Posted on 09/11/2003 12:49:16 AM PDT by kattracks
A NEW AGE BEGAN ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. The unsettled dust and undried tears from those collapsing World Trade Center towers and burning Pentagon continue to cloud our vision, emotions and perspective, but on this second anniversary of the horror we can begin to see what this new age’s landscape looks like.“The Bush Administration has drawn conclusions about this new world,” writes Fareed Zakaria in the September 15th Newsweek. In this world the “democratization of violence” allows little men to acquire big weapons that can murder thousands as only governments used to have the power to do.
Because in this new world terrorists cannot be deterred because they are often “willing, indeed eager, to die,” writes Zakaria, “You have to go on the offensive. Prevention is the only path to security.”
The word President George W. Bush uses for this doctrine is “preemption.” It recognizes that we can no longer afford merely to “contain” a foe or allow him to strike first, relying on our retaliatory power to win by striking back.
Today’s terrorists, striking from a borderless twilight zone between crime and war, may soon be able to annihilate New York City or London or Washington, D.C., and leave no clear perpetrator against whom to retaliate.
The vaccine being developed to defeat this emerging terrorism plague carries risks of its own. Preemptive war against terror does not fit neatly or fastidiously with our traditions of law, privacy, presumed innocence or proportionality.
This vaccine may be the best way to preserve our lives and civilization, but its use inevitably will transform us in many ways. In this war of the twilight, “between dog and wolf” as the French say, entre chien et loup, almost anybody might be the enemy. Accordingly, almost all of us are now subjected to more intense surveillance.
Nearly a quarter-century ago during his first trip to Israel, this columnist remembers thinking how strange it was when people warned him instantly to report any package or briefcase left in any public place such as a bus or hotel lobby.
Today Americans are acquiring that same alertness to terrorist bombs and vulnerable targets in our society. Many will think it prudent to take 9-11 off from their jobs in crowded cities or on this terrorist anniversary to avoid popular tourist destinations.
This doctrine of preemption, however, is not a retreat from the world. On the contrary, it aims to put those who would harm us on the defensive by attacking them where they live. Part of President Bush’s strategy thus far has been to fight would-be terrorists on their turf in Afghanistan and the Middle East while for two years successfully preventing any new terrorist attacks on American soil.
Preemption requires the once-isolationist United States to be more “in the world” than ever before. The fight against non-national Islamist enemies is tempting us to shed our old notions of nations and sovereignty, to inch towards global governance and alliances and international law as ways of turning terrorists into global outlaws with no place to hide.
Some conservatives find this prospect troubling.
Why, they ask, does President Bush want to spend $166 billion restoring order in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly $2,500 for every American family of four?
(This is a small fraction of the cost of another 9-11 terrorist attack, the horror of two years ago having caused more than $1 trillion in global economic disruption. If order is not restored in these regions, they could become breeding grounds for many such attacks against the West. This is why other advanced nations should share this expense to help ensure their own future safety.)
Why, these conservatives ask, is President Bush extending America’s military influence in such lands? Are we, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, a Republic or an Empire? And what right do we have to impose American-style democracy in Iraq?
(The latest poll shows that 40 percent of Iraqis would be delighted if their nation imitated America and broke free from the undemocratic authoritarianism of the Muslim Middle East. If this happened, it could preempt the current pattern seen in Iran – where the modernizing Shah was overthrown by medieval theocrats now bent on acquiring nuclear weapons – from repeating itself in Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich nations. The unstable Middle East is going to shift either our way or Osama bin Laden’s. The future safety of humankind requires that we try to make those tottering dominoes fall in our direction, not towards fanatic Islamism, and that is what President Bush is doing.)
“We conservatives believe in small government,” many of these honorable people say, “but now Fred Barnes and Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz and others are calling President Bush a ‘Big Government Conservative.’ Even Rush Limbaugh is troubled that President Bush seems to be a bigger government spender during his first three years in office than was President Ronald Reagan, and that the Republican Party under its new chairman Ed Gillespie might have lost some of its determination to shrink the size of government. This makes us uncomfortable.”
Why in particular should this be a worry to Rush Limbaugh? Twice on his radio show Rush has proclaimed: “We conservatives like Big Government, too. We just want it to do what WE want it to do.” But for those who distrust Big Government, if only because (as Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom) such power will sooner or later fall into the wrong hands, consider these points:
This is wartime. We seem to have forgotten this because President Bush has thus far kept America safe from another 9-11 attack on our soil…and, ironically, has therefore created some of the complacency that now prompts people to criticize him. If American cities were being attacked almost daily (God forbid!), as tragically happens in Israel, then we would understand the need for increased government spending in time of war.
Mr. Bush’s increased domestic spending is also caused by war, this columnist infers, but not by a war the President wishes to declare openly.
One commonplace truth about American politics is that elections are won “between the 40 yard lines.” This expression means that about 40 percent of voters are Republicans and 40 percent are Democrats. Elections get won by whomever attracts those in the middle of the political spectrum whose votes might go to either side.
In 2003 the Democrats, as one pundit hinted, have turned into Lemmingcrats. Led by a pied piper named Howard Dean, this party of the Left is marching farther leftward away from that winning center and towards its own extinction.
President Bush, as an astute politician, is seizing this rare opportunity by matching the Democrats step for step, preemptively marching into and occupying the middle ground that the Democrats have abandoned. Issue by issue, Mr. Bush and the Republican Party have preempted what used to be winning positions for Democrats – health care, education and more.
This has left Democrats with little to run on except party-line rhetoric, the kind of negative, nasty, hate-filled rhetoric that will not win over any political centrist who isn’t already a Democrat. It is preaching to the choir, but the choir does not contain enough voters to win.
Democrats have also lost a portion of patriotic Americans who will support any President in time of war – as singer Britney Spears said she did just days ago.
And they have lost the once-Democratic “Soccer Moms” who by the millions have become GOP-supporting “Security Moms” because of the threat of terrorism that Democrats seem unwilling to confront or defeat.
And now key Democrat Senators such as John Edwards in North Carolina and Fritz Hollings in South Carolina are no longer seeking re-election. Mr. Bush could emerge from the 2004 election with a filibuster-proof 60 Senator majority and be able to re-nominate Miguel Estrada, whose vote on the Senate floor was denied by the parliamentary gimmickry of Democratic senators.
No wonder Democratic strategists are in a near panic over the coming 2004 elections and the further erosion of power their party faces in every part of the Federal Government.
But instead of rushing back towards the American centrist mainstream, Democrats are continuing their suicidal march farther and farther to the loony Left. We can hear their candidates like Gov. Howard Dean and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D.-Ohio) chanting “Left …Left…Left foot…Left.” In the distance we can see some of them already falling off the outer edge of the political spectrum, victims of their own ideological doppler Red Shift.
In order to occupy this middle ground, President Bush has had to embrace more spending on certain government programs, to accept Bigger Government.
But the goal of this domestic political war is to break the power of the Democratic Party just as Ronald Reagan through temporarily higher defense spending broke the power of the Soviet Union. When Republican power becomes entrenched, as Democratic power over the Congress was for 40 years, there will be ample time to replace the edifice of Big Government brick by brick.
Leftist intellectuals, of course, see clearly what is happening. Paul Light of the liberal Brookings Institution has made a crusade of accusing President Bush of “bringing back the era of Big Government.”
But when you examine the details of what Paul Light – a friend of Big Government whenever Democrats are in control – is saying, you discover that he is accusing Mr. Bush of privatizing the government, creating private jobs to do what government employees used to do.
This process, indeed, temporarily makes government bigger by phasing private employees in and later, in part by attrition, phasing government employees with their fat pensions and unionized positions out.
At the end of the day, much to the consternation of “liberals,” this will make government smaller, leaner, easier to downsize, and much less of a piggybank of coerced union dues for the Democratic Party.
The point is that you should not let yourself be manipulated into rejecting Republicans on the basis of leftist propaganda.
The privatization of government jobs is a key step towards smaller government in the long run, even though it might expand the total number of those working for government in the short run.
The expansion of government programs to win centrist votes that will entrench Republican power for decades to come is not necessarily a permanent expansion of government. Programs such as Social Security can be gradually privatized, too.
Do younger American workers, e.g., know that many nations – including Communist China! – now give workers some choice in how what they pay into Social Security gets invested? In that sense even Communist China has more economic free choice than we do over what for nearly half of Americans is the biggest tax they pay, the Social Security FICA tax.
Do these workers understand that the average worker in Chile will retire with a lump sum nest egg from that nation’s privatized Social Security equivalent to $750,000? The interest from this would provide triple the amount Americans receive each month, and the principal of which (unlike American Social Security) can be left to their children when they die.
Do African-American men know that the Democrats set up Social Security to pay off at the same age the average African-American male dies? Why did Democrats create a government system that shafts blacks instead of a privatized Social Security system that lets citizens own their accounts and pass that money on to their children?
“President George Bush is NOT a Big Government Conservative,” said the sagacious Washington, D.C., insider Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, Wednesday on my national radio talk show.
“He is paying for a protracted War on Terror that was not in his original plans,” Norquist continued. “Ronald Reagan during his eight years in office paid for increased national defense, as well as domestic deals with Democrats he had to make to get it, and that defense spending reaped huge dividends by causing the demise of the Soviet Union. President Bush has pushed through three huge tax cuts, one for every year in office, and intends to enact more. He is outsourcing jobs to the private sector. His long term goal is the key, and that is to make government smaller.”
Call it “Preemptive Democracy,” this bold political strategy that President Bush is using at home as well as abroad. In this new landscape it will produce some failures as well as successes. This is a game of foxes whose rulebook is being written while the game is underway. But if you look past what the media pundits are saying, you will be surprised at the deep and subtle new world of politics on that old playing field. Welcome to the post-9-11 world. Welcome to the Age of Preemption. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Ponte hosts national radio talk show Monday through Friday Noon-2 PM Eastern Time (9-11 AM Pacific Time) as well as on Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and on Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Talk America network . Internet Audio worldwide is at TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
The DNC PR agents (aka mainstream press) have been pushing GOP hot buttons for decades, expecting us to fall, as usual, for their tricks, hoping to divide us and pit us against each other - and to distract us from the very real threat posed by them - a major American political party who is choosing to align themselves with anti-American, global socialist organizations over America and the US Constitution, post 9-11, during wartime.
It's past time, as Thomas Sowell said, to stop taking the press so seriously. It's past time for the GOP to take the offensive in the info wars. Thank God for FR, the internet and talk radio.
This guy is nuts. This sounds like a parody of GOP thinking. "In order to be good Republicans, we'll have to spend more than Democrats do." He also sounds like Karl Marx, talking about the withering away of the state in some faraway future.
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