Posted on 12/13/2001 5:42:37 AM PST by Cian
The last thing I wrote before 11 September was a column for the preceding weekend’s Sunday Telegraph. It was about shark attacks, which had exercised the eastern seaboard’s fevered imagination all summer, ever since eight-year-old Jessie Arbogast had his arm torn off just off the Florida coast. The boy’s uncle wrestled the shark back to the beach, killed him, and retrieved Jessie’s severed limb from his mouth.
In an eerie pre-echo of the world to come, progressive opinion came down on the side of the shark. The New York Times said that we should bear in mind all the sharks we humans kill, and fretted that the uncle’s retaliation might have been disproportionate. The experts agreed that we needed to look at the ‘root causes’, to understand ‘why they hate us’; just blundering into their territory in ever larger numbers was only going to provoke them into even bolder assaults on our shores. Above all, we should resist any hysterical over-reaction to the many non-violent members of the shark community. Substitute ‘Muslims’ for ‘sharks’ and you’d have a dandy post-11 September editorial thumbsucker. Go on, try it. Here’s the NYT back in July:
Knowing something about the biology, behaviour and world status of sharks [Muslims] does not mitigate the terror.... Even knowledge cannot alter some emotions. But many people now understand that an incident like the Arbogast attack [World Trade Center attack] is not the result of malevolence or a taste for human blood on the shark’s part [Islam’s part].... Inevitably, an incident like this one reinforces a nearly pleasurable cultural hysteria about sharks [Islam] when ...what it should really do is remind us yet again how much we have to learn about them and their waters [them and their extraordinarily rich culture]...’
It was that kind of summer. We weren’t playing croquet on sun-dappled country-house lawns in August 1914; we were splashing in the shallows, fleeing screaming for the shore at the first sight of a black snorkel. But we were enjoying the same complacent holiday from history. The week before 11 September, the US, Canada, Britain and Europe gathered in Durban under the auspices of the UN to apologise for Western civilisation to the massed ranks of gangsters and dictators. There was complete unanimity among all parties — from Robert Mugabe to the EU — that the West had a lot to apologise for. The only arguments were over how abject the apology should be and whether there should be a large cheque attached. Watching CNN in his cave, Osama bin Laden could reasonably have concluded that he was up against a culture that had lost faith in itself.
The world changed on 11 September. Nearly everyone said that, and nearly everyone meant it, even the French: ‘Nous sommes tous Americains!’ declared Le Monde, and for a while they were. ‘This is no time to be an 80 per cent ally,’ said Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, and he wasn’t. But the moment of unity was just that, and, in the months since, our paths have been remorselessly diverging. Britain seems to me right now to be about a 60 per cent ally and falling a little more each week. The initial assessment was right, but there’s a palpable urge in much of the rest of the West to pretend that nothing’s changed, to be back to the way we were.
The most obvious change on the day is that the Bush presidency finally got under way. The guy had been in office since January, but he was still a hazy presence to most Americans. The columnists, the gag-writers, the zeitgeist set wrote him off as a dullard: no star power. They wished Clinton was still there, and Clinton did his best to pretend that he was, embarking, like his chum Barbra Streisand, on an unending round of farewell appearances and filling the front pages with a flurry of last-minute scandals.
In this space back in March, I made what was, if I do say so myself (and, let’s face it, nobody else is going to), a brilliant observation. Defending their man in the storm over his last-minute pardons of various international fugitives, coke-dealers, relatives and folks who wrote large cheques to Hillary’s brother, the Clinton apologists conceded that, OK, the whole pardons business may have got out of hand but that’s because the President was so busy personally immersing himself in the nuances of very complicated cases that it just overwhelmed him. ‘In its way this was the Clinton apologia pared to its essence: the President, say his defenders, is a “complex” man, and he tends to make everything else complex,’ I wrote. ‘Bush’s problem, of course, is that he’s not “complex”. Indeed, he is, as the press has assured us, a simpleton. And so his governance has an admirable simplicity to it.’ This wasn’t entirely successful in the world before 11 September, but, as Michael Barone wrote recently in US News & World Report, ‘The war has weakened the liberal notion that all issues are complex and require the ministration of credentialled experts, but it has strengthened the conservative idea that big issues require moral clarity and decisive action.’
This is Bush territory, and he has claimed it. With Clinton, everything got complicated, including the meaning of the word ‘is’ and whether oral sex counts as adultery. What he would have done after 11 September, we do not know. But, in his only significant speech on the subject, he told Georgetown University students that it all went back to Christian excesses in the First Crusade in 1095. That’s some ‘root cause’. Mr Clinton conceded that there were many different types of terrorism, but these were the only ones he bothered to mention specifically: Christians killing Muslims, southern plantation-owners killing slaves, white settlers killing Native Americans, General Sherman burning farms in the Civil War (‘a relatively mild form of terrorism’), and ‘even today’, he concluded, ‘we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.’
By comparison, being a renowned simpleton, Bush is not the kind of fellow who feels the need to show off how much he knows about what was happening in 1095. He’s a Big Picture guy. He grasped the enormity of what had happened, and spoke to it directly. It was a time for black-and-white, not the murky grey in which Bill Clinton swims. To be sure, the Bush strategy has its grey areas — General Musharraf; the love-in with Russia — but the object even then is to pull them out of the grey towards you, not to get sucked in yourself.
As a result, a mere two months later Afghanistan has an interim broad-based government that includes a token broad. Whether it includes any gays, I cannot say, and you’ll forgive me if I’m reluctant to ask the question of any Tajik warlord, no matter how Village People-like his moustache might be. But at least the weekly Crush-a-Fag-and-Win-a-Yak-Cart competitions have been suspended.
The Democrats and their media chums haven’t quite adjusted yet. Their line is that domestically there’s a new faith in ‘big government’ that naturally favours the Dems, and that, internationally, Bush has signed up to the entire Clinton/Gore agenda: multilateralism, a big role for the UN, etc. This is, in fact, precisely the opposite of what has happened. On the domestic issues, the cult of passivity — of putting your faith in Federal regulations — was killed off when the heroes of Flight 93 rose up and overpowered the hijackers. Much of the current run on gun shops has come from increased sales to women. Meanwhile, the ‘Million Mom March’ — the fluffiest, most media-friendly ‘gun control’ group — has been laying off staff and closing up offices. Gun control is a dead issue in American politics: politicians can’t tell the citizenry that they have to be on full alert and then turn around and announce new restrictions on the ability to defend yourself.
On the international front, all the stuff Bush was getting hassled over six months ago is deader than it’s ever been. Kyoto, anyone? The International Criminal Court? Include us out, permanently. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, Mr Bush’s new multilateralism barely extends to Downing Street. I said in February that I thought Tony Blair was out in Washington, and I still do. Introducing the Prime Minister in Congress, the President was characteristically generous about the special relationship. But he’s been very steely with the Brits since. The Bush/Blair visions of this war veer off in separate directions very quickly, as the White House understands. The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, has said that Britain would not extradite bin Laden to the US without assurances that he would not face the death penalty. Here’s the response I’d give Her Majesty’s Government if I were the US Attorney-General: fine, you keep him. Put Osama on trial, he’ll have the jurors killed. Put him in Brixton or Pentonville, and the citizens of whichever country’s holding him will be seized in Palestine, Saudi, Kuwait, Egypt or Belgium and held hostage until he’s released. So, if you and your EU pals want to preen that badly, you can explain it to the loved ones of your own kidnapped nationals.
Mr Hoon is still living in that last sun-dappled Edwardian summer. For Americans, 11 September brought to a close the post-Cold War era, the period that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. For a significant proportion of Arabs, 11 September was the culmination of a quite different timeline — an era that was inaugurated on 23 October 1983, when Hezbollah suicide bombers killed 300 American and French soldiers in Beirut and prompted their governments to pull out of Lebanon. From a Muslim point of view, the suicide bomber is as reliable as the Gatling gun was: sometimes he brings victory, as in Beirut; sometimes he attracts a barely minimal response, as in Clinton’s desultory retaliations to bin Laden’s ever bolder provocations during the Nineties; and sometimes he is rewarded by public admonitions to his victims, as when the EU et al. urge ‘restraint’ on the part of Israel after Hamas or Islamic Jihad have blown up a few more pregnant women in a shopping mall.
Before 11 September, we saw the events, but not the pattern. America has been galvanised in the last three months: the Islamofascists loathe the rest of the West almost as much as they hate the US, but the difference is that, for the most part, those countries are content to be, as the Canadian columnist David Warren put it, ‘mere spectators in our fates’. They’re still in Durban mode, more inclined to apologise than to act. Robert Fisk of the Independent nicely captured the likely fate of the apologists, not in anything he wrote (he’s been pretty much wrong on everything since September) but in the simple act of getting beaten up by the people he’s championed for so long. His column on the lessons to be drawn from his savage assault by disaffected Afghans was a gem of self-parody:
Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head.... And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing.... If I was an Afghan refugee in Kila Abdullah, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.
It’s not their fault; their ‘brutality is entirely the product of others’: i.e., us. Mr Fisk is the quintessential New Racist. He believes that, while he and Bush are sophisticated human beings who should be held accountable for their actions, the Noble Savage (and no one’s done more to ennoble him than Fisk) should be offered moral absolution for assaulting a civilian on no other basis than his ethnic identity. As Salman Rushdie has said, this denies ‘the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions’. Mr Fisk’s exquisite condescension to the people he claims a unique insight into is indestructible. The difference between him and Mr Bush is that Bush treats them as he’d treat Texans, who are at least members of the human race (however primitive and barbaric). Fisk regards them as exotic wildlife.
Which is where we came in, in the turbulent waters of last summer. Read that column again, substitute ‘Jessie Arbogast’ for Fisk and ‘the shark’ for the Afghans, and you’re back in the world before 11 September:
Then the sharks began chewing off Jessie’s arm.... And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing.... If I was a shark off the Florida coast, I would have done just what they did. I would have attacked Jessie Arbogast. Or any other human I could find.
September 11 was a call to moral seriousness. You cannot compromise with a shark, you cannot negotiate with a suicide bomber. And, if you can’t see that, you must have rocks in your head, and it wasn’t the Afghans who put ’em there.
Notforprophet
Very funny Stein. Just be careful when you next visit us "Barbarians"
Ping for the MSPL!
Worth repeating.
This may be Steyn's best column. Ever.
Thanks, Cian and Pokey.
Very funny Stein. Just be careful when you next visit us "Barbarians"
(This) refers to the human race, not Texans, inasmuch as there is
no comma after 'race.'
I keep thinking he'll burn out, but he keeps getting better & better!
Thanks for the steynping Pokey, and thanks for posting this Cian. Glad to see our friend Steyn's keyboard is still smokin'!!!
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