The Fruits of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson
Imagine a different November 4, 1979, in Teheran. Shortly after Iranian
terrorists storm the American embassy and take some 90 American hostages,
President Jimmy Carter announces that Islamic fundamentalism is not a
legitimate response to the excess of the Shah but a new and dangerous
fascism that threatens all that liberal society holds dear. And then he
issues an ultimatum to Teherans leaders: Release the captives or face a
devastating military response.
When that demand is not met, instead of freezing Irans assets, stopping the
importation of its oil, or seeking support at the UN, Carter orders an
immediate blockade of the country, followed by promises to bomb, first, all
of its major military assets, and then its main government buildings and
residences of its ruling mullocracy. The Ayatollah Khomeini may well have
called his bluff; we may well have tragically lost the hostages (151 fewer
American lives than the Iranian-backed Hezbollah would take four years later
in a single day in Lebanon). And there may well have been the sort of chaos
in Teheran that we now witness in Baghdad. But we would have seen it all in
1979and not in 2001, after almost a quarter-century of continuous Middle
East terrorism, culminating in the mass murder of 3,000 Americans and the
leveling of the World Trade Center.
The twentieth century should have taught the citizens of liberal democracies
the catastrophic consequences of placating tyrants. British and French
restraint over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the
absorption of the Czech Sudetenland, and the incorporation of Bohemia and
Moravia did not win gratitude but rather Hitlers contempt for their
weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of
European civilization were the wages of appeasementa term that
early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old
idea of deterrence and military readiness.
So too did Western excuses for the Russians violation of guarantees of free
elections in postwar Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia only embolden
the Soviet Union. What eventually contained Stalinism was the Truman
Doctrine, NATO, and nuclear deterrencenot the United Nationsand what
destroyed its legacy was Ronald Reagans assertiveness, not Jimmy Carters
accommodation or Richard Nixons détente.
As long ago as the fourth century b.c., Demosthenes warned how complacency
and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a
Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek
libertyand in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek
peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to
citizens of any liberal society: we must neither presume that comfort and
security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice
and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois
liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance, and enlightened
self-interest.
Most important, military deterrence and the willingness to use force against
evil in its infancy usually end up, in the terrible arithmetic of war,
saving more lives than they cost. All this can be a hard lesson to relearn
each generation, especially now that we contend with the sirens of the mall,
Oprah, and latte. Our affluence and leisure are as antithetical to the use
of force as rural life and relative poverty once were catalysts for muscular
action. The age-old lure of appeasementperhaps they will cease with this
latest concession, perhaps we provoked our enemies, perhaps demonstrations
of our future good intentions will win their approvalwas never more evident
than in the recent Spanish elections, when an affluent European electorate,
reeling from the horrific terrorist attack of 3/11, swept from power the
pro-U.S. center-right government on the grounds that the mass murders were
more the fault of the United States for dragging Spain into the effort to
remove fascists and implant democracy in Iraq than of the primordial
al-Qaidist culprits, who long ago promised the Western and Christian
Iberians ruin for the Crusades and the Reconquista.
What went wrong with the Westand with the United States in particularwhen
not just the classical but especially the recent antecedents to September
11, from the Iranian hostage-taking to the attack on the USS Cole, were so
clear? Though Americans in an election year, legitimately concerned about
our war dead, may now be divided over the Iraqi occupation, polls
nevertheless show a surprising consensus that the many precursors to the
World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings were acts of war, not police
matters. Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the
bombing of the Khobar Towers and the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998,
the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the
American embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S.
Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and
assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats
(including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer,
Robert Dean Stethem, and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we
arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: that debacle is where
we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy, and Middle East
state terrorismand failed to grasp its menace, condemn it, and go to war
against it.
That lapse, worth meditating upon in this 25th anniversary year of
Khomeinism, then set the precedent that such aggression against the United
States was better adjudicated as a matter of law than settled by war.
Criminals were to be understood, not punished; and we, not our enemies, were
at fault for our past behavior. Whether Carters impotence sprang from his
deep-seated moral distrust of using American power unilaterally or from real
remorse over past American actions in the cold war or even from his innate
pessimism about the military capability of the United States mattered little
to the hostage takers in Teheran, who for some 444 days humiliated the
United States through a variety of public demands for changes in U.S.
foreign policy, the return of the exiled Shah, and reparations.
But if we know how we failed to respond in the last three decades, do we yet
grasp why we were so afraid to act decisively at these earlier junctures,
which might have stopped the chain of events that would lead to the al-Qaida
terrorist acts of September 11? Our failure was never due to a lack of the
necessary wealth or military resources, but rather to a deeply ingrained
assumption that we should not retaliatea hesitancy al-Qaida perceives and
plays upon.
Along that sad succession of provocations, we can look back and see
particularly critical turning points that reflected this
now-institutionalized state policy of worrying more about what the enemy was
going to do to us than we to him, to paraphrase Grants dictum: not
hammering back after the murder of the marines in Lebanon for fear of ending
up like the Israelis in a Lebanese quagmire; not going to Baghdad in 1991
because of paranoia that the coalition would collapse and we would
polarize the Arabs; pulling abruptly out of Somalia once pictures of
American bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were broadcast
around the world; or turning down offers in 1995 from Sudan to place Usama
bin Ladin into our custody, for fear that U.S. diplomats or citizens might
be murdered abroad.
Throughout this tragic quarter-century of appeasement, our response usually
consisted of a stern lecture by a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W.
Bush, or Bill Clinton about never giving in to terrorist blackmail and
not negotiating with terrorists. Even Ronald Reagans saber-rattling You
can run but not hide did not preclude trading arms to the Iranian
terrorists or abruptly abandoning Lebanon after the horrific Hezbollah
attack.
Sometimes a half-baked failed rescue mission, or a battleship salvo, cruise
missile, or air strike followedbut always accompanied by a weeklong debate
by conservatives over exit strategies and mission creep, while liberals
fretted about consultations with our allies and the United Nations. And
remember: these pathetic military responses were the hawkish actions that
earned us the resignation of a furious Cyrus Vance, the abrogation of
overflight rights by concerned allies such as France, and a national
debate about what we did to cause such animosity in the first place.
Our enemies and Middle Eastern friends alike sneered at our
self-flagellation. In 1991, at great risk, the United States freed Kuwait
from Iraq and ended its status as the 19th satrapy of Saddam Husseinonly to
watch the restored kingdom ethnically cleanse over a third of a million
Palestinians. But after the murder of 3,000 Americans in 2001, Kuwaitis, in
a February 2002 Gallup poll (and while they lobbied OPEC to reduce output
and jack up prices), revealed an overwhelming distaste for Americansindeed
the highest levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world. And these ethnic
cleansers of Palestinians cited Americas purportedly unfair treatment of
the Palestinians (recipients of accumulated billions in American aid) as a
prime cause of their dislike of us.
In the face of such visceral anti-Americanism, the problem may not be real
differences over the West Bank, much less that we are not getting the
message out; rather, in the decade since 1991 the Middle East saw us as a
great power that neither could nor would use its strength to advance its
ideasthat lacked even the intellectual confidence to argue for our
civilization before the likes of a tenth-century monarchy. The autocratic
Arab world neither respects nor fears a democratic United States, because it
rightly senses that we often talk in principled terms but rarely are willing
to invest the time, blood, and treasure to match such rhetoric with concrete
action. Thats why it is crucial for us to stay in Iraq to finish the
reconstruction and cement the achievement of our three-week victory over
Saddam.
It is easy to cite post-Vietnam guilt and shame as the likely culprit for
our paralysis. After all, Jimmy Carter came in when memories of capsizing
boat people and of American helicopters lifting swarms of panicked diplomats
off the roof of the Saigon embassy were fresh. In 1980, he exited in greater
shame: his effusive protestations that Soviet communism wasnt something to
fear all that much won him the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, while his
heralded human rights campaign was answered by the Ortegas in Nicaragua
and the creation of a murderous theocracy in Iran. Yet perhaps President
Carter was not taking the American people anywhere they didnt want to go.
After over a decade of prior social unrest and national humiliation in
Vietnam, many Americans believed that the United States either could not or
should not do much about things beyond its shores.
As time wore on and the nightmare of Vietnam began to fade, fear of the
Soviet Union kept us from crushing the terrorists who killed our diplomats
and blew up our citizens. These were no idle fears, given the Russians
record of butchering 30 million of their own, stationing 300 divisions on
Europes borders, and pointing 7,000 nukes at the United States. And fear of
their malevolence made eminent sense in the volatile Middle East, where the
Russians made direct threats to the Israelis in both the 1967 and 1973 wars,
when the Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi militariestrained, supplied, and
advised by Russianswere on the verge of annihilation. Russian support for
Nassers Pan-Arabism and for Baathism in Iraq and Syria rightly worried cold
warriors, who sensed that the Soviets had their geopolitical eyes on Middle
East oil and a stranglehold over Persian Gulf commerce.
Indeed, these twin pillars of the old American Middle East policyworry over
oil and fear of communistsreigned for nearly half a century, between 1945
and 1991. Such realism, however understandable, was counterproductive in the
long run, since our tacit support for odious anti-communist governments in
Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and North Africa did not address the failure
of such autocracies to provide prosperity and hope for exploding populations
of increasingly poor and angry citizens. We kept Russians out of the oil
fields and ensured safe exports of petroleum to Europe, Japan, and the
United Statesbut at what proved to be the steep price of allowing awful
regimes to deflect popular discontent against us.
Nor was realpolitik always effective. Such illegitimate Arab regimes as the
Saudi royal family initiated several oil embargoes, after all. And
meanwhile, such a policy did not deter the Soviets from busily selling
high-tech weaponry to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, while the KGB helped to train
and fund almost every Arab terrorist group. And indeed, immediately after
the 1991 Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officers discovered
that Soviet-trained Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu Ibrahim had flocked to
Baghdad on the invitation of the Baathist Saddam Hussein: though the Soviet
Union did not interrupt Western petroleum commerce, its well-supplied
surrogates did their fair share of murdering.
Neither thirst for petroleum nor fear of communists, then, adequately
explains our inaction for most of the tumultuous late 1980s and 1990s, when
groups like Hezbollah and al-Qaida came on to the world scene. Gorbachevs
tottering empire had little inclination to object too strenuously when the
United States hit Libya in 1986, recall, and thanks to the growing diversity
and fungibility of the global oil supply, we havent had a full-fledged Arab
embargo since 1979.
Instead, the primary cause for our surprising indifference to the events
leading up to September 11 lies within ourselves. Westerners always have had
a propensity for complacency because of our wealth and freedom; and
Americans in particular have enjoyed a comfortable isolation in being
separated from the rest of the world by two oceans. Yet during the last four
presidential administrations, laxity about danger on the horizon seems to
have become more ingrained than in the days when a more robust United States
sought to thwart communist intrusion into Arabia, Asia, and Africa.
Americans never viewed terrorist outlaw states with the suspicion they once
had toward Soviet communism; they put little pressure on their leaders to
crack down on Middle Eastern autocracy and theocracy as a threat to
security. At first this indifference was understandable, given the stealthy
nature of our enemies and the postcold war relief that, having toppled the
Soviet Union and freed millions in Eastern Europe, we might be at the end of
history. Even the bloodcurdling anti-American shouts from the Beirut street
did not seem as scary as a procession of intercontinental missiles and tanks
on an average May Day parade in Moscow.
Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and the PLO were more like fleas on a sleeping dog:
bothersome rather than lethal; to be flicked away occasionally rather than
systematically eradicated. Few paid attention to Usama bin Ladins infamous
February 1998 fatwa: The rule to kill Americans and their alliescivilians
and militaryis a sacred duty for any Muslim. Those who noticed thought it
just impotent craziness, akin to Sartres fatuous quip during the Vietnam
War that he wished for a nuclear strike against the United States to end its
imperial aspirations. No one thought that a raving maniac in an Afghan cave
could kill more Americans in a single day than the planes of the Japanese
imperial fleet off Pearl Harbor.
But still, how did things as odious to liberal sensibilities as Pan-Arabism,
Islamic fundamentalism, and Middle Eastern dictatorshipwhich squashed
dissent, mocked religious tolerance, and treated women as chattelbecome
reinvented into alternate discourses deserving a sympathetic pass from the
righteous anger of the United States when Americans were murdered overseas?
Was it that spokesmen for terrorist regimes mimicked the American Leftin
everything from dress, vocabulary, and appearances on the lecture
circuitand so packaged their extremism in a manner palatable to Americans?
Why, after all, were Americans patient with remonstrations from University
of Virginia alumna Hanan Ashrawi, rather than asking precisely how such a
wealthy Christian PLO apparatchik really felt about the Palestinian
Authoritys endemic corruption, the spendthrift Parisian Mrs. Arafat, the
terrorists around Arafat himself, the spate of honor killings of women in
the West Bank, the censorship of the Palestinian press, suicide murdering by
Arafat affiliates, and the lynching of suspects by Palestinian police?
Rather than springing from realpolitik, sloth, or fear of oil cutoffs, much
of our appeasement of Middle Eastern terrorists derived from a new sort of
anti-Americanism that thrived in the growing therapeutic society of the
1980s and 1990s. Though the abrupt collapse of communism was a dilemma for
the Left, it opened as many doors as it shut. To be sure, after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, few Marxists could argue for a state-controlled economy or
mouth the old romance about a workers paradisenot with scenes of East
German families crammed into smoking clunkers lumbering over potholed roads,
like American pioneers of old on their way west. But if the creed of the
socialist republics was impossible to take seriously in either economic or
political terms, such a collapse of doctrinaire statism did not discredit
the gospel of forced egalitarianism and resentment against prosperous
capitalists. Far from it.
If Marx receded from economics departments, his spirit reemerged among our
intelligentsia in the novel guises of post-structuralism, new historicism,
multiculturalism, and all the other dogmas whose fundamental tenet was that
white male capitalists had systematically oppressed women, minorities, and
Third World people in countless insidious ways. The font of that collective
oppression, both at home and abroad, was the rich, corporate, Republican,
and white United States.
The fall of the Soviet Union enhanced these newer post-colonial and
liberation fields of study by immunizing their promulgators from charges of
fellow-traveling or being dupes of Russian expansionism. Communisms demise
likewise freed these trendy ideologies from having to offer some wooden,
unworkable Marxist alternative to the West; thus they could happily remain
entirely critical, sarcastic, and cynical without any obligation to suggest
something better, as witness the nihilist signs at recent protest marches
proclaiming: I Love Iraq, Bomb Texas.
>From writers like Arundhati Roy and Michel Foucault (who anointed Khomeini
a kind of mystic saint who would usher in a new political spirituality
that would transfigure the world) and from old standbys like Frantz Fanon
and Jean-Paul Sartre (to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with
one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same
time), there filtered down a vague notion that the United States and the
West in general were responsible for Third World misery in ways that
transcended the dull old class struggle. Endemic racism and the legacy of
colonialism, the oppressive multinational corporation and the humiliation
and erosion of indigenous culture brought on by globalization and a smug,
self-important cultural condescensionall this and more explained poverty
and despair, whether in Damascus, Teheran, or Beirut.
There was victim status for everybody, from gender, race, and class at home
to colonialism, imperialism, and hegemony abroad. Anyone could play in these
area studies that cobbled together the barrio, the West Bank, and the
freedom fighter into some sloppy global union of the oppresseda far
hipper enterprise than rehashing Das Kapital or listening to a six-hour
harangue from Fidel.
Of course, pampered Western intellectuals since Diderot have always dreamed
up a noble savage, who lived in harmony with nature precisely because of
his distance from the corruption of Western civilization. But now this fuzzy
romanticism had an updated, political edge: the bearded killer and wild-eyed
savage were not merely better than we because they lived apart in a
pre-modern landscape. No: they had a right to strike back and kill
modernizing Westerners who had intruded into and disrupted their better
worldwhether Jews on Temple Mount, women in Westernized dress in Teheran,
Christian missionaries in Kabul, capitalist profiteers in Islamabad,
whiskey-drinking oilmen in Riyadh, or miniskirted tourists in Cairo.
An Ayatollah Khomeini who turned back the clock on female emancipation in
Iran, who murdered non-Muslims, and who refashioned Iranian state policy to
hunt down, torture, and kill liberals nevertheless seemed to liberal Western
eyes as preferable to the Shaha Western-supported anti-communist, after
all, who was engaged in the messy, often corrupt task of bringing Iran from
the tenth to the twentieth century, down the arduous, dangerous path that,
as in Taiwan or South Korea, might eventually lead to a consensual,
capitalist society like our own.
Yet in the new world of utopian multiculturalism and knee-jerk
anti-Americanism, in which a Noam Chomsky could proclaim Khomeinis gulag to
be independent nationalism, reasoned argument was futile. Indeed, how
could critical debate arise for those committed to social change, when no
universal standards were to be applied to those outside the West? Thanks to
the doctrine of cultural relativism, oppressed peoples either could not be
judged by our biased and constructed values (false universals, in Edward
Saids infamous term) or were seen as more pristine than ourselves,
uncorrupted by the evils of Western capitalism.
Who were we to gainsay Khomeinis butchery and oppression? We had no way of
understanding the nuances of his new liberationist and nationalist Islam.
Now back in the hands of indigenous peoples, Iran might offer the world an
alternate path, a different discourse about how to organize a society that
emphasized native values (of some sort) over mere profit.
So at precisely the time of these increasingly frequent terrorist attacks,
the silly gospel of multiculturalism insisted that Westerners have neither
earned the right to censure others, nor do they possess the intellectual
tools to make judgments about the relative value of different cultures. And
if the initial wave of multiculturalist relativism among the elitescoupled
with the age-old romantic forbearance for Third World rogueryexplained
tolerance for early unpunished attacks on Americans, its spread to our
popular culture only encouraged more.
This nonjudgmentalismessentially a form of nihilismdeemed everything from
Sudanese female circumcision to honor killings on the West Bank merely
different rather than odious. Anyone who has taught freshmen at a state
university can sense the fuzzy thinking of our undergraduates: most come to
us prepped in high schools not to make value judgments about other
peoples who are often victims of American oppression. Thus, before
female-hating psychopath Mohamed Atta piloted a jet into the World Trade
Center, neither Western intellectuals nor their students would have taken
him to task for what he said or condemned him as hypocritical for his
parasitical existence on Western society. Instead, without logic but with
plenty of romance, they would more likely have excused him as a victim of
globalization or of the biases of American foreign policy. They would have
deconstructed Attas promotion of anti-Semitic, misogynist, Western-hating
thought, as well as his conspiracies with Third World criminals, as anything
but a danger and a pathology to be remedied by deportation or incarceration.
It was not for nothing that on November 17, 1979less than two weeks after
the militants stormed the American embassy in Teheranthe Ayatollah Khomeini
ordered the release of 13 female and black hostages, singling them out as
part of the brotherhood of those oppressed by the United States and cloaking
his ongoing slaughter of Iranian opponents and attacks on United States
sovereignty in a self-righteous anti-Americanism. Twenty-five years later,
during the anti-war protests of last spring, a group called Act Now to Stop
War and End Racism sang the same foolish chorus in its call for
demonstrations: Members of the Muslim Community, Antiwar Activists,
Latin-American Solidarity Groups and People From All Over the United States
Unite to Say: We Are All Palestinians!
The new cult of romantic victimhood became gospel in most Middle East
departments in American universities. Except for the courageous Bernard
Lewis, Daniel Pipes, and Fouad Ajami, few scholars offered any analysis that
might confirm more astute Americans in their vague sense that in the Middle
East, political autocracy, statism, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and
gender apartheid accounted for poverty and failure. And if few wished to
take on Islamofascism in the 1990sindeed, Steven Emersons chilling 1994
documentary Jihad in America set off a storm of protest from U.S.
Muslim-rights groups and prompted death threats to the produceralmost no
one but Samuel Huntington dared even to broach the taboo subject that there
might be elements within doctrinaire Islam itself that could easily lead to
intolerance and violence and were therefore at the root of any clash of
civilizations.
Instead, most experts explained why violent fanatics might have some
half-legitimate grievance behind their deadly harvest each year of a few
Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. These experts cautioned
that, instead of bombing and shooting killers abroad who otherwise would
eventually reach us at home, Americans should take care not to disturb
Iranian terrorists during Ramadanrather than to remember that Muslims
attacked Israel precisely during that holy period. Instead of condemning
Wahhabis for the fascists that they were, we were instead apprised that such
holy men of the desert and tent provided a rapidly changing and often
Western-corrupted Saudi Arabia with a vital tether to the stability of its
romantic nomadic past. Rather than recognizing that Yasser Arafats
Tunisia-based Fatah organization was a crime syndicate, expert opinion
persuaded us to empower it as an indigenous liberation movement on the West
Bankonly to destroy nearly two decades worth of steady Palestinian
economic improvement.
Neither oil-concerned Republicans nor multicultural Democrats were ready to
expose the corrupt American relationship with Saudi Arabia. No country is
more culpable than that kingdom in funding extremist madrassas and
subsidizing terror, or more antithetical to liberal American values from
free speech to religious tolerance. But Saudi propagandists learned from the
Palestinians the value of constructing their own victimhood as a
long-oppressed colonial people. Call a Saudi fundamentalist mullah a
fascist, and you can be sure youll be tarred as an Islamophobe.
Even when Middle Easterners regularly blew us up, the Clinton
administration, unwilling to challenge the new myth of Muslim victimhood,
transformed Middle Eastern terrorists bent on destroying America into
wayward individual criminals who did not spring from a pathological culture.
Thus, Clinton treated the first World Trade Center bombing as only a
criminal justice matterwhich of course allowed the United States to avoid
confronting the issue and taking on the messy and increasingly unpopular
business the Bush administration has been engaged in since September 11.
Clinton dispatched FBI agents, not soldiers, to Yemen and Saudi Arabia after
the attacks on the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers. Yasser Arafat,
responsible in the 1970s for the murder of a U.S. diplomat in the Sudan,
turned out to be the most frequent foreign visitor to the Clinton Oval
Office.
If the Clintonian brand of appeasement reflected both a deep-seated
tolerance for Middle Eastern extremism and a reluctance to wake comfortable
Americans up to the danger of a looming war, he was not the only one naive
about the threat of Islamic fascism. Especially culpable was the Democratic
Party at large, whose post-Vietnam foreign policy could not sanction the use
of American armed force to protect national interests but only to accomplish
purely humanitarian ends as in the interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and
Bosnia.
Indeed, the recent Democratic primaries reveal just how far this disturbing
trend has evolved: the foreign-policy positions of John Kerry and Howard
Dean on Iraq and the Middle East were far closer to those of extremists like
Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich than to current American policy under George
W. Bush. Indeed, buffoons or conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky, Michael
Moore, and Al Franken often turned up on the same stage as would-be
presidents. When Moore, while endorsing Wesley Clark, called an American
president at a time of war a deserter, when the mendacious Sharpton
lectured his smiling fellow candidates on the Bush administrations lies
about Iraq, and when Al Gore labeled the presidents action in Iraq a
betrayal of America, the surrender of the mainstream Democrats to the
sirens of extremism was complete. Again, past decorum and moderation go out
the window when the pretext is saving indigenous peoples from American
oppression.
The consensus for appeasement that led to September 11, albeit suppressed
for nearly two years by outrage over the murder of 3,000, has reemerged in
criticism over the ongoing reconstruction of Iraq and George Bushs
prosecution of the War on Terror.
The tired voices that predicted a litany of horrors in October 2001the
impassable peaks of Afghanistan, millions of refugees, endemic starvation,
revolution in the Arab street, and violations of Ramadannow complain,
incorrectly, that 150,000 looted art treasures were the cost of guarding the
Iraqi oil ministry, that Halliburton pipelines and refineries were the sole
reason to remove Saddam Hussein, and that Christian fundamentalists and
fifth-columnist neoconservatives have fomented a senseless revenge plot
against Muslims and Arabs. Whether they complained before March 2003 that
America faced death and ruin against Saddams Republican Guard, or two
months later that in bullying fashion we had walked over a suddenly impotent
enemy, or three months later still that, through incompetence, we were
taking casualties and failing to get the power back on, leftist critics
only constant was their predictable dislike of America.
Military historians might argue that, given the enormity of our task in
Iraqliberating 26 million from a tyrant and implanting democracy in the
regionthe tragic loss of more than 500 Americans in a years war and peace
was a remarkable sign of our care and expertise in minimizing deaths.
Diplomats might argue that our past efforts at humanitarian reconstruction,
with some idealistic commitment to consensual government, have a far better
track record in Germany, Japan, Korea, Panama, and Serbia than our strategy
of exiting Germany after World War I, of leaving Iraq to Saddam after 1991,
of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban once the Russians were stopped, of
skipping out from Haiti or of fleeing Somalia. Realist students of arms
control might argue that the recent confessions of Pakistans nuclear
roguery, the surrender of the Libyan arsenal, and the invitation of the UN
inspectors into Iran were the dividends of resolute American action in Iraq.
Colonel Khadafy surely came clean not because of Jimmy Carters peace
missions, UN resolutions, or EU diplomats.
But dont expect any sober discussion of these contentions from the Left.
Their gloom and doom about Iraq arises precisely from the anti-Americanism
and romanticization of the Third World that once led to our appeasement and
now seeks its return. When John Kerry talks of mysterious prominent
Europeans he has met (but whose names he will not divulge) who, he says,
pray for his election in hopes of ending George Bushs Iraqi nightmare,
perhaps he has in mind people like the Chamberlainesque European Commission
president Romano Prodi, who said in the wake of the recent mass murder in
Spain: Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force
alone. Perhaps he has in mind, also, the Spanish electorate, which believes
it can find security from al-Qaida terrorism by refuting all its past
support for Americas role in the Middle East. But of course if the
terrorists understand that, in lieu of resolve, they will find such
appeasement a mere 48 hours after a terrorist attack, then all previously
resolute Western democraciesItaly, Poland, Britain, and the United
Statesshould expect the terrorists to murder their citizens on the election
eve in hopes of achieving just such a Spanish-style capitulation.
In contrast, George W. Bush, impervious to such self-deception, has, in a
mere two and a half years, reversed the perilous course of a
quarter-century. Since September 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam
Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual
government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything
from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from
Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic charities, scattered al-Qaida,
turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up
terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran, and Pakistan to come
clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another September
11and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example
presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time,
at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that Americaalone if need bewill
neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war
that they started.
As Jimmy Carter also proved in November 1979, one man really can make a
difference.
<><><
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