Conventional ignorance about the present war

[Mordenheim]

Victor Davis Hanson
March 21, 2003 8:45 a.m

THE WORLDWIDE JIHAD MYTH
Religion, we have been warned, is man's oldest, his deepest urge. Thus we are stirring up a hornet's nest in Iraq that will unleash forces beyond our control. The novelist Margaret Atwood recently warned of just that dire scenario. So does al-Jazeera, the electronic madrassa of the Arab world.
Yet we are still trying to acquire bases in a NATO-allied Muslim Turkey to attack Islamic Iraq. A northern front is desirable in large part so that Turks do not butcher the Muslims of Kurdistan (currently under attack by Islamic al Qaedists) even as we liberate other Muslims from Saddam Hussein. At the same time, remember, we are being thwarted by Catholic/Protestant France and Germany as well as by Orthodox Russia.

Iranian Shiites threaten to help their brethren in Iraq against secular Baathists. But they also want to fight Sunni Muslims. Indeed, in the past three decades Iranians, Iraqis, and Egyptians — not Americans — all preferred to fight during Ramadan. And is the Muslim world going to rise up to strike America — which saved and fed Islamic Afghans, Kuwaitis, Bosnians, Kosovars, and Somalis? Or will it hit the Russians, who killed 200,000 Muslims in Chechnya; or the Iraqis, who butchered 500,000 Shiite Iranians; or the Kuwaitis, who ethnically cleansed their kingdom of Palestinians?

The present crisis is far too complex to dismiss as a simple jihad. It resembles more the festering Balkan boil — likewise lanced by the U.S. military. Protestant and Catholic Americans bombed Orthodox Christian Serbs to save Islamic Bosnians and Kosovars — and were met with silence from the Muslim world, outrage from the Orthodox, and indifference from the European Catholic and Protestant.

THE SO-CALLED NEOCONSERVATIVE CONSPIRACY
In a variety of subtle ways, it is alleged that the war is part of a neoconservative (read, Jewish) plot to force us to fight Sharon's battles. This conspiracy theory usually unfolds with preemptive — and often angry — disavowals that the suspicion is not at all anti-Semitic. Then it proceeds to round up the usual suspects: Perle, Wolfowitz, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, etc.

Yet if we choose to concentrate on individuals rather than on the American public (which is 98 percent non-Jewish and living outside New York and Washington, and is being polled weekly), there are really five people who are preeminent in crafting American foreign policy: George Bush, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Three of them may be WASPs; the other two are African American. None are Jewish. All have a track record of being testy and independent, and hardly willing to be railroaded by anyone. And past history suggests that American successes in the Middle East usually lead to pressure on, not a free hand for, Israel.

Prior to the September attacks, Bush & co. were casting doubts on neoconservative ideas of "nation building" and Clintonian-type unilateral interventions — and I suspect they will all return to those affinities once the Iraq and North Korea crises have passed. But while the Bush team shares a wide variety of viewpoints, they all have reluctantly agreed that in a post-9/11 world, the United States will never be safe with an unhinged fascist dictator still in power — especially one who has a long history of surprise attacks against sovereign states, coupled with a habit of both acquiring weapons of mass destruction and abetting terrorists.

Midwesterners, westerners, and southerners — not eastern neoconservative Jews — are running this government. And they are going to war not for Israel, but because, like all Americans (including and especially Wolfowitz and Perle), they don't like allowing the safety of their beloved country to be contingent on the promises of assassins like Saddam Hussein, or of those appeasing neutrals who say not to worry about Saddam Hussein.

THE LEGEND OF INTERNATIONAL WISDOM
Yet many of those unhappy with the Texan flavor of Bush's rhetoric wish to listen to more sophisticated, international voices of ethics and compassion. Perhaps they desire to not be "hated" by the Europeans; or they entertain fears about doing anything that might be costly or unpleasant. Or maybe they failed to grasp the two iron laws of this crisis which trump all silly discussions about diplomatic tact and politeness: Saddam Hussein would never have disarmed without force and the French-led Europeans would never have supported the United States anyway.

Who knows? But they should at least reconsider how moral these non-state institutions really are — and perhaps recall that Socrates wasn't all that popular either, and was condemned by a "liberal" majority.

Try the pope and the Catholic Church. It has forgotten its mistaken warnings about the first Gulf War. Had we followed the pope's advice of nonintervention then, Iraq would now be sitting on half of the world's oil reserves, armed with nuclear weapons, and unrepentant about the killings of thousands of Kuwaitis.

Recent history is just as depressing. Take the silence about the takeover and desecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by Palestinian gangsters; the hospitality and sightseeing offered to the odious criminal Tariq Aziz in Rome; the seeming indifference to the thousands of Kurds and Iraqis slaughtered by Saddam Hussein. Americans liberating enslaved Iraqis should be the least of his worries.

Perhaps instead we can look to preeminent citizens of the world, such as Nobel Peace laureates? Ignore past embarrassments like the killer Yasser Arafat and note that the two most courageous — Elie Wiesel and Lech Walesa — are both support liberating Iraq. Why, then, should we listen to the newly canonized Jimmy Carter — who has a long record of parlaying with dictators and failing in diplomatic initiatives (from the Iranian hostage crisis to the Korean nuclear fiasco) — to say nothing of campaigning for the award on the widely praised strategy of ankle-biting a current American president in time of war? This was a leader, after all, who sought to "scare" the Iranian mullahs in 1979 by shipping F-15s to Saudi Arabia — all, of course, "unarmed."

The recent slaughter of 200,000 Balkans under the noses of the EU simply ends all discussion about the moral authority of that undemocratic body. That leaves us with the U.N. No one in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Haiti, or Afghanistan was saved by the courage of the United Nations. Instead, sanctimonious elites in New York talked on and on between power lunches even as over a million people rotted in shallow graves.

Half the states that sometimes comprise the Security Council deny their own citizens the very voting rights their mouthpieces enjoy in New York. For all the talk of pernicious American unilateralism, all of the permanent members routinely have used force for their own perceived national interests — both preemptively and without UN approval: Britain in the Falklands; France in the Ivory Coast; Russia (omitting the Soviet record in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan) in Chechnya; and China in Tibet, Korea, and Vietnam.

But perhaps the advice of our "allies" could lend us needed moral weight? Turkey balks not out of concern for the oppressed, but because of geopolitical worries over granting more concessions to oppressed Kurds, as well as a desire for cash and political cover for an amoral past in places like Cyprus. Billions pour into Egypt and Jordan as bribe money. Germany and France rearmed Saddam Hussein. Russia would have done more, had its weapons not been so inferior. All worry about debts to be paid. Existing oil concessions and anxiety about the scent of embarrassing footprints in a free Baghdad round out reasons for their current hostility to us.

Our allies, not our enemies, have taken away from us tactical surprise, easy logistics, and political support — and we should hold them culpable for all the needless deaths we incur. The tragedy is not that they wish to ostracize us, but rather that once Americans have died liberating Iraq, they will abandon their principles to elbow their way in and brag of "standing shoulder to shoulder" with GI liberators.

THE FRAUD OF ANTIWAR MORALITY
This week there were reports of brave, impoverished Kurds burning effigies of Saddam Hussein even as the Iraqi Gestapo hunted them down. Meanwhile pictures were being broadcast of Europeans torching simulacra of George Bush. That contrast sums up the current abject dissolution of the antiwar protestors — a bankrupt movement that has intellectual roots in the crowds who slurred Churchill and praised Chamberlain.

Go figure. Poor people atop their own oil who have no liberty, little gas, and few cars can risk their lives to express a desire to be free from a mass murderer. Simultaneously, wealthy, elite Westerners (who import their oil to drive nice cars) risk an hour or two of leisure time to damn a democratic leader for risking war to free these enslaved. Poor, tortured, and exiled Iraqis grimace at all this; Uday the Impaler and Chemical Ali smile.

In peacetime some creepy, self-proclaimed "human shields" volunteered to protect Iraqi civilian targets that won't be hit. But they bolted on the eve of war on being directed instead by their dictatorial hosts to guard military sites that probably will. Some morality.

Novelists and intellectuals decry 45 dead in Jenin and 500 civilians in Kabul killed in the liberation of Afghanistan. Suicide-murdering and medieval fundamentalist fascists are never mentioned. Nor do they say anything about the thousands slaughtered in decades of border-shelling in Kashmir, or the innocents of Chad butchered by the Libyans, or the tens of thousands of Christians executed in Africa. One person killed accidentally by a Westerner, after all, is worth 100 killed deliberately by "them."

The behavior of elites is similarly disturbing and reveals a deep sickness within American culture. What is the pathology that infects privileged Americans in this present conflict — why is it that the clerics are so out of touch with their parishioners, the actors with their audience, the professors with their students, the reporters with their readers? Hollywood celebrities either trash America abroad to cheering Europeans (cf. Jessica Lange, the Dixie Chicks, or Michael Moore), visit a criminal state on the eve of war (cf. Sean Penn), or talk of the general oppression and unfairness of the corporate America that alone gives Hollywooders a lifestyle undreamed of by the rest of America or the world at large (cf. Barbra Streisand or Ms. Huffington). Lost in all this posturing are some 26 million Iraqis — tortured, exiled, jailed, and brutalized under fascism.

So what is the truth?

We are presently watching the last hand in a long-drawn-out poker game. All the chips — the EU, NATO, the U.N., European anti-Americanism, French chauvinism, domestic opposition, the future of a democratic Iraq, the very nature of the Middle East, and of the war against terror itself — are now stacked on the table, up for grabs. As some of us once argued, it would have been far better and safer to go in last autumn; but war is full of irony, and so by forcing us to wait, our opponents have only upped the ante and may well lose all that they have so recklessly wagered.

If this war is immediate, quick, and successful, and results in the destruction of the Hussein regime and the liberation of its people, the world abroad will be made anew as we call in our markers. We will see either the reform — or perhaps the de facto end — of many flawed and hypocritical trans-national institutions we have known for a half-century. Then will follow the disgrace of our critics, the embarrassment of the utopian Left, and the sudden appearance of all sorts of European allies and Arab friends eager to mount our strong horse and ride down the remaining scattered Islamic terrorists.

And if we lose this last hand? We won't, partly because the consequences — as in any failed high-stakes gambit — would be so catastrophic that we simply cannot contemplate them all. And so we watch, as the beginning of the 21st-century global order rests in the hands of thousands of brave Americans now battling in the desert. God be with them.

[Mordenheim]

btw I want to add that while I agree with 99% of this...

He should give credit to Tony Blair and Spain for not just supporting but doing so visibly. Of course British thanks go without saying but he should have.

Other then that, I agree

[Donut]

Okay - a stab in the dark here. National Review Online?

[Nachtrafe]

Awesome article! [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

I know you credited the author, but I was wondering where you got it from. I'd like to check out the site/source. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Nachtrafe]

Originally posted by Donut: Okay - a stab in the dark here. National Review Online?

LOLOL...I was thinking that it had a NRO spin to it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Donut]

Originally posted by Nachtrafe: Quote: Originally posted by Donut: Okay - a stab in the dark here. National Review Online?

LOLOL...I was thinking that it had a NRO spin to it. [img]smile.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]And of course you don't already have a subscription!

[Nachtrafe]

Originally posted by Donut: Quote: Originally posted by Nachtrafe: Quote: Originally posted by Donut: Okay - a stab in the dark here. National Review Online?

LOLOL...I was thinking that it had a NRO spin to it. [img]smile.gif[/img] [/QUOTE]And of course you don't already have a subscription! [/QUOTE]Nope...at least, not yet. [img]smile.gif[/img]

It's on my list of 'Things to do', right next to "Getting a subscription to www.RushLimbaugh.com HEHEHEHEHEHEHE

*DUCKS AND RUNS BEFORE HE GETS [img]graemlins/blownup.gif[/img] *

[Mordenheim]

yea it was NRO

I actually foung it through google.

BTW what difference does it make who wrote it? Fox, CNN, Sky, BBC, or someone in Iraq. It the fact's quoted are correct and it is obvious why does it matter? Typical ploy to throw the issue off the article and on to the writer.

[Nachtrafe]

Originally posted by Mordenheim: yea it was NRO I actually foung it through google. BTW what difference does it make who wrote it? Fox, CNN, Sky, BBC, or someone in Iraq. It the fact's quoted are correct and it is obvious why does it matter? Typical ploy to throw the issue off the article and on to the writer.

ACK! No, I was just curious about where you got the article. I wanted to find the site and read more, if possible.

Erm...one thing though...if you know the source, you can A) judge the validity of the arguemtnt, and B) take the article in context. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[khazadman]

Dead on target! That's a great article.