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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
13:57 - Rallying Sense

(top) link
A couple of really good pieces just recently got linked from InstaPundit; after what went on this weekend, I expected as much, but it's refreshing to see it arrive right on schedule. First, there's Mark Steyn's National Post column that takes to pieces the placard-holding-protester mentality, such as it is. If people continue to insist upon chestnuts such as America as the "real terrorists" and Bush as the next Hitler after reading this, there's probably not much more that can be said to them.
If everybody thought like Saturday's marchers, it would be curtains for all of us. But we're not quite there yet, and reality will be breaking in very soon. Saying that Bush is the real "weapon of mass destruction" is awful cute the first nine or ten thousand times, but only if you live in Toronto or Paris or Madrid. Viewed by an Iraqi from the reality of Basra, it's pathetic.
And then there's this post by Brian Micklethwait on Samizdata that goes over the probable Long View on the War on Terror: the stuff that we're not being told about now because to do so would jeopardize the entire enterprise. Bush told us last September that the war would be long and difficult, and yet we assumed that he was only trying to set low expectations for a campaign in Afghanistan or something, so we wouldn't be disappointed when we still had troops in Tora Bora come March. But that's not what he meant. He meant this war will, literally, take years.
Meanwhile, whatever Blair or the Brits or the French or the Timbuktooans might say or think, the USA plan is to take Iraq, and following that, over the next few years, to make itself a lot safer than now from terrorist attacks by (a) chasing terrorists, absolutely everywhere on the planet, and by (b) putting whatever pressure is necessary on any government anywhere which is now not chasing terrorists to switch to chasing terrorists with comparable zeal to the USA, thereby making the USA, and the West and the World in general, massively safer from terrorist attack than we all are now. And if that also makes the USA a whole lot more of a force in the world even than it is now, well, the Americans can live with that.
Maybe people weren't taking Bush seriously when he alluded to this, but it's what I've been assuming all along. And as for the accusations of American "empire", well-- read the comments following the article, which contain a number of sound arguments as to why America is neither equipped for nor inclined toward such a thing.

It's going to be a hard slog, and not all of it's going to be faraway news items that we can read about safely from our computers. This is bigger than oil, it's bigger than nukes. Really-- it is. And yet it's probably going to take the hindsight of 2010 or 2020 to really prove that to us.


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