Posted on 03/25/2002 7:59:07 AM PST by aculeus
In some ways in our war against the terrorists we are like the democracies of the late 1930s. They knew that there was more to Hitler than his avowed quest for the return of the Sudetenland or the Alsace-Lorraine. They sort of suspected that an entire, venerable culture in Germany and Japan had gone off the deep end. And while there was a certain logic to Hitler's diatribes that a moralistic England had no more right to distant India than did Germany to nearby Danzig, most deep-down knew that such parlor-game banter simply masked a much larger dilemma — how to corral a very powerful dictatorship and its axis that wished dominance not coexistence, and whose fuel was brutal force and autocracy, not democracy and freedom.
For England, most of Western Europe, and the United States, reeling under recent economic depression and hardly recovered from the sheer horror of the First World War — carnage unlike any in the long history of warfare — the idea of forceful resistance was little short of insanity. Filmstrips of German Panzers, thousands of Japanese shouting "Banzai!," and even Mussolini's comically delivered, but hateful rants overwhelmed the senses.
How could one stop such madness? And might it just go away with proper diplomacy? And why did "militarists" in the West insist on rearming and thereby "provoking" war? And was not there some truth to German grievances and Japanese hurts? And did anyone really wish to risk millions of innocent Americans and British to kill equally innocent, although perhaps mesmerized, Germans? Who was stirring up such animosity?
We are in a similar dilemma — in our hesitation about Iraq, our pressure on Israel, and our worries about mission creep in pursuing the killers. Can't the Jews and Arabs just get along? If Israel would just give back all of the West Bank, wouldn't there be peace? Didn't we just fight in the Gulf a mere decade ago? How do we know that Saddam Hussein really has such dreadful weapons? Shouldn't our allies get involved too? Do these undemocratic Muslim countries really dislike us all that much? Who can trust polls anyway? Why are these saber-rattlers trying to get us into a war?
And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia — the embryo of 9/11. We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr. Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy — not America, not Israel — make their people poor, angry, and dangerous.
Rather than preparing for what our enemies are preparing for us, we look to gestures of appeasement. Does not the Islamic world appreciate the presence of General Zinni? Do we not give billions to Arab countries? Did we not save Kuwait and Muslims throughout the globe? Who in the Arab world could really think that the murderous Taliban were preferable to the present more enlightened government in Afghanistan? And although Middle Eastern males blew up our planes, people, and monuments, have we not had a national discussion about the evils of profiling those from the Middle East in our airports and stations? Don't Muslims tell their kindred back home how much freer they are in America than in Iraq or Syria?
Like the dashed hopes of the 1930s such faith is not only misplaced, but also dangerous. The efforts of countries like Iraq to acquire nuclear weapons might under the present pressures grow dormant, but they will not cease. A nuclear Pakistan is a tottering military dictatorship away from Armageddon. Bribed autocracies in Jordan and Egypt are allies only in the sense that their unelected leaders promise to jail their nuts and fundamentalists who otherwise might turn on them as well as on us. Polls everywhere in the Middle East reveal not mere anguish, but real enmity toward Americans. Public pronouncements in Iran are not any less hateful than what emanated from Berlin in 1936. Thousands of al Qaeda killers have escaped — and thousands more are angry over the death of the comrades and kin and planning carnage for us as we sleep.
Only a few of us Americans really take the Islamic world at its word — that one in three is reported to think (representing, say, a small number of around 200 million?) that the murder of 3,000 Americans was justified; that two of three believed no Arabs were involved; and that even higher poll numbers reflected real antipathy for the West.
After 30 years of listening to nauseating chanting from Teheran to Islamabad to Nablus, hearing the childish rants about "The Mother of All Battles" and "The Great Satan," and witnessing presidents from Carter to Bush burned in effigy, the ritual torching of the American flag, the misspelled banners of hatred, the thousands of paint-by-the-numbers posters of psychopaths from Khomeini to bin Laden, televised threats that sound as hideous as they are empty, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism, embassy takeovers, oil-boycotts, hijacked planes, cars, and ships, lectures from unelected obese sheiks with long names and gold chains, peacekeepers incinerated in their sleep, murders at the Olympics, bodies dumped on the tarmac of airports, shredded diplomats, madmen in sunglasses in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, demented mullahs and whip-bearing imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, continual televised murders of Americans abroad, our towers toppled, our citizens butchered, our planes blown up, hooded Klansmen in Hamas and Hezbollah, killers of al-this and Islamic-that, suicide bombers, shrill turbaned nuts spouting hatred on C-SPAN broadcasts, one day the salvation of Kuwait, the next sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the third day fury against the sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the fourth day some grievance from 1953, the fifth another from A.D. 752; and all the time sanctimonious fingerpointing from Middle Eastern academics and journalists who are as bold abroad in insulting us as they are timid and obsequious under dictators at home in keeping silent, I've about had it. No mas. The problem is you, not us — you, you, you….
I don't listen any more to the apologies and prevarications of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department, and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win — and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused.
So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity — just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941. I don't know about the rest of America, but I am proud that thugs like Khaddafi, murderers like Saddam Hussein, inquisitionists like the mullahs in Iran, criminals in Syria, medieval sheiks in the Gulf, and millions of others who do not vote, do not speak freely, oppress women, and are not tolerant of religious, gender, or ethnic diversity don't like me for being an American. I would find it repugnant if they did.
No, their hatred is a badge of honor, and I would have it no other way. I am tired of the appeasers of the Middle East on our Right who fawn for oil and trade, and those pacifists and multiculturalists on the Left who either do not know, or do not like, what America really is. I'd rather think of all the innocent dead on 9/ 11 than give a moment more of attention to Mr. Arafat and his bombers.
The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass — or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists — or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses — Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked — only defeated.
In that context, we see much of a whipped-up Arab world entering this similar period of dangerous unreality. The problem is them and their unelected and unfree regimes, not us — just as it was Hitler, not us; Tojo, not us; Mussolini, not us; and Stalin, not us — just as it always is when unelected maniacs take control and hijack an entire country and culture. We can either step up and stop Islamic fundamentalism, Arab terrorists, and Middle Eastern dictators or we can step back and watch it all continue to grow. If 9/11 was the beginning of a war, then we should remember that wars usually end when one, not both sides, win.
I, too, thought that we would have awakened as we did after Pearl Harbor. For all of the comparisons with that event evoked by the presstitutes and publicity-seeking politicos regarding 9/11, we remain asleep. I thought (naively so, as it turns out) that FINALLY the American people had finally realized what kind of a place the world was, and that we'd finally clean out the SOBs that make this world miserable. So, where was the declaration of war? Where was/is the mobilization of resources to fight the billion (or 2 or 3) that hate us for being free and prosperous? We are STILL ASLEEP - what will it take to reawaken the sleeping giant and to fill him with a terrible resolve, the atomization of several cities?
Rather than preparing for what our enemies are preparing for us, we look to gestures of appeasement. Does not the Islamic world appreciate the presence of General Zinni? Do we not give billions to Arab countries? Did we not save Kuwait and Muslims throughout the globe? Who in the Arab world could really think that the murderous Taliban were preferable to the present more enlightened government in Afghanistan? And although Middle Eastern males blew up our planes, people, and monuments, have we not had a national discussion about the evils of profiling those from the Middle East in our airports and stations? Don't Muslims tell their kindred back home how much freer they are in America than in Iraq or Syria?
Don't get me wrong - Bush has done a decent job of smashing the Taliban and putting Al-Queda back into the caves, but this isn't enough. Neither (esp. the latter) would present any kind of real threat to civilization without the support of nations like Iraq, Iran, China, Syria, Libya, not to mention Saudi Arabia (well, OK, I will mention them),our supposed ally. However, he has failed like his father did to really tell us why we have to go to war, and to be successful like in WW2, or else we will cease to exist. Churchill he ain't, but at least he could try a bit harder. He is much like Reagan in many ways, but the Gipper was head and shoulders above him in explaining why we had to struggle against the Evil Empire.
President Bush: the Axis of Evil is out there, but it is far greater in scope and resources than the 3 thuggocracies you mentioned. You must know this, but you'll never be truly successful in the War on Terrorism until you truly explain our situation to the mass of the American public that doesn't know better (or doesn't want to know better). This is a war for our survival - we must begin to act like it, soon, or we will suffer grievous losses in the future and possibly lose. We must take the initiative and destroy the various terrorist regimes ASAP, before they have an opportunity to acquire and develop effective WMD arsenals. We'll need very large and well-equipped armed forces to accomplish this, along with near limitless ammunition. Currently we have neither. Tell the voters and taxpayers the dimensions of the problem, and we'll support nearly any measure necessary to prevail.
Big Bump.
And those that were not citizens desired to be so. And became assimillated in this culture.
Today, one wonders where and why many dont.
There some 'Americans' and many aliens whose allegience lies with another nation, not this one...What are their motives? Why don't they go back? They know who they are.
LOL!
Another Clinton failure...
The problem is you, not us — you, you, you….
So true, so true, so true!
We reap what we sow.
I received an email (can't verify the truth of it) where Bush boldly asked a Christian who was greeting him, "Please pray for a protective shield over our country!"
Let's all do that.
Read and heed. Life and the threats are more complicated a la the 1930's
With Pearl Harbor, we had a much more tangible enemy that did not simply shrink back into the shadows.
Also, we had scores of leaders explaining that Islam is a religion of peace and focusing on Osama Bin Laden.
The big problem with that is people are not going to put up with really rooting out and destroying the problem. We have minimized the problem to a police action in a backwater nation that is already rubble.
Even now we are begging permission from the very people that put up the cash for September 11 to go after those responsible for putting up the cash. Hello? Is anyone home?
So true. We need to shut them up in short order!
(emphasis added is mine)
I've heard the Confederacy compared to the Nazis, but now we're in some really distinguished company!
The C.S.A. had just so very much in common with four imperialistic regimes bent on world domination, didn't they?
< /sarcasm>
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