Fifty Years of Appeasement Led to Black Tuesday By Leonard Peikoff
Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the United States. The inevitable climax was the tens of thousands of deaths on September 11, 2001—the blackest day in our history, so far. The Palestinians, among others, responded by dancing in the streets and handing out candy.
Fifty years ago, Truman and Eisenhower ceded to the Arabs the West's property rights in oil—although that oil properly belonged to those in the West whose science and technology made its discovery and use possible.
This capitulation was not practical, but philosophical. The Arab dictators were denouncing the wealthy egoistic West. They were crying that the masses of their poor needed our sacrifice; that oil, like all property, is owned collectively, by virtue of birth; and that they knew all this by means of ineffable or otherworldly emotion. Our Presidents had no answer. Implicitly, they were ashamed of the Declaration of Independence. They did not dare to answer aloud that Americans, rightfully, were motivated by the selfish desire to pursue personal happiness in a rich, secular, individualist society.
The Arabs embodied in extreme form every idea—selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group—which our universities and churches, and our own political Establishment, had long been preaching as the essence of virtue. When two groups, our leadership and theirs, accept the same basic ideas, the most consistent wins.
After property came liberty. The Iranian dictator Khomeini threatened with death a British author—and with destruction his American publisher—if they exercised their right to free speech. He explained that the book in question offended the religion of his people. The Bush Administration looked the other way.
After liberty came American life itself—as in Iran's support of the massacre of our soldiers in Saudi Arabia, and the Afghanistan-based assault on our embassies in East Africa. Again, the American response was unbridled appeasement: a Realpolitikisch desire not to "jeopardize relations" with the aggressor country, covered up by a purely rhetorical vow to punish the guilty, along with an occasional pretend bombing. By now, the world knows that we are indeed a paper tiger.
The final guarantee of American impotence is the bipartisan proclamation that a terrorist is an individual alone responsible for his actions, and that "we must try each before a court of law." This is tantamount, while under a Nazi aerial bombardment, to seeking out and trying the pilots involved while ignoring Hitler and Germany.
Terrorists exist only through the sanction and support of the governments behind them. Their lethal behavior is that of the regimes that make them possible. Their killings are not crimes, but acts of war. The only proper response to such acts is war in self-defense.
We do not need more evidence to "pinpoint" the perpetrators of any one of these atrocities, including the latest and most egregious—we already have total certainty with regard to the governments primarily responsible for the repeated slaughter of Americans in recent years. We must now use our unsurpassed military to destroy all branches of the Iranian and Afghani governments, regardless of the suffering and death this will bring to the many innocents caught in the line of fire. We must wipe out the terrorist training camps or sanctuaries, and eliminate any retaliatory military capability—and thereby terrorize and paralyze all the tyrannies watching, who will now know what is in store for them if they choose in any form to attack the United States. That will be the end of the terrorists.
Our missiles and occupation troops, however, will be effective only if they are preceded by our President's morally righteous statement that we intend hereafter to defend by every means possible each American's right to his property, his liberty, and his secure enjoyment of life here on earth.
To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action? The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations. President Bush must decide whether it is his duty to save Americans or the governments who seek to kill them.
Could you please elaborate more on how technology trumps property rights. I'm not as sufficently enlightened with Randian libertarian views as you seem to be. Thank you.