Winning still matters, etc...

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 1:36 PM -0700 10/30/04, Bill Stewart wrote:
>RAH about it being a
>_geodesic_ neo-{Khan, con-men} empire

Okay. Enough pissing in the wind. Time for a Turd Sandwich...

Cheers,
RAH
--------

<http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson200410290825.asp>

The National Review
 October 29, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
The Power of Will
Winning still matters.

Victor Davis Hanson


The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war
against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the
struggle. Indeed, the Middle East, for all its revenue from inflated oil
prices, has a smaller economy than Spain's. It has never won a war against
a Western power. Arab nations lost in 1967, 1973, 1991, and 2004. Hence the
fatwas must go back to millennia-old glories about Saladin, the siege of
Cyprus, the Moors, and the Caliphate - about the last examples of Islamic
victories over the West. The Middle East's only successes in 1956, or
during the 1980s in Afghanistan, were due to either a United States' veto
of British operations or the importation of American stinger missiles. The
Iranian hostage crisis, Lebanon, and Mogadishu were Western retreats, not
battlefield defeats - grievous, yes, but hardly arbiters of relative
military advantage. The present terrorists are a nasty sort, but they are
still not the SS or millions of Tojo's crack Japanese troops; nor do they
have the organization or the skill of the Vietcong or NVA. These are losing
hundreds of jihadists every week in Iraq and have failed to retake
Afghanistan.

So why do the now-surrounded and desperate insurgents in Fallujah think
they can prevail, especially after the rout of the Taliban in six weeks and
the implementation of a consensual government in less than three years in
Afghanistan? In a word, the jihadists and their fellow-travelers are once
again convinced that this time it will be different because the West, and
the United States in particular, have neither the patience nor the will to
endure their primeval killing of a post-Saddam Iraq.

 Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive
devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military.
Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it. In
a globalized world of instant communications, a bin Laden or Zarqawi trusts
that most of us would prefer to take out the garbage than watch a
blood-curdling video clip of yet another Western hostage kneeling before a
half-dozen psychopaths as they begin to saw off his vertebrae. They hope
that we the sickened ask, "Why waste our billions and hundreds of lives on
such primordial folk?" - wrongly equating 26 million who wish freedom with
a few thousand criminals and terrorists.

The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers
cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the
bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to
harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees
to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim
or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify
the trauma and savagery of their attack - and do so often enough to make
300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." The message of
Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their
brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our
will, is the target.

 Al Qaeda and their appendages in Iraq do not know the requisite numbers of
dead or wounded Americans necessary to break the resolve of the United
States, but brag that with 1,000 fatalities they are nearing their goal -
and thus a few more will give them a change of administration, schedules
for withdrawal, an abandoned interim Iraqi government ripe to pluck, and a
Lebanon-like paradise to reconstruct the lost sanctuary of Afghanistan. In
other words, they are desperate for a reprieve from their looming
destruction. Al Qaeda - "the Base" - without a base is not much of a
terrorist organization since its own proud appellation has become an ironic
joke.

Despite the three-week victory over the Baathists, there is some reason for
the Islamists' optimism that they can break our will - given a decade of
nonchalance after the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar towers,
the USS Cole, and an assortment of other unanswered murders in the 1990s.
The April withdrawal from Fallujah - whether due to worry about Iraqi
civilian or our own casualties - was a grievous blow. The Spanish debacle
was an even worse Western defeat. Killing about 200 Spaniards got a
Socialist and anti-American prime minister elected and an almost-immediate
troop withdrawal from Iraq - even though such appeasement was met not with
thanks but with a subsequent attempt to blow up the judges of the Spanish
High Court.

Meanwhile, here at home, John Kerry talks about timetables for departure
and cessation of the present course. His supporters on the extreme left
from George Soros to Michael Moore blame George Bush, not Osama bin Laden
or Saddam Hussein, for the current televised butchery. There is a reason
why candidate Kerry now painfully insists that he would not precipitously
withdraw - because everyone else worldwide, from a Chirac and Schroeder to
Arafat and most of the Arab world - suspect that, in fact, he will.

 An American flight would shame Tony Blair and John Howard, leave eastern
Europe to the bullying of Paris and Berlin, destroy the Iraq interim
government, take the heat off Arab autocracies, and send a message that
American policy was back to Clintonian-like law enforcement, replete with
jargon such as "sensitive" and "nuisance." It does not matter what Kerry
would "really" wish to do, since the last two years of campaign rhetoric
have earned him the worldwide reputation of the Bush antithesis, and thus
his victory would, rightly or wrongly, be interpreted as a complete
rejection of toppling Saddam and fostering a constitutional government in
his place. His supporters and financial backers on the left would not
tolerate anything less than a withdrawal.

 Because of our astounding weaponry and superb military, the terrorists in
Fallujah count on the help of such postmodern Western guilt and internecine
blame to supply constraints on the American military every bit as effective
as the old Soviet nuclear deterrent. Again, a Michael Moore - or so they
believe - is worth an entire jihadist cell. Our parents were terrified
that, should America resort to military force abroad, they would be nuked;
we are even more scared that our lethality will earn us the parlor disdain
of the French and Germans. The terrorists are assured that the Western
press is obsessed with Abu Ghraib, but not at all with Saddam's necropolis
or their own slaughter of innocents. They suspect that those who endured
Omaha and Utah or scaled Suribachi are long sleeping in their graves, and
that a few thousand creeps in Fallujah scare us more than a quarter million
in the Bulge did our parents.

So yes, it is a strange war. Jihadists are amused that a few American
soldiers, worried over their safety, can refuse orders, call 7,000 miles
home in anguish, and expect that their complaints, handed over by Mom to
the local TV station, will turn up on national cable news before their own
commanders in the field even know what is up. A teenaged terrorist with a
RPG, being filmed as he is killed, is every bit as an effective soldier
through his globally broadcast death than had he lived on to hit his target
Humvee with his rocket in the first place. We don't ask, "Which
school-builder or power-restorer was he trying to obliterate?" but rather
"Why did we have to kill him?"

When the Islamists behead a tearful Englishman or American, it is more
likely that his surviving dad or sibling back home will be on television
all over the Middle East within minutes damning Tony Blair or George Bush,
without a word of censure for the Dark-Age head-loppers. After all, we are
not Nepalese who storm the local mosque and put the fear of God into
Islamists when they butcher our own. We are more likely to be frightened,
turn on ourselves, and condemn some American somewhere who cannot stop
"this."

 But cannot our self-induced forbearance vanish as soon as we decide enough
is enough? Should the American government ignore the EU hysteria, tell Kofi
Annan to worry about his son's crooked shenanigans and not Americans'
killing terrorists, and simply take Fallujah - as part of a larger effort
to correct the laxity of the past and finish the war - then we would surely
win. The fallout would be as salutary as our present restraint is
disastrous. Like the murderous Pakistani madrassa zealots who flocked to
Tora Bora only to be incinerated, Fallujah would not stand as a mecca for
the jihadists, but an Armageddon better to watch on television than die in.

 The truth is that war remains the same the more it changes. For all the
technological gadgetry, foreign landscapes, baffling global communications,
and endemic pacifism of the present age, war is still a struggle of the
human spirit. The morality, materiel, and technology are all on our side.
But we are confused in this postmodern age that such advantages should
automatically equate to near-instantaneous and costless victory as they
sometimes do in Panama and Serbia - as if the heart of the medieval
caliphate next to Syria and Iran, replete with terrorism and a 30-year past
of mass murder, is a mere Haiti or Grenada.

 In the heart of even the most ardent liberal lies a dormant but still
alive desire for victory, and in every strutting hawk there lingers the
fear of abject defeat. Had we secured Iraq by June 2003, the sputtering
Kerry candidacy would by now have been faulting Bush for not going into
Iran. But blink, falter, and witness beheadings and hostage-taking on
television, and Kerry can reinvent himself as the apostle of peace all
along - and a bizarre group of creepy people come out of the woodwork
professing Biblical wisdom about George Bush's purported catastrophes.

 In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped
and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about
"fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional"
conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to
win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a
plan than George Bush - because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other
than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give
the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the promise of
autonomous freedom, to moderate Iraqis. Victory on the battlefield - not
the mysterious diplomacy of "wise men," or German and French sanction, or
Arab League support - alone will allow Iraq an opportunity for humane
government.

 Meanwhile, we all vote. One candidate urges us to return to the mindset of
pre-September 11 - law enforcement dealing with terrorists as nuisances. He
claims the policies that have led to an absence of another attack at home,
the end of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, idealistic efforts to extend
freedom, and radical and positive changes in Pakistan, Libya, the West
Bank, and the Gulf have made things worse. In contrast, the other reminds
us that we are in a real war against horrific enemies and are no longer
passive targets, but will fight the terrorists on their home turf, win, and
leave behind humane government. No choice could be clearer. It is America's
call.

 - Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
-----

The New York Post


  A 'FAHRENHEIT 9/11' FAN
  BY JOHN PODHORETZ


October 30, 2004 --  CONGRATULATIONS, Michael Moore - America's worst enemy
and one of the world's most evil men is a big fan of yours.

 The most startling moment on the Osama bin Laden videotape shown yesterday
was his description of the morning of 9/11, which is certainly derived -
albeit in garbled form - from a viewing of Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11."

 "It never occurred to us that he, the commander in chief of the country,
would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone,
because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more
important," bin Laden said.

 Just think. If the reprehensible Moore wins an Oscar for his disgusting
piece of propaganda, Hollywood will be seconding the favorable opinion of
Osama bin Laden.

 I want to caution my friends on the Right about claiming that the Osama
tape somehow is an endorsement of John Kerry. No doubt bin Laden would like
to claim credit for changing the American president. Thankfully, the
American people know better than to believe bin Laden will somehow go
easier on us if John Kerry wins on Tuesday.

 They know this monster attacked America when Bill Clinton was president
and that he and his minions will continue to plot the mass murder of
Americans no matter who is in the White House.

 But something does jump out at you when you consider the message bin Laden
was delivering to the United States. It was remarkably defensive, with bin
Laden offering some kind of bizarre truce to the American people: "To the
U.S. people," he said, "my talk is to you about the best way to avoid
another disaster."

 How thoughtful of him.

 He told us that neither Bush nor Kerry could protect America: "Your
security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda," he said. "Your
security is in your own hands."

 In other words, if the American people would somehow agree to consider the
security needs of bin Laden and his followers (whether that means just al
Qaeda or the entire Arab and Muslim world isn't clear), we'd be safe.


 "Do not play with our security, and spontaneously you will secure
yourself," he said.

 This is, I think, a profound rhetorical change from the man who vowed in
2002 that "the United States will not survive, will not feel any safety or
any security."

 Usually, bin Laden and his people tend to use the most purple and
terrifying language about the damage they're going to do to the United
States, as we saw earlier in the week when the American al Qaeda follower
"Azzam" said on his videotape that "the streets of America will run red
with blood."

 Now bin Laden is talking truce.

 What's changed, perhaps, is the ferocity of the American response to 9/11.
Since then, Osama has been on the run, his Afghanistan safe haven
destroyed, his movement under relentless financial and military assault. By
offering America a deal, no matter how twisted and pointless the deal might
be, the quality that he might be showing us isn't strength, but weakness.

 Maybe he's feeling the weariness suggested in the videotaped statement
last month by his No. 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri: "Oh young men of Islam," he
said, "if we are killed or captured, you should carry on the fight."

 Maybe they're buckling.

-----
<http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson.asp>

The National Review

Victor Davis Hanson

October 15, 2004, 8:23 a.m.
The Therapeutic Choice
A war for our lives, or a nuisance to our lifestyle?



Americans are presented with a choice in this election rare in our history.
This is not 1952, when Democrats and Republicans did not differ too much on
the need to stay in Korea, or even 1968 when Humphrey and Nixon alike did
not wish to withdraw unilaterally from Vietnam. It is more like 1972 or
1980, when a naove McGovern/Dukakis worldview was sharply at odds with the
Nixon/Reagan tragic acknowledgement of the need to confront Soviet-inspired
Communism. Is it to be more aid, talk, indictments, and summits - or a
tough war to kill the terrorists and change the conditions that created
them?

Mr. Kerry believes that we must return to the pre-9/11 days when terrorism
was but a "nuisance." In his mind, that was a nostalgic sort of time when
the terrorist mosquito lazily buzzed about a snoring America. And we in
somnolent response merely swatted it away with a cruise missile or a few
GPS bombs when embassies and barracks were blown up. Keep the tribute of
dead Americans low, and the chronic problem was properly analogous to
law-enforcement's perpetual policing of gambling and prostitution. Many of
us had previously written off just such naoveti, but we never dreamed that
our suspicions would be confirmed so explicitly by Kerry himself.

In the now-lost age of unperturbed windsurfing and skiing, things were not
all that bad before al Qaeda overdid it by knocking down skyscrapers and a
corner of the Pentagon - followed by George Bush's commensurate
overreaction in Afghanistan and Iraq that brought on all the present messy
and really bothersome cargo of IEDs, beheadings, and promises of dirty
bombs to come. The Taliban and Saddam were, of course, bad sports. But
really, going all the way over there to topple them, implant democracy, and
change the status quo of the Middle East? Tsk, tsk, tsk - well, that was a
bit much, was it not?

Terrorist killing, like the first World Trade Center bombing or the USS
Cole, certainly was not seen as the logical precursor to 9/11 - the
expected wages of a quarter century of appeasement that started with the
weak Carter response to the Iranian hostages and was followed by dead
soldiers, diplomats, and tourists about every other year. No, these were
"incidents" like 9/11 itself - "law-enforcement" issues that called for the
DA, writs, and stern prison sentences, the sort of stuff that barristers
like Kerry, Edwards, Kennedy, and McAuliffe handle so well.

This attitude is part of the therapeutic view of the present struggle that
continually suggests that something we did - not the mass murdering out of
the Dark Age - brought on our present bother that is now "the focus of our
lives." We see this irritation with the inconvenience and sacrifice once
more reemerging in the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the New York Times:
We, not fascists and Islamist psychopaths, are blamed for the mess in Iraq,
the mess in Afghanistan, the mess on the West Bank, and the mess here at
home, but never credited with the first election in 5,000 years in
Afghanistan or consensual government replacing autocracy in the heart of
the ancient caliphate.

 Sometimes our problems arise over our past failure to chastise the
Russians over Chechnya. Or was it not enough attention to Mr. Arafat's
dilemmas? Or maybe we extended prior support for corrupt sheiks? All that
and more - according to rogue CIA "experts," best-selling authors, and the
omnipresent Richard Clarke - earned us the wrath of the Islamists. Thus
surely our past transgressions can be alleviated by present contrition,
dialogue, aid, and policy changes of the European kind.

 To all you of the therapeutic mindset, listen up. We can no more reason
with the Islamic fascists than we could sympathize with the Nazis' demands
over supposedly exploited Germans in Czechoslovakia or the problem of
Tojo's Japan's not getting its timely scrap-metal shipments from
Roosevelt's America. Their pouts and gripes are not intended to be
adjudicated as much as to weaken the resolve of many in the United States
who find the entire "war against terror" too big, or the wrong kind, of a
nuisance.

Instead, read the fatwas. You hear not just of America's injustice in
Palestine or Chechnya - not to mention nothing about saving Kuwait, Bosnia,
Kosovo or Afghanistan of the 1980s - but also of what we did in Spain in
the 15th century and in Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the 12th. The mystery
of September 11, 2001, is not that it happened, but that it did not quite
happen when first tried in 1993 during Bill Clinton's madcap efforts to
move a smiling Arafat into the Lincoln Bedroom and keep our hands off bin
Laden. Only an American with a JD or PhD would cling to the idea that there
was not a connection between Group A Middle Eastern terrorists who attacked
the WTC in 1993 and Group B who finished the job in 2001.

A Kerry presidency, we know now, will go back to the tried and true
institutions so dear to the therapeutic mind that please the elite and
sensitive of our society. How silly that most Americans are about through
with the U.N. Indeed, we Neanderthals want it relegated to something like
the Red Cross tucked away at the Hague, if not on the frontlines in Nigeria
or Bolivia. Yes, we dummies have seen enough of its General Assembly
resolutions aimed at the only democracy in the Middle East, its promotion
of rogue states such as Syria, Cuba, Iran, and Libya to human-rights
watchdogs, its corrupt Oil-for-Food program, and its present general
secretary and his role in nepotism and sweet-heart contracts at the expense
of the Iraqi people. No surprise that a shaken perpetual-president Hosni
Mubarak is calling for a U.N. conference on terror with wonderful Arab
League logic: 'You kill Jews on your own soil, good; you kill them on mine
and lose me money, bad.'

 The artists, musicians, and entertainers have also railed against the war.
In the therapeutic mindset, the refinement and talent of a Sean Penn,
Michael Moore, Al Franken, Bruce Springsteen, or John Fogerty earn respect
when they weigh in on matters of state policy. But in the tragic view, they
can be little more than puppets of inspiration. Their natural gifts are not
necessarily enriched by real education or learning. Indeed, they are just
as likely to be high-school or college dropouts and near illiterates,
albeit with good memories, voices, and looks. The present antics of these
influential millionaire entertainers should remind us why Plato banished
them - worried that we might confuse the inspired creative frenzies of the
artisans with some sort of empirical knowledge. But you can no more sing,
or write, or act al Qaeda away than the equally sensitive novelists and
intellectuals of the 1930s or 1940s could rehabilitate Stalin.

And then there are the new green billionaires who no longer worry about the
struggle to make any more money, much less about state, federal, and
payroll taxes that can eat up half of a person's income. A George Soros may
have made his pile by trying to destroy the British financial system, but
now he wishes to leave the world safe for currency traders to come by
defeating George Bush. The up-from-the-bootstraps struggle to create the
dough for the Heinz fortune is a century past and forgotten - thus the
post-capitalist Teresa in her private jet and John Kerry on his $500,000
power boat can lecture us about Americans' shameless oil profligacy and
George Bush's blood for oil gambit in Iraq.

Our mainstream media also cannot quite believe we are at war with evil
people who wish us dead - something like the crises that have faced all
civilizations at one time or another. Instead, to ponder Rathergate or the
recent ABC memo advocating bias in its reporting is to fathom the arrogance
of the Enlightenment, and the learned's frustration with those of us
less-gifted folk who don't quite wish to follow where they lead us. Such
anointed ones have taken on the burden of saving us from George Bush and
his retrograde ideas. After all, who believes that anyone would really wish
to reinstate a mythical caliphate, a Muslim paradise of sharia, gender
apartheid, and theocracy spreading the globe through Islamic nukes and
biological and chemical bombs? How one dimensional and unsophisticated.

Meanwhile most Americans have already quietly made up their minds. They
think the Democratic party is run not by unionists, farmers, miners,
truckers, and average folk, but by those rich enough not to have to make a
living, and who wish out of either guilt or noblesse oblige to force the
dumber upper middle class to be more sensitive, generous, or utopian.
Americans also believe Europe has lost its way and is bogged down in a
hopeless and soon-to-be scary task of legislating by fiat heaven on earth.
We of the tragic persuasion wish them well with Turkey and their
unassimilated Islamic populations, but we don't want our hurtful combat
troops there after 60 years of subsidized peacekeeping. Americans also
don't care much about the Nobel prizes anymore - not when a Jimmy Carter is
praised after trying to undermine his own president on the eve of war, and
not when the most recent peace-prize winner rants on that AIDS is a
Western-created germ agent unleashed to hurt Africa but silent about $15
billion in American aid to stop what her own continent is spreading.

John Kerry is probably going to lose this election, despite the "Vote for
Change" rock tour, despite Air America, despite Kitty Kelley's fraud hyped
on national media, despite Soros's moveon.org hit pieces, despite
Fahrenheit 9-11, despite the Nobel Prizes and Cannes Film Awards, despite
Rathergate and ABC Memogate, despite the European press, despite Kofi
Annan's remonstrations, despite a barking Senator Harkin or Kennedy,
despite the leaks of rogue CIA Beltway insiders, despite Jimmy Carter's
sanctimonious lectures, despite Joe Wilson, Anonymous, and Richard Clarke -
and more. You all have given your best shot, but I think you are going to
lose.

Why? Because the majority of Americans does not believe you. The majority
is more likely to accept George Bush's tragic view that we really are in a
war for our very survival to stop those who would kill us and to alter the
landscape that produced them - a terrible war that we are winning.

 When all is said and done, it still is as simple as that.

 - Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
  

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'