Posted on 09/17/2001 3:24:00 PM PDT by A.J.Armitage
The American Constitutionalist
By: Aaron Armitage
Their Feet Run to Evil, and Make Haste to Shed Blood
I once read somewhere that Gallup did a poll in 1944 showing that 96% of the public knew we were at war, which means that 4% of the public wasn't even aware of WWII. Except for the modern day equivalents of those people, and perhaps a few tribesmen in the Amazon, everyone in the world knows that on September 11 America suffered the worst attack in its history. It's been compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but it's worse and certainly far more evil than that. The number of the dead is higher, and the attack was directed against civilian targets with the idea of killing as many innocent people as possible.
We have done nothing to deserve this, but those who say we could have avoided it by staying out of the affairs of other counties are right. No one attacks the Swiss. It's too late for that, though, like telling Parliament they'd be better off not taxing America on July 5, 1776 or giving Roosevelt advice about protecting our military bases from sneak attacks on December 8, 1941. Now is the time to fight.
It would be impossible for us not to retaliate. It would be like a play in which Hamlet doesn't eventually get around to killing the king. We should be warned, however, that while we will do what we must it will be much harder than we think. This is going to hurt. Whatever our reaction is, we will face more attacks. More likely than not, we're going to wind up occupying portions of the Middle East, with the guerilla warfare that implies. There's even a good chance this will lead in unpredictable ways to upheavals we can't see yet. We're already in it, and we need to prepare for what lies ahead.
What we must not do, though, is forget that we are Americans. We're not the Taliban, and being attacked by them is no reason to start acting like them. There is no need to sacrifice liberty. To lose liberty is to lose, and there would be nothing more disrespectful to the dead. Ending curbside check in and other such ideas share two important features with most security measures adopted after catastrophe. It makes ordinary people jump through hoops, and it would have nothing to stop the crime that inspired it. National ID cards are unfit for a free people, even a free people at war.
Worse than these predictable moves to limit freedom are incidents of violence against Muslims, or even "ragheads" who aren't Muslim. A blunderer in California by the name of John Phillip Lucas decided to imitate earlier Californians' mistakes during WWII and drove a tractor in front of the door at a temple before diving into a sacred pool, thus defiling it. There was one problem, other than his impeding incarceration: the temple was a Sikh temple. Sikhs wear turbans and have beards, but are not Muslim and in fact have a history of conflict with Muslims.
A Sikh was shot to death in Arizona.
Even if the victims really are Muslim, the people who commit these acts are described by the title just as much as the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. We should also refrain from attacking Muslims outside the United States just for being Muslims, both to keep ourselves from being stained with innocent blood and to prevent terrorists from getting what they want. The hijackers and plotters want us to retaliate. Otherwise, they would not have attacked us.
They hope we retaliate in a way that will unite the Muslim world against us, and so we must avoid that at all costs. We must and will retaliate, but we must do it in a way that retaliates only against the people directly supporting and harboring Osama bin Laden.
The attack brought out the best in many Americans, and the worst in a few. The great danger facing us now is that we will act rashly, and instead of bringing war to the Taliban, turning Islam into the enemy, and instead of taking a few necessary measures to increase security, becoming more of a police state. As hard as it is now, we need to exercise prudence, if only to deny the terrorists the final satisfaction of making us fools.
Is it possible that we don't need allies with whom to have mutual defense pacts, but merely friends with whom we cooperate when it serves mutual purpose to do so? How many of our "allies" do we really confidently expect will act on our behalf when it is not in their own current interest to do so?
Maybe alliances should be made at the moment when needed and only for the purpose and duration of the current need for cooperation.
There is no difference between 'collateral damage' and 'innocent civilians'. WW II, with Dresden and Hiroshima, made plain that any hurt you can put on an enemy will divert their resources. In total war, just because someone wears a uniform will not make him more of a target than Rosie the Riveter. Today, there are no longer 'innocent civilians'. We are all in this together.
Who's this 'we'? If you mean the government, you're wrong. Government always ruins everything it touches. And that includes saving the world. If you mean 'you and I', then I accept your point. And the first thing 'you and I' can do is to fight to get the government out the saving-the-world business, just like George Washington said.
We have never fought anything like this before and I know for sure I don't know have the answers. I see radical Muslim fundamentalists that have been allowed to have free reign in committing terrorism against us for years with no retaliation and nothing to fear, just alot of blah, blah, blah from our government. I guess because it was our military dying that it was ok, people got upset then forgot about it, I guess I did too.
We have stood by and watched entire nations sink under the brutal yoke of Muslim fanatics and looked the other way, well, we can't anymore. We didn't go steal their oil, we bought it, we didn't take over their countries, we didn't demand they wear crosses, we treated them with respect as equals, but they were not equals, no where near it.
They didn't have a good enough reason to hate us, or to deal so treacherously with us other than for the benefit of power hungry fanatic Muslim clerics seeking rulership, and they better pay for that at a high cost.
So I guess it's really up to moderate Muslims how they react to the destruction of fanatisim by terrorists where ever we find them. Right now they are the last thing on my mind as I see the pain of these destroyed families and their loss. Like I said, blood is thicker than water, and they are famous for switching horses in midstream, so how moderate Muslims react outside our nation is out of our hands.
The moderate Muslims in our nation, better be flag waving son-of-a-guns, or I won't give a tinkers **** about what happens to them.
LOL! Think you got something here.
Thanks for the heads-up. I cited two candidates for the most significant lines, IMHO, in your essay. Either this is the best essay -- and so economical! -- I've read so far on the war, or we're a couple of think-alike dimwits. I prefer the brilliance option.
Isolationists (disguised as libertarians) and neo-cons are trying to force us to choose between globocop and Rumpelstiltskin. It's a false choice.
The isos have removed all doubt as to their motive, which is about pure, rank, anti-Semitism. The funny thing is, although I'm a Jew, I have a harder time figuring the neos. (Maybe that's because I read more isos, and personally know more, though I guess that's about to change.) Global interventionism merely as a front for supporting Israel? I dunno, but I do know that Israel is our ally, while the Arab countries are our enemies, so why would Christian isos be in such a hurry to suck up to the Arabs? Where's their self-respect? As if obsequiousness would endear us to those who wish to destroy and replace us as superpower. The isos have also conveniently forgotten, that we give several Arab (enemy) nations and non-nations (the PLO) billions each year.
Just excellent.
Just as in the long run Pearl Harbor was a blessing for world peace at the expense of American lives, so too might 9/11/01 be seen, fifty years from today, as a "blessing" in that it finally mobilized the "sleeping giant" the destruction of the enemies of freedom.
I know that sounds a bit cold, with bodies still being recovered, but when the mourning is over, and the realization begins, I really think this is how it is going to be seen by those who have eyes to see.
First thing we need rid of is the insane Excutive Order Ford gave us prohibiting going after foreign leaders. Can anyone imagine WW2 being fought without the objective of taking out Hitler at all cost?
We never need Israel to defend us, say, form Canada, so the relationship is not symmetrical. It is not in our interest to have a new Mongol Horde roll over Israel and Europe, so it becomes in our interest to have alliances with these nations that are of significant duration. Unless there is durability to the alliance, the small countries that we don't want to succumb one by one will seek separate deals with the Horde and won't provide a united front, which we do need.
"We" is of course individuals. We should get the government out of the saving the world business the way Magdalene Albright sees it, yes. What I am talking about is a conflict with a hostile civilization, in which we have a distinct danger of perishing ourselves. In that, alliances matter. If we signaled to them that we won't stand up to them in the Middle East, they would correctly assume that we won't stand up in Europe, and then we become a kind of fortress America that everyone wants to come and loot.
Those facts, and the mountains, are why invading armies don't attack the Swiss. Invading armies don't attack us because our military is too much for them to beat. It wasn't a conventional army that attacked the WTC and the Pentagon, it was terrorists who could have attacked Switzerland just as easily, but didn't.
If other countries are directly behind it, we should go after them, but we shouldn't attack a country just because terrorists use it as a staging area. After all, they use the United States as a staging area. Uriel has a very good idea, which is apparently on its way to being proposed as legislation: bring back letters of marque and reprisal, which would mean groups authorised by the letters killing members of the terrorist network(or turning them in, if inside the United States) for bounties. The thread's here.
As Bush has given us the impression that he doesn't want a "show" war involving a two million dollar missle against a 10 dollar tent
And that's a good thing.
I agree. Recruitment is also a MAJOR concern for terrorists. Finding suicide bombers isn't all that easy. Rash moves however can only aid bin Laden types in their efforts to bring in other wise moderate haters of the US.
It also helps him show the moderate leaders in the middle east to be unable and unwilling to fight the west. Bin Laden becomes the sole resource for the radical looking for expression.
As always, I am grateful for your essays.
Exactly. Our over-reaction is what they hope for more than anything.
I disagree. Terrorists don't always (or even usually) seem to have an end-game, unless you count creating chaos as an end-game. They are simply trying to disrupt, demoralize, fracture, and spread terror (thus the name). I don't think the group who did this has a great strategy planned out beyond this. They have already succeeded beyond their wildest dreams by bringing down the WTC and hitting the Pentagon.
Uh...because that's not an alliance?
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