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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.
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