Posted on 09/11/2002 8:52:40 AM PDT by dead
IT'S a strange thing, but I cannot remember when our flag came down.
By "our flag", I mean the modest Stars and Stripes hoisted over the front door of the apartment building where I live in Washington DC.
Nor do I remember when it went up. This is not a flag-waving building; it's populated by liberal professionals for the most part. Anyway, at some unremarked point a flag went up; at another it came down.
All anniversary events are subject to diminishing returns, as the fans of Princess Diana and Jim Morrison are aware. Anybody who has ever mourned a relative will know the uneasy moment that comes when days have passed without our thinking of them. We tell ourselves correctly that normal life would be impossible without this, while feeling slightly shabby nonetheless.
In the commemorations and obsequies this week, we are not remembering the dead of a previous war. We are observing that it is one short year since the present war began. I have no idea how long it will go on, but I am sure of two things: first, that it will be won, at the very least by the defeat of the crazed elements on the "other" side; second, that it will be going on long after George Bush has ceased to be president of the USA.
There is a fashion among people who have become understandably bored with repeating the obvious about the enemy, to change the subject and to talk about the shortcomings of Bush instead. I can sympathise with this in a way: I have never met anybody, even among the dimmest of my students, who wouldn't in some ways be better qualified to be president of the United States. But it's here exactly that his fascination lies.
A year ago, a large number of the voters watched him go through a shattering moment of shock and humiliation, and saw him stumble and improvise - just as they might have done themselves. This has created an unspoken bond, even among those who are quite sure that they are smarter and better informed.
The president was sitting awkwardly on an infant-classroom chair in Florida when he got the news from New York and Washington. He got it on camera. No chief executive has ever looked so small and shrunken in public. That image has become his and America's metaphor.
Which would you rather be able to say: (1) that everything came to you as a complete surprise and your citizens were burned alive on network TV while a late-scrambled Air Force jet circled hopelessly over the scene; or (2) that you had taken in advance every precaution, and identified or neutralised every enemy? Never mind the deep pundit-thoughts about Iraq for now; this time next year Saddam Hussein will be either dead or deposed, and the Russian, French and Chinese governments will be striving with smarmy friendliness to accommodate his successors.
This will be partly because Saddam was so stupid as to fail to give concrete assurances on the second point above. Don't believe anything you hear from Democrat or Republican "doves", who are mainly engaged in creative fence-sitting. In Bush's position, they would be doing exactly the same thing, rather than even risk facing the electorate with another round of "why was I not told?"
A LESS flattering way of saying this is that Bush can grasp only simple concepts. Well, in that case he is highly fortunate to be president at a time like this.
How difficult is it to see what we are up against? In Nigeria, the Islamic authorities in the north are keen to stone a young mother to death in public to show that they cannot be outdone in their fealty to Koranic law. Are they doing this because they care about Palestine?
Around the world minority populations are threatened with mass death or stripped of their rights. And in European cities the welcome of "multiculturalism" has been exploited by those who regard pluralism and human rights with contempt. What's complicated about this or the need to oppose it? Let's not complain of leaders who can recognise a rusty shank when it is pointed at them.
The same will be true of other countries that we often forgive ourselves for ignoring; huge, variegated nations like Malaysia, Indonesia and Morocco. Who has not had their own private or public laugh at the inability of President Bush to pronounce the names of these countries or their leaders?
Yet isn't there some uneasiness behind the laughter because there is a sub-conscious identification with Boy George on the part of people who would strenuously deny it. (After all, men like Nixon and Clinton knew how to spell the names of foreign states, but that didn't inhibit them from bombing the wrong cities at the wrong time. Bush hasn't done that, yet.)
The concentration upon Bush's educational limits is a distraction from the main event. Nobody is entitled to view this conflict as if they were a spectator. Every citizen has to ask what he or she can contribute to this argument.
The latest sneer-game in Washington circles has been to attack Bush for keeping so quiet over the summer months. (A vacation? In August? For a chief executive? Unheard of.) A variant of this game is the constant complaint that he hasn't "made his case" about Iraq. While it's true that the administration has been culpably lame in producing evidence and arguments, can't people do any thinking for themselves?
Do you not think there is something menacing about a leader who, assured privately that he would not face reprisal if he took a bit of Kuwait, was then so deranged that he decided to occupy the whole of it? A dictator who could de-emphasise his resemblance to Josef Stalin but instead opts to make the most of it?
Bush feels this deep in his guts, and doesn't feel that he has to come up with much in the way of rationalisation. Wake me up and ask me about this, and I have to say that I don't like it. It reminds me too much of the folksy, jaunty and panicky LBJ on his own Texan ranch.
This time around, the analysis of the enemy is basically sound. The tactics of the foe are fascistic, as is its demented rhetoric and the aim for an outcome of Stone Age barbarism.
BUSH "gets" this, in a way that many liberal intellectuals have failed to.
He is still in credit, morally and politically, even after a year which began "well" for him and is now ending rather disappointingly.
Precisely for that reason, Bush ought to welcome the chance to bond with other civilised societies, from Iran to Ireland, in a campaign against a common threat, but where he has failed, is on his strongest potential point. The United States is respected, even by its enemies, for having a written Bill of Rights and for arguing about this in public. But if some people have taken refuge in the ostrich-like posture of scoring points in this contest as if it were one between the USA and the Rest, the White House also has a share in creating this stupid impression. For one thing, it often speaks of "America's war".
I don't personally care about this too much, because I like to think I have a mind of my own. One year ago, the authorities in most Western states were indifferent to the Taliban, fatally complacent about al-Qaeda and seemingly unaware that extremists were about to take over Pakistan. We have all awoken, in differing degrees, to the implications of the civil war within the Islamic world and the consequences for all if that war is won by the fanatical side.
The awakening was rude and sudden. It's hardly surprising that people should reach for their oldest rhetoric - about "crusades" on the one hand and ill-defined "terror" or "evil" on the other. The key division was, still is, between those who realise we have a fight on our hands and those who pretend otherwise.
But there is a danger in lazy thinking. The aggressors in the Islamic civil war have calculated that they can or will win it if they can export it with sufficient ruthlessness to the non-Muslim world.
The whole art of combat will now consist of being on the "right" side of the civil war, in both senses of that term. We are already on one side in one way, because we have no choice.
But we will have to work and think very hard to be certain of being on the right side all the time, and this represents the possible beginning of a argument rather than the repetition of an old one: do secret detentions help keep down crime? Does the defiance of a new international court deter criminality?
OBVIOUSLY they contradict the serious purpose of the war, and make a nonsense of the official rhetoric.
Here is where the essential smallness of George Bush betrays him. He remembered to say, in the ghastly early days of the rubble and the stench, that America's enemies always made the mistake of confusing freedom with weakness.
A noble thought, but his envoys abroad, and his cops at home, make that blunder all the time.
That is why I stress Bush's transience, and urge his allies and his critics to bear it in mind. The initial bold promises he made about the conflict must survive him.
Unlike the cults who now wish us harm, we are not conditioned to worship leaders or to blindly follow demagogues.
Any criticism of the commanders in chief must be a criticism we are willing to share among ourselves, because this right and this duty is, among many other such rights and duties, what we are fighting about in an argument which we did not start but must be willing to finish.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
I beg to differ. I thought he looked shocked, and then DETERMINED! I was proud of his restraint -- not wanting to upset the children, or the teacher.
When you sober up, you will vovonder on the stalk.
Hitchens is an elitist, and this is as close as he will ever come to complimenting a US president. Aside from the cheap shots most of this article is pretty good.
Because the liberal media via the TV networks and large publications (newspapers and magazines) constantly drum the message, "All liberal Democrats are brilliant and all conservative Republicans are stupid." Read Ann Coulter's book "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." She explains that point beautifully and documents it extensively.
Bush has expressed his belief in the power of prayer to our Almighty Father.
Clinton seemed to think he, himself, was some Greek god.
I prefer Bush's sense of reality to Clinton's egocentric world-view.
Nor does Bush require a consensus for his gut feelings.
Having a President that demonstrates the fact that he is, indeed, a morally centered man is something that the Democrats, our enemies and our erstwhile "European Friends" cannot seem to come to grips with. They think that Bush is too stupid to agree with them, when in reality he is too moral to submit to the easy path. And that which cannot be understood or subverted must be diminished and destroyed
One of my first posts to a discussion group was in Nov., 1992 on the old Compuserv politics thread. I predicted a rough road for Clinton because of his sociopathic lack of any moral center.
I think that America is wiser today.
I think a week or two before any action in Iraq, Bush will come up with the speech, and more importantly - the evidence, to make his case to the world community.
And if he doesn't, we'll go anyway.
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