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 .You
don't win wars by defending yourself. You win them by attacking
the enemy. People say, "This is war," and they're right.
But if our policy is merely defense and counterattack, this war
can't possibly be won. The U.S. must take the initiative. The president
should tell his service chiefs: Give me a plan of attack, now,
against any known terrorist or terrorist state. They are
all our sworn enemies.
2.The U.S.
ultimatum to Afghanistan. By the time you read this, we may
already have delivered an ultimatum to the government (such as it
is) in Kabul. We needn't and shouldn't wait for the investigation
of the September 11 massacres to finish. We know what bin Laden
is — and if he didn't mastermind this mass murder, we want
him anyway, because we don't play games with terrorists anymore.
It is Afghanistan's job to find the man and hand him over.
Our ultimatum should read: You have so many hours to turn him over,
or prove to our satisfaction that he's not in Afghanistan. If you
don't, we'll declare war and systematically destroy everything you
own, every building and field, every shop and sheep in Afghanistan,
one by one, until you hand the man over or there's nothing left.
(Of course we'll always tell you our next target, so you can evacuate
if you care to.) And if we wreak havoc and still don't get our man
— in the future, bloody-minded states might think twice before
sheltering aspiring murderers.
3. The topic
is "guilt," not "responsibility." The president
spoke well on the evening of the 11th. He spoke about "justice"
and "evil." But in some ways we are still confused. People
say that we have to find the "responsible" parties. What
they mean is the guilty parties. Back in the '70s, terrorists
would murder people, and ignorant, oblivious reporters would announce:
"The PLO [or some other bloodthirsty barbarian group] has claimed
responsibility." Every time you heard that phrase, your
blood ran cold. Those reporters had turned themselves voluntarily
into propaganda machines. They should have said: The PLO has "admitted
guilt," or "claimed guilt" — a gruesome
phrase that says something important. In the '70s, all sorts of
enlightened Americans were politely interested in terrorism. We
still haven't fully recovered from the harm they inflicted.
4. Hunt
and punish. The president said on the 11th that we would hunt
down these murderers and punish them. Henceforth, when Israel hunts
down terrorist murderers and punishes them, I assume the State Department
will be enthusiastic.
5. Closing
the barn door. Experts have warned us for years about the self-imposed
weakness of American intelligence, especially human intelligence.
Our weakness reflects not merely the tragic moral confusion of recent
decades (especially the late '70s), but our blind-idiot's faith
in technology. Who needs mere "human intelligence" when
we have the world's fanciest, highest-tech "signals intelligence"?
(And who needs well-trained, well-armed servicemen when we have
so many fancy machines?) We will now attempt to fix our intelligence-gathering
operations. How many other catastrophic defeats will we suffer before
we pay attention to our other screaming weaknesses? We've known
for years that criminal nations would like to shoot missiles at
us (or be able to threaten us with missiles) and are frantically
trying to figure out how. We need a national crash project: ABM
defenses within twelve months. We've let our military deteriorate,
relentlessly politicized it, and allowed too many of our military
training programs to be turned into jokes. Our guiding spirit has
been: We're so rich and powerful, no amount of incompetence can
hurt us.
6. Remember
Nablus. Yesterday we saw men, women, and children take to the
streets to celebrate mass murder. We should never forget those pictures.
Some organization ought to run a full-page Nablus photo with a headline
like "Oslo? This is Oslo. Any more bright ideas?" We ought
to round up a flock of multiculturalists — the all-cultures-are-equal
types — and show them what Nablus and East Jerusalem looked
like yesterday.
7. Freedom
and democracy had nothing to do with it. The president and secretary
of state said that the massacres were an attack on freedom and democracy.
Don't believe it. These murderers don't even know what freedom and
democracy are. Their goals are to create suffering and death.
Suffering and death for their own sakes are what they believe in.
8. Pride.
New York and Washington were attacked, not Paris and Rome —
and something tells me that Mideast terrorists are not about
to attack Paris or Rome. No doubt internal Arab politics had something
to do with the massacres, but in the end there is one reason why
the United States is the target: We are the only nation in the world
with the decency and heart to stand up for Israel. If Japan and
Europe and the new democracies of Asia and South America cared about
Israel's right to exist, and to defend herself, and if they stood
up and said so — I'll wait while the laughter dies down —
if they all were to say: We are against cold-blooded murder
in America and Israel, we reject the ludicrous and evil claim
that "moral equivalence" holds between Palestinians whose
goal is to murder Jews and Jews whose goal is not to be murdered
. . . how could the mass murderers ever choose among so many juicy
targets? They'd be paralyzed. But they're unlikely to face that
dilemma, ever. Every man, woman, and child who died in the September
11 massacres is a witness to the greatness and majesty of the United
States. They didn't ask or deserve to die for American greatness,
but they did. We ought to tell the world: Save your crocodile tears.
These are dead not merely to mourn but to honor, and we dare not
fail to avenge them.
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