Whose War Is this

In his resolve to hunt down and kill the Osama bin Laden terrorists he says committed the Sept. 11 massacres, President Bush has behind him a nation more unified than it has been since Pearl Harbor. But now Bush has been put on notice that this war cannot end with the head of bin Laden and the overthrow of the Taliban.

The shot across Bush's bow came in an "Open Letter" co-signed by 41 foreign-policy scholars, including William Bennett, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the publisher of The Weekly Standard and the editor in chief of The New Republic — essentially, the entire neoconservative establishment.

What must Bush do to retain their support? Target Hezbollah for destruction and retaliate against Syria and Iran if they refuse to cut all ties to Hezbollah and move militarily to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Failure to attack Iraq, the neocons warn Bush, "will consti tute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

"Our purpose in writing is to assure you of our support as you do what must be done to lead the nation to victory in this fight," the letter ends.

Implied is a threat to end support if Bush does not widen the war to include all of Israel's enemies, or if he pursues the U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Among the signers is Richard Perle, chairman of Bush's own Defense Policy Board, a key advisory group.

This letter represents one side of a brutal policy battle that has erupted in the capital: Is it to be Powell's war or Perle's war?

The final decision Bush makes will be as historically crucial as Truman's decision to let MacArthur advance to the Yalu, and FDR's decision to hold up Eisenhower's armies and let Stalin take Berlin.

In his address to Congress a week ago, Bush declared: "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." The president seemed to be offering amnesty, or conditional absolution, to rogue states if they enlist in America's war, now, and expel all terrorist cells.

Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is signaling that what matters is not where nations stood, but where they stand. On Sunday, he said on CBS: "What we are looking at today is how are these states going to behave going forward."

And Powell's coalition is coming together. Whether out of fear or opportunism, Libya, Syria, Iran and the Palestinian Authority have all denounced the atrocities of Sept. 11. Pakistan has joined the coalition. Sudan is cooperating.

But calls for a wider war dominate the neoconservative media. The Weekly Standard's opinion editor, David Tell, wants war not only on past sponsors of terror, but also on "any group or government inclined to support or sustain others like them in the future."

Bennett wants Congress to declare war on "militant Islam" and "overwhelming force" used on state sponsors of terror such as Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran and even China. The Wall Street Journal wants strikes "aimed at terrorist camps in Syria, Sudan, Libya and Algeria, and perhaps even in parts of Egypt."

Terrorism expert Steve Emerson puts Lebanon's Bekaa Valley at the top of his list. Benjamin Netanyahu includes in the "Empire of Terror" to be obliterated: Hamas, Hezbollah, "the Palestinian enclave," as well as Iran, Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan. Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century want Iraq invaded now: "Nor need the attack await the deployment of half a million troops. ... The larger challenge will be occupying Iraq after the fighting is over."

As of now, Bush is laser-focused on bin Laden and the Taliban. But when that war is over, the great policy battle will be decided: Do we then dynamite Powell's U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition by using U.S. power to invade Iraq? Do we then reverse alliances and make Israel's war America's war?

If the United States invades Iraq, bombs Hezbollah and conducts strikes on Syria and Iran, this war will metastasize into a two-continent war from Algeria to Afghanistan, with the United States and Israel alone against a half-dozen Arab and Muslim states. The first casualties would be the moderate Arabs — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states — who were our Cold War and Gulf War allies.

The war Netanyahu and the neo cons want, with the United States and Israel fighting all of the radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

If America wishes truly to be isolated, it will follow the neoconservative line. Conservatives should stand squarely with President Bush — and Gen. Powell.

You make some good points.
"Point is, the editors of opinion mags are irrelevant to GW, and Buchanan's reference to them as if they were a force reflects only his own limited pundit worldview. "

However, I do believe that list was well salted with other than pundits, including some in his administration. I think Buchanan had them in mind also. This is a battle for the mind and heart of G.W.

You might think that these folks have no influence but his Dad was taken in my the likes of Rudman and Sununu on Court appointment Souter. Bush needs more people, in additon to Buchanan, to speak out for his position. Otherwise these 'pundits' press megaphones will stampede his Texas plain talk.

"We're going to be in the Gulf for a good long while, my friend. You may as well get used to it."

Gee Sinky, now you're sounding like that shitkicking liberal warmongering bastard LBJ. I ask you again, how did you get out of the draft? How did you avoid military service? You are what British philosopher Michael Oakeshott called "the failed individual"--you swallow "national greatness" propaganda to compensate for your own empty, uncentered existence. Do you have sons, Sinky? Probably not. Recent history's biggest saber-rattlers (LBJ and Tricky Dick) didn't.

You're just another aging angry old neo-con, one who loves to rattle sabers, but runs away from having to carry one.

"We're going to be in the Gulf for a good long while, my friend. You may as well get used to it."

Gee Sinky, now you're sounding like that shitkicking liberal warmongering bastard LBJ. I ask you again, how did you dodge the draft? How did you avoid military service? You are what British philosopher Michael Oakeshott called "the failed individual"--you swallow "national greatness" propaganda to compensate for your own empty, uncentered, unreflective existence--a low-rent Albert Speer, technocratic friend of totalitarians. Do you have sons, Sinky? Probably not. Recent history's biggest saber-rattlers (LBJ and Tricky Dick) didn't.

You're just another aging angry old neo-con, one who, like Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz and the rest of that globalist crowd, loves to rattle a sabers in peace but doesn't have the balls to carry one in war.

However, his stuff about Hitler came awful close to an apologia for Nazism.

This simply isn't true. I've seen the quotes that alledgedly support this, but I've also read the essays that these quotes are selectively culled from. When someone selects a line from an essay about what Germans of the 30s saw in Hitler, and attributes those same views to the author, in this case Buchanan, it is simply an exercise in lying. And that is an example of what has been done. What it does is reveal the low ethics of those who take quotes out of context in their zeal to label someone a Nazi. Such tactics used to be the province of the Left. And it's quite obvious that a number of Neocons haven't abandoned their roots.

This controversy first began when Buchanan defended President Reagan for his having laid a wreath at Bitburg Cemetery, to honor the German war dead. If you recall, a number of the same people who have called Pat a nazi also had the same words for Ronald Reagan over that incident. If you don't recall, then I suggest you go dig up some copies of Commentary magazine of that time. Do you also think Ronald Reagan is a "nazi"?

Another incident that aroused the Pat-is-a-nazi crowd was his defense of a group of nuns that was being evicted from their convent at the site of one of the former Death Camps, where they prayed for the millions of Catholics who also were murdered by the Nazis. Should good Catholic Pat have ignored the plight of these nuns? I didn't care, but then I'm not Catholic.

Another of his "nazi" activities was his having the gall to argue that old John Demjanjuk was falsely accused of having been Ivan the Terrible, a prison guard at one of the Nazi death camps. Buchanan argued that the evidence, largely from the Soviets, wasn't true. In the end Demjanjuk was acquitted, by the Israeli Supreme Court. I guess they're nazis, too.

I used to know all of these Crimes of Herr Buchanan. Mostly because I read a dozen magazines at the time when this all began, and I was very surprised to realize that some people had an agenda here, and that agenda wasn't seeking the truth. I was certainly naive to believe that there is a dedication to truth, to honor, and to goodwill among the people I considered on my side politically. Machiavelli lives.

War is a means, not an end.

Very true. That is one of the messages of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. We have to know what our goal is and patiently go about doing it... until everyone associated with this attack is dead. No need to make a big noise that will create a bigger problem than we already have. Just lots and lots of small paybacks. The bad guys will get the message, and live in fear the rest of their days until their turn comes.

But if this does turn out to have been state-sponsored, then we likely won't be able to avoid getting ourselves a lot of publicity.

Munich is misleading, and poor old Neville Chamberlain gets a bad rap. At the time Chamberlain feared Bolshevism more than he did Hitler, and he thought that Communism was what England would have to fight. It was also the Great Depression and he needed to buy time in order to rearm England. We all condemn Chamberlain because we know what happened next, but he really wasn't some sort of antiwar pacifist.

Our allies in the Arab world are those who suffer from terrorists, some daily. Our enemy are terrorists and their supporters. It is a fact of life that both categories span multiple countries. Did Sun Tzu say anything about facts of life?

Your comments on the Arab world are the same as my own. But your comment on Sun Tzu is a non-sequiter, having no relation to those observations. Apparently logic isn't your strongest suit. Let me recommend Copi's Logic to you, perhaps you can correct this deficiency.

Sun Tzu's book on war is taught at West Point. The American military thinks he has plenty to say about the facts of life, especially on how to win wars. Maybe you know better than Sun Tzu. If so, you owe it to us to put your knowledge down on paper.

I advise you to read more widely. The Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare has documented the link. No, their Islamic beliefs are not the same; however, there HAS been a terrorist alliance formed among all these groups to share expertise and training. Iranian intelligence helps check out all the security details. In the report on the first World Trade Bombing and subsequent arrests surrounding it, the FBI stormed a house where terrorists (persons from Sheikh Rahman mosque) were in the process of mixing a chemical bomb set for using at the UN. Who was there helping them with the chemicals but a known South American terrorist. They also have documents proving that Iranian and Sudanese intelligence agents entering the country with diplomatic visas checked out the details around the first bombing of the WTC. For the documentation of these detail get Yossef Bodansky's books. (He is the director of the task force in Congress.)

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