THE Bush administration fully expects al-Qa'ida to attempt a big terrorist attack in the US between now and November's presidential election, according to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
This should be no surprise to the five or so people who've been reading this blog. Spain has shown that terrorism can work by electing a Socialist government that is pulling Spanish troops out of Iraq. This is simply positive reinforcement of behavior so it only makes sense that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups will continue to do what has been shown to work in the past. Of course, this country is not Spain. In my opinion, there's a better than even chance that, should a major terrorist attack succeed in this country leading up to November 2, the result will be the opposite of what the terrorists want. What they want, of course, is President John Forbes Kerry.
Having said that, I would now like to direct your attention to this article by the inestimable Victor Davis Hanson. It's a long one, but it's well worth reading all the way through.
Fruits of Appeasement
It's so full of good paragraphs that it's hard to pick out just one or two but I'll try:
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 Hitler’s contempt for their weakness. Fifty million dead, the Holocaust, and the near destruction of European civilization were the wages of “appeasement”—a term that early-1930s liberals proudly embraced as far more enlightened than the old idea of “deterrence” and “military readiness."
...
This nonjudgmentalism—essentially a form of nihilism—deemed 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 Atta’s 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.
...
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.
Right now the Democrats hate Bush so much that they're willing to overlook the fact that the downfall of Saddam Hussein put an end to a regime based on fear, torture, and murder. By itself, this is a good thing. But, because it serves the strategic interests of the United States, and especially because it was done by the hated Bushitler, it is unacceptable. The only good use of our military is for purely humanitarian purposes, and then only if a Democrat is in the White House.
No comments:
Post a Comment