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we await the final disposition of Mullah Omar and the formal identification
of Osama bin Laden's last redoubt, it's time to review the bidding
and ask ourselves "How can we blow this one?"
In retrospect,
we can see that the whole thing got an enormous push from the Intifada,
because our enemies in the Middle East do not distinguish between
us and Israel, and so if they're able to push around the Israelis
they take it as a sign of our weakness. Never mind all that sweet
talk about being reasonable, about being evenhanded, and all that.
Learn your
Machiavelli, Chapter One: It's all about winning and losing. And
when the Israelis tucked their tail between their legs and beat
an ignominious retreat from southern Lebanon, the terror masters
could suddenly taste victory over us. They added "our"
retreat from Lebanon to our earlier retreats from Vietnam, Beirut,
and Somalia, and they got a very big jackpot number, so big that
they convinced themselves that our moment had passed, and theirs
had come, and the evidence was all there: we wouldn't fight like
real men because we were afraid to die in combat so all we could
do was drop bombs from time to time, and we had stopped challenging
Saddam Hussein, another sign of cowardice and fear. All they had
to do was kill a lot of us, and we would yield to their more powerful
will.
All those years
— mostly Clinton years, by the way, lest we forget — they
insulted us, they preached hatred against us, they laughed at us
and our effeminate ways, and they dreamed of their day of glory,
plotting and scheming and anticipating how wonderful it would be,
vengeance for hundreds of years of humiliation and shame. And then
when they decided their moment had come, and they attacked, it was
a glorious moment.
Or so they
thought. But then they learned otherwise, and now they are being
killed like stray dogs in Afghanistan, and we must be sure, absolutely
positively certain, that this is the memory that will last, and
we can only be sure of this if we defeat them all, so that no one
is left behind to say, "if only they had listened to me, glory
would have been ours."
We must demonstrate
that the entire crazy enterprise was a disaster, so that they won't
be tempted by this sort of madness for many generations. And that
means we must not, not, not show compassion too soon. Compassion
comes after victory, not before it, not alongside it. First victory,
then greatness of spirit. Machiavelli Chapter Two: If you win, they
will always judge your means to have been appropriate. Once we've
won, they will sing our praises. But if we start to show kindness,
generosity and compassion too soon, they will interpret it as weakness,
and strike again.
We need to
sustain our game face, we must keep our fangs bared, we must remind
them daily that we Americans are in a rage, and we will not rest
until we have avenged our dead, we will not be sated until we have
had the blood of every miserable little tyrant in the Middle East,
until every leader of every cell of the terror network is dead or
locked securely away, and every last drooling anti-Semitic and anti-American
mullah, imam, sheikh, and ayatollah is either singing the praises
of the United States of America, or pumping gasoline, for a dime
a gallon, on an American military base near the Arctic Circle.
If we send
in the United Nations, and turn over the construction of civil society
to the NGOs, we're losers. Remember what the greatest generation
of Americans did at the end of World War II: we occupied the enemy
countries, and we imposed democracy on them, to their and our enduring
benefit. All the U.N. does is impose corruption and the worst forms
of political correctness. This is our war, paid with our money,
fought with our weapons, deployed by our fighting men, with a little
help from our friends. And while we fight, the U.N. daily condemns
Israel and gives the Palestinian terrorists a big fat pass.
Don't kid yourself.
We can still blow this thing, big-time. Every few days we show alarming
signs of being "reasonable," and "evenhanded,"
apparently because somebody forgot that that's what got us into
this mess in the first place. We must be imperious, ruthless, and
relentless. No compromise with evil; we want total surrender. Once
the ink's dry on the surrender documents, then we can start thinking
about the best way to build theme parks in underground-tunnel networks.
Back at the
beginning of our war,
when I insisted that this was going to be a vast revolutionary war,
and that we would transform the entire Middle East, few were inclined
to agree. Now it is just barely over the horizon, but the tyrants,
who are always looking as far ahead as they can, can already see
it, and they are very frightened. The latest word from Tehran is
that the mullahs are afraid that they will have the same destiny
as the Taliban.
And why not?
They even look the same.
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