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paraphrase Churchill, with the conclusion of hostilities in Afghanistan
we are not at the beginning of the end, but rather at the
end of the beginning in our fight against the terrorists. Although
judgments in medias res are always hazardous, we can perhaps
look back over the last four months and size up winners and losers
that appear on the national scene in clear-cut antitheses. War takes
away the luxury of peace, and so shows things for what they are
rather than what they seem.
Before September
George W. Bush was dismissed as inarticulate and worse. Pundits
constantly and often cruelly reminded Americans that their leader
had not mastered the intricacies and nomenclature of world politics.
But September 11th revealed the president as quite a different person
from his critics' caricature. Mr. Bush is, in fact, the Greek iambic
poet Archilochus's proverbial hedgehog, the allegorically wise beast,
who, unlike the supposedly clever foxes of the world, knows one
— but one big (hen mega) — thing: how to galvanize
his nation to fight back relentlessly and powerfully against evil
in the hour of its greatest peril.
In contrast,
his predecessor's impressive and near encyclopedic knowledge of
names, dates, and places now appears little more than thin veneer,
a glossy lamina that scarcely hid his real ignorance about the nature
of the human condition. He, not the current president, wished to
be liked at all costs and therein possessed a flaw fatal for a leader
of the world's greatest power. Mr. Clinton's inability to pursue
the terrorists and keep his country on guard against its noxious
enemies is now judged as the last amoral straw that broke his camel's
back of security lapses, unwise military cuts, impeachment, personal
scandal and perfidy, and tawdry sales of White House visits and
eleventh-hour pardons alike. The more Mr. Bush is terse and to the
point, the more Mr. Clinton frantically flits from one public forum
to another — whining about his legacy, lecturing the citizenry
about its purported sins from the Crusades to the Civil War, and
therein ensuring that he is no longer a tragic, but rather a comically
absurd, figure.
Before September
11th popular wisdom suggested that bin Laden and his terrorists
represented a new, vibrant, and deadly threat to a tired, soft,
and decadent West. But the past four months have shown just the
opposite. The true weaklings and cowards were the al Qaeda leadership.
It, not us, cynically sent the deluded and young to suicidal murdering
while it hid in caves, planned its escape, and churned out pitiful
and self-serving videos.
The worse indulgence
for a fanatical and "committed" terrorist is to appear
worldly, gossipy — and petty. Bin Laden's tapes revealed all
three sins. He brags of his rising ratings among the mosques of
the worlds, but then, like a toddler in his terrible twos, bellyaches
that our bombs were bigger than his and therefore not fair in his
infantile game of tit-for-tat. He slurs blacks — as revealing
as his chuckles over the fate of his naive henchmen who boarded
the planes of death on September 11 — which must send a chilling
message to Africans anywhere who might think that an anti-Western
radical Islam offers the proper home for their own unhappiness with
America and Europe.
In contrast,
the United States military and its war makers loom not merely as
deadly, but overwhelmingly so in a manner that reduces bin Laden
and his ilk as unworthy of combat between equals — and therefore
deserving not an honorable duel between real soldiers, but a quick
incineration befitting criminals and cutthroats. Far from appearing
as overly worried about losing soldiers in a ground war with terrorists,
America's ability to kill without danger from high in the skies
comes off as Olympian: the omnipotent do not think it worth their
time to wrestle below with weak and shrill miscreants when they
can dispatch them at will with thunderbolts.
The left, both
on and off campus, has been reduced to a state of ethical insolvency
— followed by silence — in the aftermath of September
11. The roll call of published idiotic remarks by the likes of Mary
Beard, Eric Foner, Frederic Jameson, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati
Roy, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, and a host of others
has revealed that the luminaries of today's Western cultural and
intellectual establishment are not merely ignorant of politics,
history, and culture, but often downright immature, hysterical,
and inarticulate. Marxism has been discredited as both murderous
and impoverishing; postmodernism as hypocritical and nonsensical.
And now we see that the only skeleton of an ideology remaining that
feeds the elite left is a reactive anti-Americanism. But those old
bones have little taste left given our power and humanity in waging
this present awful war that we did not ask for.
How different
are their antitheses. Real scholars over the past decades have perhaps
garnered less glitter — a Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel
Pipes, Donald Kagan, and others — but in the present crisis
have in contrast offered blunt, unsparing, and sober appraisals
grounded in history, an understanding of human nature, and clear
and precise prose. The former intellectuals are of the moment and
of no relevance, even as needed critics of their culture. The latter
scholars prove to be engaged, principled, and prescient. Ironically,
the traditionalists, not the universities' darlings, have done far
more to salvage the entire notion of liberal education and the reputations
of the great schools themselves.
These binaries
of this war, then, also involve institutions as well as people.
For two decades we have been worried about the ultimate harvests
of the diseased groves of academe. The present war has exposed for
public view young people in the military as knowledgeable as college
students, their officers as well-spoken as professors, and the high
command perhaps more well-rounded and engaged than university administrators.
Again, we are not talking merely of common sense and practicality,
which we expect from a military culture, but rather those visible
and manifest signs of learning — logic, lucidity, and information
— that is the supposed monopoly of our schools.
If this apparent
paradox is true, the dichotomy presents a host of further disturbing
consequences. Is our defense budget, then, complimentary, rather
than antithetical, to social expenditure on education? Here I do
not invoke just the negative notion that more money for guns means
less funding for foolhardy programs in our schools that do real
harm to our youth. Rather in a positive sense, can it be that a
few critical years in the military produce youth as well-spoken,
disciplined, and worldly as those on our college campuses? Do campuses
need to learn from the military as much as the latter has from the
schools? Seriousness, literacy, and written and oral communication
must be shared by dozens of young people in order to catapult safely
a jet plane off a rolling carrier — let us for a moment ignore
questions of maturity and teamwork — skills hardly inculcated
by counseling, journal writing, and gender studies so often found
on the contemporary campus.
The war, however,
has not embarrassed the Left alone. Many on the Right come in for
needed reexamination. The officers of the Enron conglomerate appear
not merely felonious, but biblically amoral in draining off money
for themselves while destroying the life savings of thousands of
loyal employees. In a time of war, such an energy corporation, which
provides the lifeblood for a technologically advanced society, proves
itself much more than duplicitous and incompetent. It is near treasonous
as well, and has done its nation far more damage than the teen traitor
from Marin County. Enron's leadership should be named often, and
then roundly condemned by both the president and the Congress —
as preliminaries to well-publicized indictments by the Department
of Justice.
And under the
false guise of "national security" — a slight against
the very struggle we are in — our Congress is about to pass
the largest farm bailout in history. Yet we know that family farms
are rarely the beneficiaries of such ill-conceived largess; that
the present legislation simply makes liars out of the architects
of the "absolutely final" multibillion 1996 'Freedom to
Farm' bill; and that the more the Department of Agriculture has
grown, the more rapidly real agrarians have been obliterated. The
latest gift to a few thousand corporate farms is little more than
an insult to the memory of the rural vanquished. Faced with congressional
passage of this monstrosity, any true conservative would either
abolish the Department of Agriculture altogether, eliminate once
and for all its welfare policy for select, campaign-donating agribusiness
concerns — or, barring that, in the interest of fairness bring
back the equally inequitable and dishonest give-away programs for
the urban poor of the past.
War is merciless
in the manner it cuts through cant and traditional wisdom. When
men and women risk their lives to save their brethren, and the power
of arms, not brag, decides who lives and dies, then truth emerges
to expose pretense in ways we could scarcely imagine when the fighting
broke out. And if the last four months are any guide to the next
year, then we are likely to see far more unexpected winners and
losers in the days ahead.
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