My friend Lawrence Kaplan had a terrific little piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Terrific because it put its finger on how quickly a cultural and political divide emerged in the war on terror. By and large, the Democratic party is now opposed to continuing this war, as currently envisaged, and want to wind it down as fast as possible, seeking diplomacy over force, denying the nexus of terror in the Middle East, eager to undo the new mechanisms law enforcement has to prevent future terrorist attacks, while engaging in Dowd-like attempts to embarrass and infantillize the men and women with the dreadful responsibility for our security. Listening to the Democratic debate earlier this week, I was amazed at how few had any strategic plans for taking the war to the enemy, how the very concept of ‘enemy’ seemed to unnerve and embarrass them. Similarly, the New York Times, a paper that witnessed first-hand the terror, now prefers to use the occasion of the anniversary for a classic piece of moral equivalence, comparing the murder of 3,000 innocents to the U.S. complicity in a coup in Chile thirty years ago. For these people, the first instinct is always, always, always, that the United States is morally suspect. They haven’t changed. The moral clarity after 9/11 terrified them. They wanted it to go away so badly so they could switch the conversation back to the faults and evils of America.
CLARITY FATIGUE: And they have, of course, partly succeeded – not because they managed to inflate, say, Enron’s collapse into the greater event (though that was one of the more comic Raines-Krugman gambits). They succeeded in the end not by argument but by the effect of sheer fatigue. No democracy wants to believe it is under dire threat; no one wants the abnormality to endure; no one wants to absorb the truth that the war is still in its infancy and that greater atrocities lie ahead, unless we act forcefully to pre-empt them and build the kind of societies in the Middle East that are alone guarantees of our and their future peace and stability. I have made plenty of criticisms of this president; and will do so again. But he’s currently the only leader in this country who actually gets the depth of our predicament and the need for innovative, enterprising and ruthless action to improve it. The paradox is that the more he succeeds and the more the threat of terror recedes, the more his opponents will take the calm as evidence that nothing much has to be done, that nothing much has been done, that America, by acting, is the real source of world conflict, and that retreat and amnesia are the cure-alls. I don’t think most Americans believe this. I think they are still angry and still afraid and still determined. But they will suffer more than a thousand cuts from the September 10 brigades in the coming months and years. I remember thinking two years ago that support for the war was easy then; but the real test would be in a few years when forgetfulness would set in and complacency revived. Which means, of course, that the real test of our mettle is now. So the question is not, once again: what have we done wrong? It is: Where are we going to hit those bastards today?
The Dish 