Posted on 11/06/2001 5:42:48 AM PST by LavaDog
Cry, "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.i.270
The tragedy of war is that the unthinkable soon becomes the accepted. Yet those who expect the macabre from their bloodthirsty enemies, and are not awed by it — but rather are grim and ready to answer every manifestation of evil with overwhelming force while still pledged to a moral cause — usually prevail. Such is the case now with America.
We were rather startled, after Pearl Harbor, that Hitler would suddenly declare war on the United States. Blinkered Americans woke up on December 8 to discover that all of Europe united under fascism was now every bit as determined as Japan to wipe us out. Few thought that cannonballs over Fort Sumter in but four years would lead to battles like Shiloh, Antietam, and Cold Harbor; ironclads and repeating rifles; Lincoln assassinated; and 600,000 dead. In the Gulf War, no pundit predicted that the purportedly battle-hardened army of Saddam Hussein would collapse within 100 hours — despite missiles raining down on Israel and the Kuwaiti oil fields afire. When the dogs of war slip loose, accurate prognosis is almost impossible; the surreal becomes the typical.
Before Marathon, the Greeks had purportedly been afraid even to look on the Persians — yet once they charged head-on at that battle and slaughtered them, Herodotus would say that a "destructive madness" had taken hold of them. Saddam Hussein learned that neither the threat of poison gas attacks on Tel Aviv nor ecoterrorism in the oilfields could stop American armored divisions from destroying his military. Not his terror but only American naiveté in the guise of Realpolitik saved his regime.
In this present war, we must brace for the unthinkable. The government in Pakistan could crumble. A few nuclear weapons could conceivably fall into the hands of renegade officers sympathetic to the Taliban, or be smuggled out and sold. Far worse germs may reach our inner chambers of government. A cornered Saddam may well send missiles again into Israel; the oil fields might again be set on fire. There could be splits in the Saudi royal family and terrorists' attempts to take over that government. Tens of thousands of fundamentalists may flee Pakistan to join the Taliban (promises, promises…). There may be stored caches of Stinger missiles waiting for our low-level helicopter attacks. Americans may be targeted in every country in the Middle East and beyond. Indeed, we may see appalling things in this Götterdämmerung that few can imagine — but then the vaporization of 6,000 of our dear citizens, and the toppling of our landmarks, were themselves rather unimaginable. Two kilotons of destructive power dropped into downtown New York City at a time of peace is not to be forgotten.
I would not wish to fight the United States — either militarily, politically, or culturally. For every threat, our history teaches us that Americans offer not just a rejoinder, but the specter of a devastating answer of a magnitude almost inconceivable to those now chanting and threatening in the streets of the Middle East. Do they have any idea of what sort of dangerous people we really are? Do they understand the history of the names of those ships now off their coasts, like the USS Peleliu or Enterprise, or the pedigree of the 82nd or 101st Airborne?
The Saudis' princes tease us with polite lectures about our errant policies, more obliquely suggesting that our bombing may lose "friends" among the moderate states. Yet America, unlike Saudi Arabia, has not merely the veneer of modern civilization, but is its wellspring. In a real war, despite severe dislocation we can survive, as in the past, without Saudi oil. The royal family and the faux-culture of the Gulf cannot. Fifteen of their citizens helped to murder 6,000 unsuspecting Americans in a time of peace — a single wing of American fighters could end their entire regime in a few days of war. Such are the frightening and horrendous realities that lurk beneath the unspoken surface when the dogs of war are unleashed. Battle indeed is the ultimate nightmare because accustomed rhetoric recedes before the truth of abject military power; and so the more the United States is shrilly hectored, in still more stark contrast loom the silhouettes of aircraft carrier groups and B-52s.
We are warned by the media that Americans might be blown up and shot abroad, but a simple and quite legal change in our own immigration policy can — if need be — expel all those visitors on visas from all suspect countries of the Middle East, and so, besides offering us increased protection, in a real war deny to thousands the access to American education and Western technology which so many crave (and yet apparently hate) all at once. So one of the great tragedies of the present war is not merely that Americans will be targets in the Arab world (most will discover that they can live without seeing the Pyramids or flying a fighter jet out of a Saudi Arabian hangar), but that an entire generation of Middle Easterners will be under a veil of suspicion in Western countries. Life for an Egyptian scientist on leave in Berlin, or a Saudi tourist with a camera in Los Angeles, or a Lebanese visiting businessman with binoculars on the bay in Boston, for years hence — terribile dictu — will not quite be the same.
All this sadness and unfairness was unleashed not by us, but by Mr. bin Laden, who is canonized by millions in the Muslim world. Yes, he is lionized by millions, but the next few years will prove that no one in the last century has done so much to harm so many of the Arab world.
When the dogs are unleashed, there may be more catastrophes to come — none of them our own. We are told that the entire Muslim world may turn on us — a ghastly thought no doubt, but hardly as scary as a united Europe aroused or a suddenly angered China, which have real military capabilities. The fact is that the most potent countries in the world — Japan, Russia, and India — are not mere neutrals, but daily becoming incensed at Islamic fundamentalists and enacting policies whose natural evolution can only end in the isolation of the radical Muslim world.
A once snapping and American-snarling Europe is hunting out terrorists as never before and beginning to talk again of "the West." The really bizarre specter after September 11 is not that the moderate Muslim world threatens to fall to the side of the fundamentalists, but that the leisured and sophisticated of Europe are now suddenly talking as if they were seamen at Lepanto. The truth is that bin Laden, the Taliban, and the shrieking fundamentalists in the Arab capitals may have united hundreds of thousands against America, but in the process their dogs of war have turned billions of the world against them — a global community which they sorely need but which, if the truth must be brutally confessed, in scientific or economic terms, sadly does not need them at all.
After the unprovoked murder of thousands of Americans, the governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran should not lecture us about either our policies or morality, but rather should fear that they themselves are on the edge of a frightening precipice. For the first time in a half-century, America has the unity and resolve to act as a nation rather than being paralyzed as a loose affiliation of squabbling tribes, interests, and cultures. And America has discovered in its renaissance that it has the military power to end hostile militaries, the moral anger to confront corrupt governments, the cultural dynamism to ostracize bellicose societies — and, after the horrors of September and October, is nearing the recklessness not to care.
Moderates in the Middle East must draw us back from the brink to protect themselves, not us. They must distance themselves far more forcefully from those who sanction the murders of thousands of Americans. They should not fund or sponsor radicals on our own shores.
Millions of Americans on Halloween night viewed on C-SPAN perhaps the most ghoulish expression of unadulterated hatred ever telecast in American history. Live from the National Press Club, the New Black Panther Party and their Islamic allies in America — Imam Abdul Alim Musa, Imam Mohammed Asi, Imam Abdel Razzag al Raggad, and others of the various mosques in the Washington, D.C. area — cheered on the Taliban, venting racist, anti-Semitic (and subversive) propaganda in a time of war. These prime-time hate-mongers blamed Jewish agents for the September 11 bombing, and were clearly not unhappy at the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Surely similar incendiary groups, like the foul Ku Klux Klan, would not be given free time on public television in a time of war. The transcript alone of that disgusting spectacle before the era of Vietnam would have qualified as evidence for treason and sedition under the classical definitions found in Article III of the Constitution.
There is a growing chorus of rarely-heard-from Americans between the two coasts — one little known by fundamentalists in the Middle East, or their agents in our capital — which has had enough of all this. They are reaching a state of fury over thousands of our dead, constant germ scares, bomb threats, screaming imams on public television slandering our dead, sneering caveats from puffed-up academics, and lectures from corrupt governments mixed with veiled threats. So most Americans have sadly accepted that the dogs of war have indeed slipped loose and their anger, as I can discern it from this central California farm, can be summarized by something like, "Hell, enough is enough — let's get to it and not stop until the whole damn thing is over with!" That crescendo, which elites decry as "unilateralism" and worse, is actually similar to the mood of resolve and desperation of December 8, 1941, when we didn't worry much about anything other than annihilating our enemies, and letting neutrals, allies, threatening enemies, and our own critics sort it all out and live with the aftershocks.
Reviled by those in the Middle East, caricatured on campuses at home, and second-guessed by pundits of every persuasion, our military and its leadership — by any military standard of the past — have been rather brilliant in waging a war of unprecedented logistical challenges against an elusive enemy. In less than a month, America has devastated an evil government over 6,000 miles distant at a loss of fewer than five dead! Its planes roam freely over enemy skies; its opponents are either ensconced in caves, hiding among mosques, or striking out by the pathetic spectacles of public executions, threats to poison the food of their own hungry, and the shanghaiing of reluctant conscripts. Rarely has such a boasting adversary proved to be both so craven and so foul. Critics of our progress, in the aftermath of the Gulf War and Kosovo, and in ignorance of military history, have judged past miraculous and rare victories as typical rather than as exceptional in the long story of battle, and so have weirdly defined success only as instantaneous triumph, rather than real achievement over months — or a few years — of hard fighting.
Remember! — Those who promised us a generation of suicide bombers three weeks ago are lurking incognito among women on buses. Unlike the unexpected attacks on Pearl Harbor or the invasion of South Korea, it has not taken the United States six months to regroup and attack, but only a few days. What is maddening to our enemies is not that we are bombing with untold devastation, but that we are bombing with care to avoid the innocent and to target the guilty, and all the while are trying to feed the hungry — and with far more success than failure.
If we have learned anything from the 20th century, it is that the braggadocio of fascism is not the same as the brawn of democracy — and that the evil and weak should not attack the stronger and better. Bin Laden and his supporters have let slip the dogs of war; history teaches us that they more often turn on and devour their masters. We must be patient and let the dogs reach their fury.
JH, you might want to ping your list!
His line about the Muslims needing the West but the West doesn't need the Muslims is so true.
Absolutely. But they won't do it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.