Now that the European powers have tipped their hand and will do all they can diplomatically to forestall or derail war, we can at least reassess where we are. The participation of the French and Germans was never militarily significant. It would have been great to have gotten U.N. sanction for the war against terror, but given the disparate interests of the various great powers, it was always a long shot. So once again, it’s the English-speaking peoples versus the despots. And there’s a reason for this. Terrorism is a far greater threat to countries founded on liberty. Terror’s ability to cripple free societies, their travel and communications, their limited government, their cherished personal liberties, is felt far more keenly in the English-speaking world. That’s why the civil liberties enthusiasts on the right and left are both right and wrong. Right to defend what they defend. Wrong to think that John Ashcroft is a greater threat in this respect than al Qaeda.
A DIFFERENT LEGACY: Statist and dirigist societies, on the other hand, with freedom less of a priority than among their liberal, English-speaking allies, cope with terrorists by ratcheting up police powers, making all sorts of concessions to the enemy, and muddling through. It’s not so big a threat to their customary way of operating. Ditto with foreign threats. For most of the last century, France responded to external pressure in classic Gallic fashion: superficial remarmament, diplomatic ballet, appeasement, and, if necessary, tactical surrender or accommodation. And since the last war, Germany has placed superficial peace above all other priorities – whether defeating terror or accommodating Communism. When you don’t have a deep tradition of internal freedom or inviolate national sovereignty, and when the external threat doesn’t appear to be imminent, this kind of society instinctually avoids war. That’s especially the case now. It’s clearly the hope of France and Germany that the English speaking powers will bear the brunt of Islamist terrorism. By ducking out of the fight, they think they can avoid trouble once again, see the U.S. and the U.K. damaged, and make what best they can of the aftermath. (Check out Safire’s shrewd assessment of Schroder’s realpolitik today for a guide to what the Germans have in mind.) Their current position is therefore their historical default position. We shouldn’t be surprised by their avoidance of conflict now. We should be surprised that they came even this far.
THE WAR CONTINUES: But for us, it’s important to remember why we’re fighting Saddam. The answer is September 11. Those who want to find some specific evidentiary link between al Qaeda and Saddam don’t begin to fathom what war is. It is not the pursuit of one distinct goal after another, depending on the exigencies of international law or diplomacy. That’s called foreign policy. War, in contrast, is the attempt to destroy an enemy. The enemy is Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors. Strategically, the overthrow of the Saddam regime is absolutely central to this objective. It will deal another psychological blow to the reactionaries who want to ratchet Islam back a few more centuries and wage war on the free societies of the West. It will remove one huge and obvious source of weapons of mass destruction potentially available to the enemy. It will provide a military base from which to continue the war against al Qaeda and its enablers across the Middle East, specifically in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. And it will reassert the global hegemony of the United States and its Anglosphere allies. That’s why we fight. It isn’t a pre-emptive war. It’s a reactive war – against what was done to this country throughout the 1990s, culminating on that awful September day. We are fighting to honor the memory of the dead and to defeat a brutal enemy that would inflict even more carnage if they possibly could. And we fight to defend the principles of a liberal international order, principles that the United States and the United States alone has long been responsible for upholding. Our loneliness in this struggle should not therefore be a cause for concern. It is, in fact, a sign, once again, that we are on the right path.
The Dish 