulwark against tyranny.”
Well….it sort of depends upon which institutions you’re talking about. I f you mean the Special Relationship between the US and Great Britain, that which reduced me to tears reading Roosevelt’s handwritten note to Churchill, you’re right on the money.
If you mean NATO, well, it depends on whether or not, for example, France or Germany wishes, this week, to participate. It depends upon whether or not the people of European NATO partners want to take seriously their obligations to defend themselves….yes, and to defend us….a seriously chancy matter to say the least.
Over here we’re not impressed by the several years of genocide in the center of Europe, before the U.S. (without U.N. approval by the by) stopped it with armed force. It’s laughable for an American to even imagine being defended by Germany or France. For too long we’ve settled for their not actively trying to harm us. Those days are coming to an end, regardless of whatever Vanderleun’s other predictions come to pass.
So what’s left? Say it isn’t so, my friend, but the thing that’s left is the “United Nations.” Now that’s a really sad case.
You say that imperfect as it is, it’s all that we have, and that we must use it to save ourselves. I'm sorry, but that’s ludicrous. The United Nations isn’t imperfect, if it were, then it could be perfected. It’s worse; it’s useless.
The State of Israel was established by a vote of the United Nations. The Palestinian Camps, “home” to the most wretched people in the world, are UN camps. Funded by the rest of us, mostly the US, for sixty odd years, they’re UN responsibility. The failure of whatever “Peace Process” one speaks of at any one time pales before the failure of the UN to deal with this for more than half a century.
There are said to be some agencies of the U.N. that are effective….W.H.O is commonly quoted as one…but nothing that the UN does could not be done as effectively by a specifically charged separate organization for the desired purpose.
The utter corruption of the U.N. is no longer a matter of debate….it’s the stuff of Monty Python, not a “bulwark” of any kind. Failures are too numerous to recount….and the corpses pile up in Darfur while the UN debates what defines genocide. Ruanda taught Kofi Annan nothing. Slavery still exists in much of that part of the world, ignored by the U.N. The English and their American descendents, to their everlasting credit, fought the slavers and ended it in the civilized world by armed force, bloody sacrifice at sea and in an American Civil War…but today, the “United” Nations dithers while millions barely survive as slaves. A “bulwark” where Mugabe’s Zimbabwe defines the UN on its “Human Rights Council” is too crazy even for Monty.
Talk. Talk. Condemn those who will actually defend Human Rights, but talk and it’s not a bad life for the talkers, New York, the freedom of our Liberal Democracy, and on someone else’s dime. Oh, yes, it’s time to condemn Israel again. How about a 17th resolution calling for Iraq to comply….whoops, I forgot, that’s a moot point. Oh well, never mind. It makes no difference, anyway.
No way, Liam. They’ll not save us, either. So, what will? Let’s consider Krauthammer. After a long historical review he describes American policy and position in the world in these terms.
“…democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called “the success of liberty.” As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: “The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings.”
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism.
It’s not Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights--there is no way not to know.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference…the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism…,we can prevail.
In this, he means “we” in the larger sense. We….you, Europe, the rest of the world that wishes to live its own way, everyone who doesn’t want to kill us. Just why should this be anathema to the rest of the world? Do they wish for something different? Do they not wish to live free, as they define it? The U.S. policy hasn’t been to enforce our view of The Right Way, but to insist only on freedom to choose whatever someone wishes. We’re not forcing the Danes to stand in line for a Big Mac in Copenhagen, nor the French to flock to Disneyland, or to American movies.
The 11,000,000 blue fingered Iraqis will choose a way different from ours, and their choice was bought by our treasure and our blood. You spoke of our historical commitment to the “weak and the dispossessed,” but I count those hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in mass graves as among them. How dare the darlings of Europe, who’ve done nothing but enable the killers, complain of our efforts to save ourselves, and them?
The “democratic globalism” can’t be as simple as that, and I’ll not defend it in detail, other than to maintain that whatever its faults, nobody has proposed a much different concept; none but the Jihadis. We can argue about the nuances of defining Democratic, or Realism, whether we’re insufficiently Wilsonian, or whatever, but the differences are slight compared to our differences with our enemies. Unless somebody has a more effective way to resist murder…other than endless U.N. resolutions…the only hope for the future is that the D/Gs are right, and that American power can be used justly. If they’re wrong, we’re doomed.
Which brings us finally to the current battles of WW4, Iraq and Palestine. I don’t like the Battle of Iraq, but the war has to be fought somewhere, and I prefer Iraq to Edinburgh or Charlotte. There may have been a better choice for the battle site. Personally, I’d have voted for Syria first, and then Iran, but all of them had downsides too, and this one was chosen. It’s where we are, now.
I don’t like killing or even hurting anybody. I don’t like butchery, beheadings, gouging eyes out, putting human beings feet first into industrial shredders, cutting out their tongues, rape rooms or mass graves either. All of those are realities for someone, and there was no stopping it without armed force.
The “intelligence” was incomplete, but how could it not be so? The Press didn’t tell us what they knew, as CNN admitted later, so why should the enemy do so? How can intelligence get it right without cooperation of the people on site? How could we have had better intelligence? Well, looking back on a generation of looking askance, endlessly putting off what we now have to do, we can see that we should have depended less on machines and more on old fashioned spies….but we didn’t, and in 2003 we couldn’t have had better intelligence on the ground, in the real world.
We could have been more constant friends, and not allowed Saddam to butcher the people who supported us in the First War, but in deference to the Europeans we didn’t, and today’s Iraqis have a right to be uncertain that we can be counted on, despite what’s been done so far. All the talk about withdrawing from Iraq is only making this worse, and it’s a long way from over. As they come to believe we’ll be there, this time, to protect them, they will provide new and real intelligence. They are doing so now. Zarqawi is below room temperature, and buried. That’s better.
It would be nice if we could be perfect, but we’re not, and imperfections demand improvement, not abandonment of ideals. Yet even with imperfect information, we know now that it wasn’t all that imperfect. Nobody claimed Iraq was involved in 9/11, despite the fact that an Iraqi was among those who first attempted to destroy the WTC several years ago, and that Iraq attempted to assassinate a former U.S. President while visiting Kuwait. The claim was only that Saddam Hussein was working with terrorists of a wide variety, against our people.
Zarqawi and Abu Nidal were in Iraq. We now know there were at least extensive contacts with Bin Laden and Al Quaeda. There were chemical weapons, and they were used to massacre Kurds. T here was an active nuclear program; that’s proved. It was hidden, and perhaps not as well developed as thought to be, but nascent and available for reconstitution in a short time, none the less. And by the way, just how far advanced does it have to be to trigger alarm from the Precious in Europe? Well, let’s look at the Iranian situation.
Here we have a regime that speaks openly of destroying another people, and obviously is run by persons who are deranged, historically if not psychiatrically. It is precisely this that constitutes the issue. If Belgian chocolatiers wanted a nuclear power plant, none of us would have knots in our knickers.
While lying about it, the Iranians clearly seek a weapon with which to destroy whomever they choose. At present the chosen are the Israelis, but what the Hell, they're Jews. A missile of the kind being tested by North Korea, sold to Iran and with an Iranian nuke, will take out London. Is that acceptable to anybody in Europe? Well, for now maybe it can’t reach London…only, say Prague…well, I guess that’s not so bad, they’re Slavs, after all.
After more than two years, there’s been NO progress by the U.N. or E.U. in de-clawing this beast. Obviously, Europeans are waiting again for somebody else to save their bacon, all the while whining about U.S. “unilateralism.” Today, it’s the Israelis fighting the Iranian’s proxies, and for that they receive nothing but vilification in the E.U. Years of suicide bombers, rocket attacks on their civilians, a withdrawal from Gaza that allowed the “Palestinians” to have their own state complete with infrastructure needed to maintain a society…infrastructure that’s been destroyed by their own war among themselves…and Europe dares to speak of “disproportions.” How quaint to demand Israeli withdrawal to a status quo that no other civilized people would have tolerated for a week, much less for years.
Imagine the fury in the U.S. if such a sequence had been launched against us from Mexico. Northern Mexico would be a glass parking lot by now, but the Israelis somehow are considered “disproportionate” after years of tolerating these attacks.
Tomorrow it may have to be the U.S. that again carries the battle, not because we want to be an Empire nor the World’s Policeman, as you put it, yet who else is there?
Well, we in America know, or used to know. There are you Brits. At least there once were you Brits, our constant friends, the source of our laws, our ideals and beliefs, of our founding fathers; the providers of a debt, that as I’ve said, we can never completely pay, for it must always remain as a reminder of the why of The Special Relationship. But I sense a willingness on your people's part, as part of the greater Europe, to toss that over the fence, too.
And from most of Europe, we hear nothing but anti-American drivel about our descent into fascism, or failure to….whatever. It makes me, and a lot of us, sick to hear of it. Sick. Vanderleun may yet be proved right, as his view is the only opposition to Krauthammer’s, save that of the Jihadis, or of the cowards among us.
Terrorism is a tactic in the war. The poor Brazilian man was a victim, and in the wrong place in London, just as were any of the victims of this war at any one time. The Israeli children, the Lebanese mother, the Iraqi doctor or the London librarian, the American soldier or his wife…Liam, the list is endless…all are casualties in this war, and none is more tragic than the other.
All the tears are fungible, Liam. But that’s not a reason, let alone not a permission, to stop defending ourselves with whatever imperfect means we have at any one time and place. If I make a wrong choice in the operating room, and a patient is harmed, the solution is for me to do better, not to stop trying to destroy brain cancer. We have no choice but to deal with our realities and to do as best we can, patiently and until we destroy our enemy’s capacity to destroy us.
I simply cannot understand why this, which seems so obvious to me, is so obscure to so many. Not all are in Europe, by the way; millions of Americans are similarly afflicted. And none of those who hope that America be “brought to heel” or better even, to fail…to be constrained…to no longer be The World’s Policeman, have any idea what kind of a world would emerge from their puerile hopes.
To be blunt about it, there will be no painless victory by the Jihadis. Imagine for a moment that we of the West decide to become Dhimmis after all; to just give it up and hope for the best….sort of like the last generation's pacifist “Better Red Than Dead” scenario.
What remains is precisely the rest of the world that you accuse us of ignoring.
Does anyone think that the Indians will accept Dhimmitude? They’re nuclear armed and came close to nuclear war with Pakistan just a few years ago. It was Cowboy Bush and the hated Rumsfeld of Gitmo who defused that situation.
How about the Israelis? They’ve got an estimated 200 nukes and the means to deliver them. With nothing to lose, and no US to counsel otherwise or protect them from their executioners, does anybody believe that when faced with literal extinction, they will simply go, clutching their children to their breasts, passively into the ovens for the second time in a hundred years?
As the world is currently constituted, that Cowboy President and the sixty million of us who re-elected him are most of what there is between Krauthammer’s hopes, and a fate beyond imagining. There are some in Europe that are willing to fight, but they haven’t the means.
My reading is that even you Brits have no stomach for any more of the fun that Iraq provides. It’s peculiar and sad, I think, for the descendents of Braveheart and of the warriors who conquered the world bringing English Law wherever they went, to “go wobbly” at this critical time and place in history. You need Churchill now, at least as much as you did in 1939. We all do.
Personally, I don’t want to be anything but somebody’s grandpa. I didn’t ask to be a citizen of The Empire, but here we are. Unless somebody else steps up to the plate, somebody who’s not even suited up yet, we’re going to have to bat, like it or not.
Go ahead, Europe, get into the game, but do it fast, for the game will be over if you diddle around much longer.
This is a lot to listen to, my friend. Sorry to burden you with it, but it’s been there for a couple of weeks, moldering, fermenting, and it just burst out, I guess. Painful, I know, but heartfelt, and I believe, true.
Your note responds to two articles that I sent previously, one by Gerard Vanderleun and another by Charles Krauthammer, which were sent to illustrate opinions that are being formulated here in America. As I said before, I was surprised to find that opinions in Europe are so poorly informed about what really goes on in the US. People who have strongly held and very negative views of our politics and our positions are quite ignorant of what they actually are. It’s striking, really, and for that reason I sent some examples. In my mind Vanderleun’s is a radical one, and Krauthammer’s a more reasonable historical review and conclusion, but neither one is known in England, judging from what I read in your papers or see in your TV analyses.
Here’s a German website that analyzes some of what I find unimaginably common. In fairness, the existence of this site itself indicates that all Europeans don’t share this journalist’s view, but the journalist’s opinion is pretty much what I find in much of the European press, and among citizens with whom I spoke. The website author’s critique speaks for itself.
http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/financial_times_deutschland/index.html
Apart from their arguments, the articles I sent are important because of their authors. Vanderleun is a former radical of the 60’s, an early adopter in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, he became an editor of one of the sex-mags…I think it was Hustler…and lived for a while in the New York literary, liberal politics, anti-establishment scene till he was hustled by a wife and left with a different point of view. For such a person to have the strong Pro-Active, “go it alone and to Hell with the weaklings of the Left” attitude represents a serious conversion; it might yet prove to be a conversion on a road to Damascus, if you’ll forgive the “not-intending-to-be-blasphemous” pun. The mere fact of such an opinion being formulated by such a person and influencing other Americans, is itself a point of information that Europeans need to have.
I submit Vanderleun’s piece as an example of what could easily become America’s attitude if European anti-Americanism becomes manifest to a majority of Americans. Krauthammer has it right….we really just want to go about our business, and to be left to our own devices, but if that proves impossible, Vanderleun may persuade a lot of us.
You’ve responded to his rant, correctly in my opinion, and I’m grateful to know that we agree on several points. Particularly I appreciate your understanding that we could do as he suggests, for the reasons you acknowledge, but that we shouldn’t. Not because it’s impractical, nor even wrong, but because it would be a violation of what makes America, well, America. Yes. I agree completely. It is really tempting to take a “blow ‘em all to Hell” attitude, but in the final analysis we can’t and still be true to what we are; and therefore we won’t. But his prediction may be accurate if there’s another major attack on US soil.
I remember seeing the hugely diverse population of London….undoubtedly including some who’d just as easily kill you and me as the passengers in the Underground…and asking myself, “Could I really just blow this man away….kill him in cold blood, just because he’s a Muslim?” When I told you of that query, you and I responded simultaneously, “Of course not.”
Liam, I’m a locked and loaded gun totin’, whiskey drinkin’, cigar smokin’, bad mouthin,’ gas-guzzlin’ SUV drivin’ American, and severely proud of it, but I’m also afflicted with the American Curse of having to “Do The Right Thing.” Can you imagine another people flagellating themselves over whether or not murderers and killers in the most barbaric ways have “rights,” like those we guarantee to ourselves?
Until it’s proved to be the only way, if not the right thing, we’ll not be able to kill them simply because they’re Islamofascists. “Of course not” is the correct answer, and because of that simultaneity of answer I know that we can be friends, and so I’ll speak openly. While I believe that to be the correct answer, I frankly wish it were not, as then Vanderleun’s plan going forward would be more clear and more easily focused. As it is, the reality is messy and difficult. In many ways we’re unclear and uncertain, and we’re seemingly in a mess, and endlessly negotiating with ourselves about what’s right and what’s wrong.
It will take another attack here in the U.S. to end that negotiation. When it does, the world will never be the same; never. That’s Vanderleun’s point. That is a point which Europeans, with so much to lose, seem not to consider. There are others, but about them, later.
We agree on some other things. “That there should be a war on terror is self evident,” for one. Your assertion that the might is right proposition “blinds itself to America’s historical support for the weak and the dispossessed…” is also true. “…Islamic Terrorism presents a threat to virtually all of Western Society, and not just to American interests. Consequently, in the face of such a threat…it is unthinkable that America should act unilaterally,” is also true; but none of these is the entire truth.
You object to the term “unconditional victory over Islamic Totalitarianism” as reminiscent of a call to Jihad. Really, Liam, that’s hardly so. An American Jihad? A religious call to murder?
Just what alternative is there and on what basis shall we negotiate? What shall we be prepared to negotiate away? We did not start this fight; they see themselves as continuing a fight that’s a thousand years old. They have nothing to negotiate, as the only thing they admit to wanting is Us as Them or Us Dead. Not negotiable, my friend. They demand total victory, and they’ll continue to kill us till they get it, or until we do.
There are millions of the “reality challenged” in the Muslim world. Note that by huge percentages across the Muslim world, people claim to believe the U.S. brought down the WTC towers and killed those thousands of us on behalf of an Israeli cabal. Remember the joy in the streets of “Palestine” on the very day of 9/11. Discuss the reality of Hamas, openly dedicate in its very charter to eradicating Israel, freely rocketing Israeli towns over a course of months, and now expecting to “negotiate” a “prisoner trade”….murderers for soldiers. Here’s who they want to trade:
I’m willing to negotiate that there will be peace someday, a peace which preserves Muslims’ rights to their culture, their beliefs and habits, their money and the proceeds from a huge trade in oil…anything other than their right to kill us all.
But this isn’t what they’re talking about, since they already have it. America is not attacking Pakistan, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Turkey nor even Syria, yet, and our President’s going out of his way to avoid war with Iran. We have proposed “talks” on Iraq and other issues which divide us, which they refused; so what’s to negotiate? They make war by proxy on Israel and threaten to kill all those people; so what’s to negotiate? If there can be no negotiations with someone who threatens the entire Western Civilization on the command of a Mullah of the 7th Century in the personage of the Mullahs of the 20th, just what’s left?
Well, we can ignore it, and hope it goes away. That’s what we’ve done for the past twenty something years. We’ve been at war since the Mullahs took hostages and the US Embassy, about which a different kind of American President, one beloved of Europeans, did nothing.
There have been multiple battles across the world since, (See the attachment: Catalogue of Terrorism, that brought it up to last October) but now we’re fighting back. That is what’s different. It frightens a lot of people, but that’s a new reality, too.
If negotiation isn’t possible and fighting is all there is; then your point is that it should not be “unilateral.” I agree, if possible, and so would Vanderleun, although he says it’s not possible. I say it is, and is being done as best we can.
The war, which I call World War Four, is being conducted with the variable assistance of much of the rest of the world, from India and Pakistan to Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Canada and Great Britain, much of Eurasia, indeed, most of Europe, especially Central Europeans who know something about totalitarianism…just not those who we know now were always on Saddam’s payroll, France, and Russia. This is hardly “unilateralism.” Not all those people agree with us completely, but they’re helping, nonetheless, as they understand there’s little alternative.
North Korea is at the heart of a lot of this. It is they who supplied the technology to the Pakistani, Dr. Khan, who sold it to Libya and Iran. It is they who are building rockets capable of reaching across the world, and which Iran is trying to acquire. It is a seriously dangerous world, and the U.S. is trying to deal with it, for now without more war, but insisting on multiparty action and negotiations as a guiding principle, a principle for which the US Administration is excoriated by its so called friends in Europe and by the semi-treasonous in the US itself. Unilateral? Come on Liam, get real.
What other unilateralism are we guilty of? Kyoto….now there you have it…a “treaty” that was signed even though no one has honored or met their “goals.” Even the Canadians are withdrawing, I believe. The Chinese and Indians are excluded, and the treaty was dead before it was signed. Clinton negotiated it, but didn’t even try to get it ratified by the Senate, as required by U.S. law. The Russians first refused it as unworkable but then cynically signed on as it became clear nobody would enforce it. Our refusal to share such cynical and meaningless “diplomacy” isn’t a sign of unilateralism, it’s a mark of realism. Meanwhile, US proposals for alternative environmental steps are being accepted, and may even be effective.
How about withdrawal from the ABM treaty? That treaty forbade us from developing the very anti-missile technology that is the current technological hope, in light of North Korea’s threats to Japan, Australia, South Korea, and even the U.S. Perhaps it would have been better to symbolically remain signatory while cheating a way around it, but symbolism over action is not going to protect anyone, not even the French.
I think it’s not really unilateralism that’s the heart of the debate. Then what is it? I think it’s the fear that we in the U.S. will take seriously the threat to us, and act to stop it. Not necessarily unilaterally, but act to save ourselves, not automatically including those who have made a passion of anti-Americanism. The Vanderleun Alternative.
Whatever transpires, it will be painful, costly, deadly, possibly fatal to you or me, and scary as Hell. I understand that; it’ll change the way we live in ways that’ll look too much like where we thought we’d never have to go again.
We can’t bear to admit it, and as long as one holds out the phantasm of something other than unconditional victory, there’s hope that we’ll stop short of the unbearable. That’s what’s uncomfortable about the concept of victory. We have people in this country, as you do in Europe, who just cannot imagine a U.S. victory as a desirable goal, for fear that reaching it will be unbearable, but at the same time they ignore the unbearable alternative.
Whatever happens, the conditions have been set by our enemies, not by us. It is they who declare Jihad. It is they who see no choice but death for infidels. It is they who define Dhimmitude. It is they who attack, and tell us again and again that they’ll always attack.
You named the places, and they’re not just places where “the West” is involved at all.…Bali, Chechnya, Bombay, Philippines, western China, Thailand….places where there’s not an American nor a Jew in sight.
It is they who define the unconditional. If we fight, it’ll be unconditional. If we surrender it’ll be unconditional. They have defined the rules of engagement, not we, and fight is what we must do. Slavery is not an option. The loss of Western Civilization and the replication of the Dark Ages is not an option.
Which brings me to your issue of “international institutions,” the existence of which you claim to be the “bulwark against tyranny.”
Well….it sort of depends upon which institutions you’re talking about. I f you mean the Special Relationship between the US and Great Britain, that which reduced me to tears reading Roosevelt’s handwritten note to Churchill, you’re right on the money.
If you mean NATO, well, it depends on whether or not, for example, France or Germany wishes, this week, to participate. It depends upon whether or not the people of European NATO partners want to take seriously their obligations to defend themselves….yes, and to defend us….a seriously chancy matter to say the least.
Over here we’re not impressed by the several years of genocide in the center of Europe, before the U.S. (without U.N. approval by the by) stopped it with armed force. It’s laughable for an American to even imagine being defended by Germany or France. For too long we’ve settled for their not actively trying to harm us. Those days are coming to an end, regardless of whatever Vanderleun’s other predictions come to pass.
So what’s left? Say it isn’t so, my friend, but the thing that’s left is the “United Nations.” Now that’s a really sad case.
You say that imperfect as it is, it’s all that we have, and that we must use it to save ourselves. I'm sorry, but that’s ludicrous. The United Nations isn’t imperfect, if it were, then it could be perfected. It’s worse; it’s useless.
The State of Israel was established by a vote of the United Nations. The Palestinian Camps, “home” to the most wretched people in the world, are UN camps. Funded by the rest of us, mostly the US, for sixty odd years, they’re UN responsibility. The failure of whatever “Peace Process” one speaks of at any one time pales before the failure of the UN to deal with this for more than half a century.
There are said to be some agencies of the U.N. that are effective….W.H.O is commonly quoted as one…but nothing that the UN does could not be done as effectively by a specifically charged separate organization for the desired purpose.
The utter corruption of the U.N. is no longer a matter of debate….it’s the stuff of Monty Python, not a “bulwark” of any kind. Failures are too numerous to recount….and the corpses pile up in Darfur while the UN debates what defines genocide. Ruanda taught Kofi Annan nothing. Slavery still exists in much of that part of the world, ignored by the U.N. The English and their American descendents, to their everlasting credit, fought the slavers and ended it in the civilized world by armed force, bloody sacrifice at sea and in an American Civil War…but today, the “United” Nations dithers while millions barely survive as slaves. A “bulwark” where Mugabe’s Zimbabwe defines the UN on its “Human Rights Council” is too crazy even for Monty.
Talk. Talk. Condemn those who will actually defend Human Rights, but talk and it’s not a bad life for the talkers, New York, the freedom of our Liberal Democracy, and on someone else’s dime. Oh, yes, it’s time to condemn Israel again. How about a 17th resolution calling for Iraq to comply….whoops, I forgot, that’s a moot point. Oh well, never mind. It makes no difference, anyway.
No way, Liam. They’ll not save us, either. So, what will? Let’s consider Krauthammer. After a long historical review he describes American policy and position in the world in these terms.
“…democratic globalism, a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values, and that identifies one supreme value, what John Kennedy called “the success of liberty.” As President Bush put it in his speech at Whitehall last November: “The United States and Great Britain share a mission in the world beyond the balance of power or the simple pursuit of interest. We seek the advance of freedom and the peace that freedom brings.”
Beyond power. Beyond interest. Beyond interest defined as power. That is the credo of democratic globalism.
It’s not Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later--with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights--there is no way not to know.
In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we came to the edge of the abyss. Then, accompanied by our equally shaken adversary, we both deliberately drew back. On September 11, 2001, we saw the face of Armageddon again, but this time with an enemy that does not draw back. This time the enemy knows no reason.
Were that the only difference between now and then, our situation would be hopeless. But there is a second difference…the uniqueness of our power, unrivaled, not just today but ever. That evens the odds. The rationality of the enemy is something beyond our control. But the use of our power is within our control. And if that power is used wisely, constrained not by illusions and fictions but only by the limits of our mission--which is to bring a modicum of freedom as an antidote to nihilism…,we can prevail.
In this, he means “we” in the larger sense. We….you, Europe, the rest of the world that wishes to live its own way, everyone who doesn’t want to kill us. Just why should this be anathema to the rest of the world? Do they wish for something different? Do they not wish to live free, as they define it? The U.S. policy hasn’t been to enforce our view of The Right Way, but to insist only on freedom to choose whatever someone wishes. We’re not forcing the Danes to stand in line for a Big Mac in Copenhagen, nor the French to flock to Disneyland, or to American movies.
The 11,000,000 blue fingered Iraqis will choose a way different from ours, and their choice was bought by our treasure and our blood. You spoke of our historical commitment to the “weak and the dispossessed,” but I count those hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in mass graves as among them. How dare the darlings of Europe, who’ve done nothing but enable the killers, complain of our efforts to save ourselves, and them?
The “democratic globalism” can’t be as simple as that, and I’ll not defend it in detail, other than to maintain that whatever its faults, nobody has proposed a much different concept; none but the Jihadis. We can argue about the nuances of defining Democratic, or Realism, whether we’re insufficiently Wilsonian, or whatever, but the differences are slight compared to our differences with our enemies. Unless somebody has a more effective way to resist murder…other than endless U.N. resolutions…the only hope for the future is that the D/Gs are right, and that American power can be used justly. If they’re wrong, we’re doomed.
Which brings us finally to the current battles of WW4, Iraq and Palestine. I don’t like the Battle of Iraq, but the war has to be fought somewhere, and I prefer Iraq to Edinburgh or Charlotte. There may have been a better choice for the battle site. Personally, I’d have voted for Syria first, and then Iran, but all of them had downsides too, and this one was chosen. It’s where we are, now.
I don’t like killing or even hurting anybody. I don’t like butchery, beheadings, gouging eyes out, putting human beings feet first into industrial shredders, cutting out their tongues, rape rooms or mass graves either. All of those are realities for someone, and there was no stopping it without armed force.
The “intelligence” was incomplete, but how could it not be so? The Press didn’t tell us what they knew, as CNN admitted later, so why should the enemy do so? How can intelligence get it right without cooperation of the people on site? How could we have had better intelligence? Well, looking back on a generation of looking askance, endlessly putting off what we now have to do, we can see that we should have depended less on machines and more on old fashioned spies….but we didn’t, and in 2003 we couldn’t have had better intelligence on the ground, in the real world.
We could have been more constant friends, and not allowed Saddam to butcher the people who supported us in the First War, but in deference to the Europeans we didn’t, and today’s Iraqis have a right to be uncertain that we can be counted on, despite what’s been done so far. All the talk about withdrawing from Iraq is only making this worse, and it’s a long way from over. As they come to believe we’ll be there, this time, to protect them, they will provide new and real intelligence. They are doing so now. Zarqawi is below room temperature, and buried. That’s better.
It would be nice if we could be perfect, but we’re not, and imperfections demand improvement, not abandonment of ideals. Yet even with imperfect information, we know now that it wasn’t all that imperfect. Nobody claimed Iraq was involved in 9/11, despite the fact that an Iraqi was among those who first attempted to destroy the WTC several years ago, and that Iraq attempted to assassinate a former U.S. President while visiting Kuwait. The claim was only that Saddam Hussein was working with terrorists of a wide variety, against our people.
Zarqawi and Abu Nidal were in Iraq. We now know there were at least extensive contacts with Bin Laden and Al Quaeda. There were chemical weapons, and they were used to massacre Kurds. T here was an active nuclear program; that’s proved. It was hidden, and perhaps not as well developed as thought to be, but nascent and available for reconstitution in a short time, none the less. And by the way, just how far advanced does it have to be to trigger alarm from the Precious in Europe? Well, let’s look at the Iranian situation.
Here we have a regime that speaks openly of destroying another people, and obviously is run by persons who are deranged, historically if not psychiatrically. It is precisely this that constitutes the issue. If Belgian chocolatiers wanted a nuclear power plant, none of us would have knots in our knickers.
While lying about it, the Iranians clearly seek a weapon with which to destroy whomever they choose. At present the chosen are the Israelis, but what the Hell, they're Jews. A missile of the kind being tested by North Korea, sold to Iran and with an Iranian nuke, will take out London. Is that acceptable to anybody in Europe? Well, for now maybe it can’t reach London…only, say Prague…well, I guess that’s not so bad, they’re Slavs, after all.
After more than two years, there’s been NO progress by the U.N. or E.U. in de-clawing this beast. Obviously, Europeans are waiting again for somebody else to save their bacon, all the while whining about U.S. “unilateralism.” Today, it’s the Israelis fighting the Iranian’s proxies, and for that they receive nothing but vilification in the E.U. Years of suicide bombers, rocket attacks on their civilians, a withdrawal from Gaza that allowed the “Palestinians” to have their own state complete with infrastructure needed to maintain a society…infrastructure that’s been destroyed by their own war among themselves…and Europe dares to speak of “disproportions.” How quaint to demand Israeli withdrawal to a status quo that no other civilized people would have tolerated for a week, much less for years.
Imagine the fury in the U.S. if such a sequence had been launched against us from Mexico. Northern Mexico would be a glass parking lot by now, but the Israelis somehow are considered “disproportionate” after years of tolerating these attacks.
Tomorrow it may have to be the U.S. that again carries the battle, not because we want to be an Empire nor the World’s Policeman, as you put it, yet who else is there?
Well, we in America know, or used to know. There are you Brits. At least there once were you Brits, our constant friends, the source of our laws, our ideals and beliefs, of our founding fathers; the providers of a debt, that as I’ve said, we can never completely pay, for it must always remain as a reminder of the why of The Special Relationship. But I sense a willingness on your people's part, as part of the greater Europe, to toss that over the fence, too.
And from most of Europe, we hear nothing but anti-American drivel about our descent into fascism, or failure to….whatever. It makes me, and a lot of us, sick to hear of it. Sick. Vanderleun may yet be proved right, as his view is the only opposition to Krauthammer’s, save that of the Jihadis, or of the cowards among us.
Terrorism is a tactic in the war. The poor Brazilian man was a victim, and in the wrong place in London, just as were any of the victims of this war at any one time. The Israeli children, the Lebanese mother, the Iraqi doctor or the London librarian, the American soldier or his wife…Liam, the list is endless…all are casualties in this war, and none is more tragic than the other.
All the tears are fungible, Liam. But that’s not a reason, let alone not a permission, to stop defending ourselves with whatever imperfect means we have at any one time and place. If I make a wrong choice in the operating room, and a patient is harmed, the solution is for me to do better, not to stop trying to destroy brain cancer. We have no choice but to deal with our realities and to do as best we can, patiently and until we destroy our enemy’s capacity to destroy us.
I simply cannot understand why this, which seems so obvious to me, is so obscure to so many. Not all are in Europe, by the way; millions of Americans are similarly afflicted. And none of those who hope that America be “brought to heel” or better even, to fail…to be constrained…to no longer be The World’s Policeman, have any idea what kind of a world would emerge from their puerile hopes.
To be blunt about it, there will be no painless victory by the Jihadis. Imagine for a moment that we of the West decide to become Dhimmis after all; to just give it up and hope for the best….sort of like the last generation's pacifist “Better Red Than Dead” scenario.
What remains is precisely the rest of the world that you accuse us of ignoring.
Does anyone think that the Indians will accept Dhimmitude? They’re nuclear armed and came close to nuclear war with Pakistan just a few years ago. It was Cowboy Bush and the hated Rumsfeld of Gitmo who defused that situation.
How about the Israelis? They’ve got an estimated 200 nukes and the means to deliver them. With nothing to lose, and no US to counsel otherwise or protect them from their executioners, does anybody believe that when faced with literal extinction, they will simply go, clutching their children to their breasts, passively into the ovens for the second time in a hundred years?
As the world is currently constituted, that Cowboy President and the sixty million of us who re-elected him are most of what there is between Krauthammer’s hopes, and a fate beyond imagining. There are some in Europe that are willing to fight, but they haven’t the means.
My reading is that even you Brits have no stomach for any more of the fun that Iraq provides. It’s peculiar and sad, I think, for the descendents of Braveheart and of the warriors who conquered the world bringing English Law wherever they went, to “go wobbly” at this critical time and place in history. You need Churchill now, at least as much as you did in 1939. We all do.
Personally, I don’t want to be anything but somebody’s grandpa. I didn’t ask to be a citizen of The Empire, but here we are. Unless somebody else steps up to the plate, somebody who’s not even suited up yet, we’re going to have to bat, like it or not.
Go ahead, Europe, get into the game, but do it fast, for the game will be over if you diddle around much longer.
This is a lot to listen to, my friend. Sorry to burden you with it, but it’s been there for a couple of weeks, moldering, fermenting, and it just burst out, I guess. Painful, I know, but heartfelt, and I believe, true.
posted by Jerry at 10:21 AM
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