| Thursday, October 2, 2003 |
18:25 - Sarindar
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10111
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If this is true...
Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.
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It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.
Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.
Mr. Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.
... And we end up voting Bush out of office purely because of the palatability of the idea that he "lied" about WMD, then it's all over. The terrorists will have won.
Not just them, though. Al Qaeda's actually a side issue in the global game, looked at through this lens. What's really at stake is a century-long war of ideology, where on one side we have the ever-encroaching socialistic forces that prey on the compassion of people in rich and peaceful countries... and on the other, increasingly alone in holding out against those forces, is America. The Cold War had strongly delineated sides, big polar extremes to choose between. But since 1990, when we thought we'd won, it seems to me that all we've done is let our guard down.
The encroachment has continued. Only it's been at such a low level, and embarked upon with such pure and benign of intentions, that we never saw it coming.
It's called the "peace" movement, "green" politics, our old buddy transnational progressivism, and Western self-loathing and revulsion at seeing our own institutions-- the things we'd once looked on with pride and affection, like Levi's and McDonald's and Barbie-- being pulled into far-flung cultures. They all loved us, but we hated ourselves. We hated ourselves for poisoning the world with our gauche impurity. And we fought ourselves whenever we had the opportunity to make the world a better, richer, or more peaceful place.
We were busy for fifty years trying to hold back the Iron Curtain. But the forces trying to hold us back come from within our own borders.
Sure, that's no bad thing, if what you're talking about is "imperialism". (Read this if it's what you think I mean.) But it is a bad thing when the America that the hippies and their modern counterparts mean to restrain is the America that dares to try to do some good in the world, just because it's the right thing to do. "Who are we to say what's right or wrong?" they cry.
Well, it seems to me that we've done a better-than average job of making those judgments so far. Better than some countries I could mention.
But now we've seen exactly what happens when all the sides in this ideological battle, all the ones who have been building up their ranks in secret and in the open for decades, are called upon to show their hands. 9/11 did that-- it brought everyone out of the woodwork, Right and Left, and forced everyone to take sides. In the grand scheme, it looks as though that's the biggest effect 9/11 may in fact have had: it's the closing bell, the shout of pencils down! that tells us to take stock now of how many people stand on which side of the line.
Protests in the streets of cities around the world against the prospect of America freeing twenty-four million people from the grip of the worst tyrant since Hitler have shown one side's numbers, one side's strength. "Human shields". University professors remembering Mogadishu the way we used to remember the Ardennes. Hollywood, our proudest and most uniquely American institution, rallying in a bloc to impose restraint upon our bellicosity. And the news media determined to convert our proudest moment in the modern age, our greatest act of charity and humanity and sacrifice, and our most easily vindicated by anyone looking at it with clear eyes-- into a shameful failure. That is the measure of the opposition's strength.
They're stronger than I ever would have imagined possible.
It's not "protest" when you've gained the upper hand.
All the threads are coming together now. All the grass-roots forces and pressure groups and lobbies that with one hand held up the torch against the bleak bulwarks of the Warsaw Pact, and with the other sifted into our national bloodstream an intravenous drip of a watered-down, sugared-up, tantalizingly addictive stream of the same poison that had doused the far side of those walls-- they've all shown their colors now. All in the name of equality, diversity, peace, conservation, and respect, we've found ourselves not having won the Cold War after all-- but having set ourselves up to lose the Warm War. That's what it's been all along.
Who could be so callous as to take a stand against racial equanimity? Or so hateful as to oppose peace? Or so ghoulish as to fight against environmental controls?
Those questions are exactly the weapons that we were never equipped to defend against. Nor, judging by the snow-blanket silence coming from the White House lately, do we have the means to do so now.
Because it would appear that the forces that want us to pull back, quiet down, leave the world stage, and stop trying to solve other people's problems are in fact stronger than the forces that cling to those old-fashioned notions of justice, fairness, security, and freedom for all.
The only reason that the latter side has been able to make the strides that it has, in Afghanistan and Iraq, is because of a fluke-- a few boxes of hanging-chad ballots in Florida. More and more it appears that if it weren't for the contents of the trunk of a car in Dade County, Saddam would still today be enthroned in Baghdad, and New York might be a denuded ruin or Los Angeles a poisoned wasteland.
"But Los Angeles IS a--" Hush.
More and more it appears that what the people of this country really want is what people like Michael Moore and Peter Camejo want: apologies, capitulation, accession to the practices of the enlightened governments of Europe and Asia, and the voluntary surrender of our nation's armed might-- a gun buyback program for the United States Military-- so as to bring about true global equality and unarmed world government. The people calling in to NPR this morning on the ongoing Recall coverage show, if their sheer numbers were any indication at all, show that there's only so much propaganda we as a people can absorb from the get-the-government-overturning-scoop-or-die media before we start to believe it, facts on the ground be damned. 9/11 brought the world into sharp relief for many people-- but for nearly as many the wound scabbed over far too rapidly, forming an ugly scar as they worried it endlessly, searching for a way to take solace in ritual self-mutilation.
Next year's election will be where the final hand is dealt. It will tell us how many people in this country have been able to weather the battering of the guiltmongers and the doom-seekers and the sowers of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and hold on to what we know is the right course of action for ourselves and for the world-- and how many are ready to cash in, give up, lie down and let blissful slumber overtake our eyes while the Pods placed by the social-progressive Europeans creep ever closer to our bedsides.
If Bush manages to win reelection, there's a chance. It means we have room for a much longer-term plan to be executed, a mandate to do things right in this effort to bring democracy and the rule of law at long last to the last part of the world still mired in medieval theocracy. It will spark outrage from the Left, but it'll be muted-- chastened, driven to the sidelines-- while the voices that gleefully revel in slogans like "Selected not Elected" and "Bush Lied, People Died" have to suck up the fact that they aren't being listened to, that they have no voice and no power after all. They'll have to face the fact that in order to win over a significant portion of the people of this country to your views, you have to grow up a little, walk a mile in the other man's shoes, find out what it is to live the kind of life you were raised to oppose. They'll have to understand that Americans aren't so fickle, so easily duped, so susceptible to cheap shots and low blows and infantile slogans repeated ad nauseum. They'll have to realize that America still believes, for all its faults, in America-- and it's not going to be converting itself into a clone of Canada or England or France (or, for that matter, Nazi Germany) anytime in the foreseeable future.
But if he loses... then it means the forces that have lost their faith in the American ideal, that have banked on the dream of the future they see in Star Trek, that think reality is a subjective and malleable toy that each person has free rein to knead and mold and bat around to his whim... those forces have grown strong enough to defeat those who think otherwise. It means America has changed forever, irreversibly. It means the great Experiment has failed-- the idea that the people can rule themselves, defeating the ages-old cycle of brutal dictators and evil nepotistic tyrannies and aristocratic, manufactured "culture" in favor of the true, vibrant jubilation of the common and everyday man and woman imagining a universe and changing the world, will cease to be a viable force on the global stage just as Marxist communism did.
At the time of the Civil War, Europe watched with ghoulish glee-- praying for the Confederacy to win, and so to dash to pieces this heretical idea of a Union of democratic States that could breach free of history and shame every nation that had not yet let go of its justifications for withholding governing power from its people. Lincoln, by holding the States together at the cost of nearly everything held dear up to that crowning ideal, threw humiliation to those European powers that had hoped so fervently to see America fail-- and in so doing, forced them into their own internal turmoils that led to the crashing overcorrections of nationalism and populism and elitism that eventually coalesced into the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. America got back on its course, but Europe lost its way-- and it took American resolve to put things right again.
The repercussions of WWII lead in direct lines to the Israel/Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam War, the inevitable fall of the Soviet bloc (and sudden renewed hope in Eastern Europe for greater days ahead), and the emergence of America as the world's only superpower, endowed with the ability to change anything, anywhere on the globe, that we see fit, untrammeled by any technological or practical barriers. The only thing keeping America from remaking the world in what it knows to be a successful, intoxicatingly vibrant, deeply human and enlightened image is the reluctance and self-doubt of its own people. And so fearful is that people of the specter of becoming an imperial power, even one whose only "empire" consists of an exportation of ideas, prevents us from accomplishing those goals of supreme benevolence and modernity that it has taken the planet Earth thousands of years of human history just to be able to conceive of. At long last, eight thousand years after Ur, humanity is capable of standing up, of casting away the relics of ancient days that in the absence of a power keeping watch over them divide a people between privileged overclasses and downtrodden masses; free finally of the seduction of communism and its heavy-handed, statist imposition of equality at the expense of individuality, nations can tap the potential of all of their people and become proud, modern, and free. The age of tyranny is over. All that remains is to clean up the last vestiges of it.
If only we have the courage to do so, and the will to deny that we step onto a slippery slope toward Naziism every time we speak of defeating a despotic government and freeing a people. All it takes is to look the self-doubting hordes in the eye and say, loudly, NO! We are not out to enslave the world. We are doing the exact opposite. We have the unique opportunity to do the most good that's ever been done on the face of this planet, and all you can do is pine for a fantasy world? We're doing more than any country ever did before to bring this world a little closer every day to that very fantasy... and yet you oppose it because it means in the process we might end up killing the villains who currently keep it from coming about?
The realities of a world of tyranny and subterfuge and shady backroom deals is evident nowhere as much as in the stories of what went on in Saddam's Iraq-- not least between his doomed regime and a bitter, power-hungry ex-Soviet-bloc cadre of schemers. Yet our propensity for self-doubt causes us to suspect our own government of high treason before we entertain the possibility that we might have the moral high ground, that we only look like we have egg on our faces because we don't cheat. It's that kind of paralysis-- that kind of enslavement to our worst interpretations of everything we do-- that has the opportunity to kill this country's aspirations, to bring to naught everything we've worked for all this time. No other country, indeed not even the whole rest of the world put together, can kill America. But America can commit suicide.
We have a year to prepare-- to decide the direction our sword will be pointed.
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