Mark Steyn: We’re Winning This War

The Spectator ^ | September 13, 2003 | Mark Steyn

[quidnunc]

The remarkable achievements of the Bush administration, and his enemies’ remarkable refusal to give him credit

The emergency dispatcher wasn’t quite sure she’d heard correctly. ‘Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?’ ‘People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky… .’

On a day like 11 September 2001, time is both accelerated and suspended. On the top floors of the World Trade Center, office workers who moments earlier had been scheduling lunch appointments and making plans for the weekend had a few seconds to determine the manner of their death — to stay and be burned alive, or to take one last gulp of fresh air as they plunged to the plaza below. For almost everybody else, time is halted: when you’re caught up in the middle of a terrible day, you don’t know that that’s what it is — a day. By 11 o’clock on that Tuesday morning, with the second tower collapsed and the Pentagon on fire and rumours of more missing planes and the White House evacuated, none of us knew how much more was to come. I don’t think you could find many Americans who went to bed that night expecting to get through the next two years without another major terrorist attack on US soil. Yet here we are.

That in itself is remarkable. Even more remarkable is the lack of credit that the Bush administration gets for it.

There are basically two lines on Bush these days. At home, the media and the Democrats argue that Americans are somehow reeling under a terrorist onslaught. As the New York Times’s elderly schoolgirl Maureen Dowd put it last week, ‘We wanted to get rid of Osama and Saddam and the Taleban and al-Qa’eda. We didn’t. They’re replicating and coming at us like cockroaches.’ Really? Osama is replicating? That’s news to me. Considering that the original hasn’t been seen in a year and three quarters, it looks more like he’s plicated. I said in these pages 15 months ago that he’s dead, he’s bin Laden to rest, he’s pushing up daisy-cutters, and I’m sticking with that.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the tinfoil-hat brigade has gone mainstream. Of course America hasn’t been attacked again. That’s because 9/11 was a neocon conspiracy to give Washington a pretext to grab Iraq’s oil and Afghanistan’s, er, rubble. The conspirazoids now include the Rt Hon Michael Meacher, MP, a man who until a few weeks ago was one of Her Majesty’s ministers of state, a fellow who sat at the Cabinet table with Tony Blair and discussed troop deployments. But now, with time on his hands, he’s frolicking merrily on the wilder shores of the Internet. In the Guardian on Saturday, he demanded to know whether US air-security operations had ‘been deliberately stood down on 11 September’ in order to facilitate the attack. Who would do such a thing? Why, Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and the other sinister graduates of the Project for a New American Century.

Meacher is late to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I’ve had a gazillion emails a day about this for almost two years. Condi Rice apparently warned all kinds of people not to fly on 11 September. If that’s true, it seems odd that Don Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the conspiracy, didn’t warn himself not to go to the Pentagon that morning. You’d think, being in on the plot, he’d warn himself not to be sitting at his desk as the plane sliced through the building. If Michael Meacher had had advance warning that a plane was going to slam into the Department of the Environment that day, would he have had the cojones to be sitting there dictating a memo to Miss Jones as the nose cone ploughed into the photocopier? Or maybe that’s just how well planned the conspiracy was: Rumsfeld knew the plane would hit the other side of the Pentagon well away from his office, so, if he coolly went to work as usual, he’d throw even expert conspiracy-sniffers like Meacher off the scent. Or maybe there was no Pentagon plane at all; it was a pure invention of the administration, as that French bestseller argued. Or maybe the Pentagon itself is just a thought-form generated by the microchip implanted in Meacher’s brain when he sat next to Dick Cheney at a G7 buffet lunch. Or maybe… .

Looking back at the columns I wrote in the first days after 9/11, I’m pleasantly surprised by how perceptive they were on the self-loathing of the West, the uselessness of the Cold War alliances, the duplicitousness of America’s ‘moderate’ Arab ‘friends’, etc. But I seriously underestimated the degree to which much of Europe would be unhinged by 11 September. If it’s a choice between Meacher or the Continentals who’ve turned down US requests for troop contributions because they want Iraq to go belly up so that Bush gets defeated in 2004 and some wimp Democrat gets elected who’ll treat them with the respect they deserve, I’ll take the latter. Chirac’s decayed cynicism is marginally less unmoored from reality.

But, as the descent into madness of Mr Meacher illustrates, there’s no longer any agreement on what reality is. Last Sunday, the Observer ran a story headlined ‘Bush Seeks An Exit Strategy As War Threatens His Career’: ‘The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans’ growing hostility to the casualties and chaos …approval ratings plummeting …another Vietnam …sons and daughters dying daily …bogged down… .’

Did Bush seek an exit strategy? Did he make a dramatic U-turn? Au contraire. ‘We have carried the fight to the enemy,’ he said. ‘The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.’

Are America’s sons and daughters dying daily in guerrilla attacks? No. As I write, no American serviceman has died in Iraq for nine days. Whatever that is, it’s not Vietnam.

Are Bush’s approval ratings plummeting? Gallup has him at 59 per cent. In any case, he always takes August off and his numbers always slip as noisy Democrats run around filling the vacuum. Then September arrives, he comes back to work and they rise again. It’s now an established seasonal variation.

[Gritty]

They’re all turban and no jihad.

My gosh, is this fellow priceless, or what!!??

[Texas_Dawg]

Tex, I'll be honest with ya. I don't have a clue what that means.

No problem.

Quality Street is an English chocolate company and George Galloway is a former radical left-wing British Minister of Parliament whose name surfaced as an ally to the Iraqis in several Iraqi government documents found after the fall of Baghdad.

[TheDon]

Click on the link below to read the article mentioned by Mark. Is Europe really that out of touch?

Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career

[colorado tanker]

I thought it might be Brit humor. Now, that's funny! Saddam must be missing all his old buddies. Jacques doesn't call, doesn't write . . .

[MeekOneGOP]

Steyn bttt for later, thanks ...

[prairiebreeze]

Is Europe really that out of touch?

Well, I think they are. But I was admonished by another Freeper on a different thread to not believe that millions and billions around the globe think a certain way just because their media portrays a certain side of a story.

Of course, we all know how the masses carefully read and research news articles to gauge the merits of each and how the masses think critically for themselves. (/sarc)

Prairie

[mikegi]

The "all turban, no jihad" line is great. Another classic, "he’s pushing up daisy-cutters".

[xp38]

:) cue the dead parrot sketch...he's pining for the red sea

[MeekOneGOP]

Miss Hawley has mistakenly assumed that Saddam thinks as she and Harold Pinter and Jacques Chirac do: that it’s all about America. When something blows up in Iraq and it can be passed off as a ‘setback’ for Bush, Miss Hawley has a good gloat. But it’s not much consolation to Saddam: he’s thinking of his gold toilet, and no matter how furiously Miss Hawley spins things he’s not going to be sitting on that ever again. They’ve sounded the last flush at the Presidential Palace. Likewise, for Mullah Omar.

Saddam sons killed in loo [bathroom]

$30 Million worth of trash

Uday Hussein, left, and Qusay Hussein

They're dead, Jim.

[MeekOneGOP]

[MeekOneGOP]

[M Kehoe]

The thread (with the analysis, humor, taglines, etc.) is almost as good as Steyn's editorial.

5.56mm

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[jokar]

Well newbie

And I need you to explain to me how the internet and life works because . . . .

[Utah Girl]

All turban and no jihad ping for you.

[jokar]

My mistake. I didn't realize you were such an a$$hole.

Well it takes one to know one. Would you be kind enough to introduce me around.

[JohnHuang2]

Welcome :-)

[Pokey78]

A very, VERY late Steyn ping