| Tuesday, July 13, 2004 |
14:22 - As if it weren't obvious
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/27202.htm
|
(top)  |
This John Podhoretz column is actually quite a good read. He raises some good points that follow from this:
JOHN Kerry has finally spoken the words that make the November election an unambiguous choice. On "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, according to the official transcript released by CBS News, Kerry said: "I am against the — the war."
He tried to qualify them, to fudge them a bit, but no matter. The words are now out there and can't be taken back.
Oh, but he'll try. He'll say the opposite, and then switch back again, for every audience he talks to between now and November. After all, now he'll have to. Stupid economy keeps getting better, and now he has to find something new to berate Bush for. He can't even say he lied anymore.
What I want to know is this: How, after Sunday night, could a President Kerry ask a single man or woman in the U.S. armed forces to risk his or her life in Iraq when he is "against the — the war"? Don't simple honesty and decency demand that Kerry immediately announce his plans for a complete withdrawal from Iraq?
Kerry has made no such announcement. In fact, he continues to proclaim his support for a huge American presence in Iraq on the grounds that "the world has a stake in . . . a stable Iraq."
He never speaks about the Iraq war in terms of protecting America from terrorism, or advancing democracy in the Muslim Middle East, or liberating a suffering people from more than 30 years of tyranny and chaos.
He offers no cause higher or nobler than "stability."
That cannot stand. Kerry cannot lead this country to a successful resolution of the hostilities in Iraq if the only positive value he sees in victory is "stability." The country won't stand for it.
Kerry may share JFK's initials, but right now, the president he most resembles is Richard Milhous Nixon — the very man he condemned in 1971 for not wanting to be "the first president to lose a war."
Nixon did become the first president to lose a war.
If John Kerry becomes president, he'll be the second.
Uh huh. You know, the news about the Philippines, and the stark contrast between Bush's and Kerry's approaches to the war and terrorism, are perfect illustrations of the whole central point of everything we've all been writing about for the past three years: Attitude is what this war is about. Not conquest, not foreign aid, not oil interests, not alliances, none of those postmodern silly reasons we're all used to for going to war. This is all a matter of attitude. You know how even a decade ago we'd all internalized the notion of an embattled President sitting in a smoke-filled room, growling, "We don't negotiate with terrorists"? That was the attitude that was understood to be the only sensible course of action, in everything from Star Trek to Saturday-morning superhero cartoons. We don't negotiate with terrorists. Attitude is paramount. Because if you do negotiate with terrorists, if you let your attitude slip, they win. That's all they want, and you're giving it to them.
Now, even as England counsels its citizens to "adopt a submissive posture" when mugged, and give the attacker whatever he wants and don't attempt self-defense at all—we seem to be embarked on a global re-education program to convince the Western world that the solution to any threat is to simply give in to it, buy it off, and then seek justice—if any is to be had—from some paternal body of latent authority. Mugger steals your purse at knife-point? Give it to him and call the cops. Terrorists blow up your buildings? Do whatever they say, then ask the UN to draft a resolution condemning the act.
Spain and the Philippines have shown that they think the best way to respond to terrorists taking their citizens hostage and blowing up their trains is to take the terrorists at their word and fulfill their demands—because hey, then they'll go away and be nice, right?
Those of us who seem to remember something about the inalienable right to self-defense—and about how using terror to achieve one's demands is a tactic that should never, ever be rewarded with success—are finding ourselves more and more alone in the world.
But we remember what a difference attitude makes. We remember our self-defense courses that taught us to strike a threatening posture, to brandish a gun, to make it clear to the mugger that we are not going to be an easy target—which will make him skedaddle, since he's out there looking for easy targets, not to get beat up. And we remember that the absolute last thing you want to do, when attacked by terrorists, is to give even the slightest impression that you're taking their demands seriously. You treat them like vermin. You react with unreasonable force. You make sure they understand that getting you angry is not something they want to do.
There were those of us who wanted to respond to 9/11 by nuking Mecca; and of course, our civilized and tolerant natures won out in the first nanosecond of discussion, and that option was never really taken seriously. Of course it wasn't. But that impulse was there; among serious, intelligent people who understand the nature of war, the desire to mount a response way, way out of proportion with the scale of the attack itself was always there, floating in the back of our minds. It's what made us go to Afghanistan as quickly as practicable after 9/11. It's what made us go to Iraq to sweep out whatever looked like a potential threat. And, well, that's why al Qaeda has been focusing on other countries than the U.S. since then. They know we're not an easy target; and they also know that there are other countries who are.
Sucks to be them; but they know the rules of the game they're playing. Or ought to.
Kerry's approach to the war will be to rein in all our attitude. We'll fold up the tents, call off the dogs, go back to minding our own business like we were doing on 9/10. Those who vote for Kerry because he opposes the war (at heart, even if he tries to take back his words) are specifically voting for this change in our attitude: they want to see us negotiate, form alliances, be friendly and welcoming and forgiving. To adopt a submissive posture. To cower in the alley when the mugger tackles us with a knife, to hand over our purse and then—if we're still alive—to call the cops. Who, no doubt, will put out an APB, much may it threaten the attacker whose face you never saw and who slunk away silently into the shadows with your goods and your dignity.
I don't think the American people as a whole have forgotten what it means to be the belligerent, bristling, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, pugnacious people we once liked to imagine ourselves to be. We still like Popeye better than Captain Planet, after all. It's still in our blood somewhere—even if just in reliquary earthy expressions like "in our blood"—to understand the importance of attitude. Now that the Presidential race, as if there had been any doubt before, has reduced itself to a choice between being badasses or being wusses, I do think more of us will choose the former; because we realize that there's always time to dabble in the arts, but not when the museum is burning down. And you don't wear silk dresses on the city streets at night.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
