Amazing what moral clarity can do for world affairs. Now that president Bush has essentially called the U.N.’s bluff, various countries and allies seem to be singing a different tune. Here’s the Saudi story. This is particularly true of the Arab world where strength leads to respect and respect leads to acquiescence. Even Egypt now seems on board. The question now is whether inspectors, backed by military force, can really determine whether Iraq’s potential nuclear capacity is operational. According to one Iraqi defector, the four years since the Clinton administration gave up on policing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have led to elaborate schemes to conceal them at all costs. We’ll see. But at least the burden of proof is now where it should be: on Iraq, not on the U.S. And almost all of that is president Bush’s doing.
CLINTON AND AL QAEDA: If you haven’t yet, read Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary piece of reporting in the New Yorker. It’s not online and it’s endless, but every page tells you something new about the provenance of al Qaeda, its roots in Egyptian radicalism, and its emergence in the 1990s as such a lethal force. But one thing that deeply impressed me is how damning an indictment this piece is of former president Clinton. What Wright shows is that Clinton’s passivity and inconsistency in the face of Islamist terrorism undoubtedly made matters far worse than they otherwise would have been. By engaging in piece-meal, ineffective and disastrous retreats and half-hearted swipes, Clinton not only failed to stop al Qaeda, he gave it new strength and vigor. It started early on with Clinton’s panicked withdrawal from Somalia:
Bin Laden glorified in the fact that his men had trained the Somali militiamen who shot down two American helicopters in the “Black Hawk Down” incident, in October of [1993], prompting president Clinton to withdraw all American soldiers from the country. “Based on the reports we received from our brothers in Somalia,” bin Laden Said, “we learned that they saw the weakness, frailty and cowardice of U.S. troops. Only eighteen U.S. troops were killed. Nonetheless, they fled in the heart of darkness.”… Emboldened by the success of the “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, bin Laden escalated his campaign against America.
When the Islamists saw how Washington responded to their terror, they ratcheted their campaign up. And why wouldn’t they have? Perhaps the worst of all worlds was Clinton’s highly dubious decision to send missiles to attack al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan. Here’s Wright again:
The strikes which, in the big-chested parlance of military planners, were dubbed Operation Infinite Reach, cost American taxpayer seventy-nine million dollars, but they merely exposed the inadequacy of American intelligence. President Clinton later explained that one of the strikes had been aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders,” but the meeting in question had occurred a month earlier … The failure of Operation Infinite Reach established bin Laden as a legendary figure not just in the Muslim world but wherever America, with the clamor of its narcissistic culture and the presence of its military forces, had made itself unwelcome. When bin Laden’s voice came crackling across the radio transmission – “By the grace of God, I am alive!” – the forces of anti-Americanism had found their champion. Those who had objected the the slaughter of innocents in the embassies in East Africa, many of whom were Muslims, were cowed by the popular response to this man whose defiance of America now seemed blessed by divine favor. The day after the strikes, Zawahiri called a reporter in Karachi, with a message: “Tell the Americans that we aren’t afraid of bombardment, threats, and acts of aggression… The war has only just begun; the Americans should now await the answer.”
Part of that answer was 9/11. Notice that this story isn’t written by a conservative opponent of Clinton or in a conservative magazine. It’s by a superb reporter in a left-liberal magazine. No, Clinton is not responsible for al Qaeda, just as Chamberlain wasn’t responsible for Hitler. But Clinton is absolutely responsible for the consequences of his inaction and his appeasement. And it’s vital, if we are to prevent a repeat of the fecklessness of the 1990s, that we remember this lesson and take it to heart.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “George Bush is trying to hijack the UN. Delegates thought it was just a routine peacetime trip. They were settling back in their seats for a snooze when suddenly a scary-looking American president broke through the flimsy doors into the UN’s cockpit, grabbed the controls and tried to steer it into a catastrophe. Will anyone have the courage to overpower him or will they nervously sit it out, hoping that they might somehow survive?” – John O’Farrell, the Guardian. (Thanks to the bloggers at i330.org.)
WHY NOT ENGLISH? The Blair government wants Islamic immigrants to speak English when they immigrate. They’re going to set up an English test for citizenship. If I were Bush looking for a good domestic initiative that would also help the war on terror by helping to assimilate Islamic would-be Americans, I’d follow Blair’s lead and ask Ron Unz in for a meeting.
OVER THERE: Matt Welch brought this link to my attention. It’s a blog-site from troops. Illuminating and important to see the men and women still fighting al Qaeda far away from home. Send them your best.
THE ECONOMIST VERSUS ISRAEL: Well, you make the call. Here’s an article on the current Economist website that serves as a brief for Arab anger against the United States and the West. Here’s a paragraph:
As any simple Arab citizen will confirm, resentment of the superpower has never been a response to America itself. Rather, it is a response to its policies: its throttling of Iraq, sanctioning of Libya and Sudan, and, above all, its generous bankrolling of an aggressive Israel. “Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”
“Take Israel out of the equation?” Is that a new metaphor for getting rid of the Jewish state? “Any simple Arab citizen” is also a telling quote. How can you be a “citizen” in a hereditary monarchy, a theocracy or a police state, the current options on offer to the Arab world? Notice too the complete absence of any reference to rabid anti-Semitism among Arab populations. It isn’t even a question raised to be rebutted. It is simply ignored. Why? Notice also the strained call that Arab “governments must devolve more power to the people”. You mean … democracy? Why is the need for un-euphemized democracy so obvious to the Economist’s writers in every part of the world except the Middle East?
PALESTINIAN GAY-BAITING: No surprise that Yassir Arafat’s police state viciously persecutes gay people. No surprise the American left largely
ignores it. One Yalie speaks truth to campus power.
CONSERVATIVES AND MENTAL HEALTH: An amazing sub-head in the New York Times Magazine: “Pete Domenici is a social and fiscal conservative. So how did he become the Senate’s leading advocate for the mentally ill?” Just think about the assumptions behind that headline. Conservatives definitionally cannot favor treating mental illness as a serious matter. Why? Because they’re callous, bad, selfish, inhuman people. Why else? The article drips with the same kind of left-liberal condescension, although it’s perfectly well researched and written in every other respect. The truth is: such issues are not explicable on a liberal/conservative spectrum. Awareness of the seriousness of mental illness is largely a function of understanding the science that shows it to be indistinguishable from what we arbitrarily call “physical” illness. Once you have grasped that, the need for an end to what amounts to active discrimination against the mentally ill in our society becomes apparent. Good for Domenici for seeing this for decades. Good for the Bush administration for being the first to take the argument seriously. Brickbats for the Times Magazine for falling for easy anti-conservative bigotry. (They’ve changed the subhead in the online version. Perhaps someone saw sense.)
The Dish 