Truth
Dean
Muslim refusenik Irshad Manji said the other day:
And that's why Muslims everywhere face a test in the next several hours. Assuming we're serious that Islam means peace, we must demand that our Friday khutbas denounce the London terrorist explosions in unambiguous and unqualified terms.
Here's what I predict will happen instead. The preachers will express condolences for the victims and condemnations of the criminals. Then they'll add, "But Britain should have never invited this kind of response by joining America in the invasion of Iraq."
The trouble with this line of reasoning is that terrorists have never needed an Iraq debacle to justify their violent jihads. What exactly was the Iraq of 1993, when Islamic radicals tried to blow up the World Trade Center? Or of 2000, when the USS Cole was attacked? Hell, that assault took place after U.S. military intervention saved thousands of Muslims in Bosnia.
If staying out of Iraq protected anyone from terrorism, then why did "insurgents" last year kidnap two journalists from France — the most anti-war, anti-Bush nation in the West? Even overt solidarity with the people of Iraq, demonstrated by CARE's top relief worker in the area, Margaret Hassan, didn't shield her from assassination.
These are the facts that ordinary Muslims must take to their preachers at Friday's sermons. A clear repudiation of the London bombings will not bring back the dead. What it can do is help the rest of the world differentiate between the moderates and the apologists.
More muslims need to read that--but everyone everyone else needs to read it too. It is, for example, a perfect response to Matt Sheffield's question the other day, and to others pointing to similar questions.
The worst terrorist attack the West has ever seen happened without our having invaded Iraq--unless you are now going to say that driving Saddam out of Kuwait back in the early 1990s, and keeping him (and his long-suffering people) "in a box" was what provoked the terrorism. So what provoked the terrorist attacks before that, hmm? Is it merely our presence anywhere in the Middle East that provokes the fascists to murder innocents and oppress their own people?
No one can claim that the so-called "flypaper strategy" (i.e. "better to fight them there than here") is working perfectly--but then, who ever told you that flypaper catches 100% of all flies? Did you ever believe it worked that way? Can you find me anyone who believed it? I'd appreciate names and exact quotes, because I don't know anyone like this.
Truth: if you believe that we are "causing" terrorist attacks on the Brits, or the Aussies, or the Spaniards, or the French, or ourselves, simply by helping the people in Iraq claim their fundamental human rights--if you really believe taking out a fascist thug is a cause of terrorism--then what is it you think will make the fascists stop their fanatical murders?
Carping that strategy X is "failing" is a child's game. Grownups analyze and say, "Okay, maybe strategy X isn't perfect... but can I name a better strategy?" If you can't, then, quite seriously, all you're doing is being a defeatist--and, in this case, acting as an apologist for fascists.
Seriously man: Osama Bin Laden declared war on the West back in the 1980s. Before the first invasion of Iraq. Before the first World Trade Center bombing. Before Clinton was President. After 9/11, Osama Bin Laden was naming crap that happened as far back as the 1400s as part of his indictment of the West!
If you want to be "skeptical" that our efforts to bring human rights and democracy to Iraq will succeed, fine. I simply ask that you clearly and without evasion explain what you think the better course of action would be. Because with any war there will always be bad times, there will always be failures, there will always be unforeseen consequences, and there will always be nasty surprises. Children refuse to acknowledge this, but grownups understand it implicitely.
If you have other ideas for how we handle the situation, great, bring them up. But please, let's be done with this crap about how we brought terrorist attacks on ourselves by removing a fascist dictator. That is fascist excuse-making. You think that's harsh? Okay, just name what you think will stop the fascists from more bombings. Go on, name the strategy. What will make them stop?
In the meantime, while I'm mentioning muslims who are finally speaking up, in addition to Irshad Manji's terrific piece this week, I thought I'd also mention this piece that appeared in the Saudi-run Arab News:
The barbaric terrorist attacks in London yesterday were condemned by all civilized nations. In addition to condemning the atrocities, Muslim and Middle Eastern leaders were among the first to send messages of support, sympathy and solidarity with Britain.
Words of condemnation and solidarity are fine and great in their symbolic value, but they are not enough unless backed by practical measures in cooperation with Britain and the rest of the civilized world to defeat the evil forces of terrorism.
Let me tell you: if we want to address the problem, sitting around saying "maybe we should have left the fascist mass-murderer Saddam in power because then the terrorists wouldn't be so mad at us" is not much of a starting point. Neither is "let's turn tail and leave the Middle East and offer our abject apologies for ever offending the fascists."
So: we have a strategy we are persuing. No one--no grownup--ever said it was a perfect strategy. You got a better strategy? Let's hear it.
I was a supporter of the war, and still support the idea of remaking the middle east by creating democratic governments. Unfortunately while I took that idea seriously my goverment apparently did not. The occupation has been a study in incompetence.
I am very well aware that wars often go badly. When they go badly you adjust strategy or tactics. At very least you change key personnel. Is there some sign that the Bush admin has done any of this?
At this same point in the Civil War Lincoln had finally found Grant. At this same point in WW2 we had created, essentially from scratch, the world's greatest military force and were in Italy. It took less time to steal half of Mexico, a lot less time to eliminate Spain as a world power, less time to tip the balance in WW1.
I see no evidence that The Bush administration is aware that they are in trouble in Iraq. They have very belatedly begun to augment the size of the US Army but are having trouble with recruiting. They are lawyering reservists and guardsmen into extended tours. In their more candid moments some US officers have admitted that we have made essentially no progress against the so-called insurgents. People like John McCain have said flatly what I have believed for a long time: we went in with too little, and that was a devastating mistake.
We are in effect hoping to be rescued by the Iraqis. We have too little force to hold the initiative in Iraq, we need more men, and we are hoping that those men will come from an Iraqi government which as of today is hiding in the Green Zone. The administration consistently overstates the readiness of Iraqi forces and indeed it is hard to see why Iraqis would function effectively to fight on behalf of a government which has not yet demonstrated that it can organize itself.
Like you I have no sympathy for the quasi-pacifist Left on this. But setting aside their defeatism, and their stomach-turning gloating at each American defeat, it becomes harder and harder for me to imagine why an American parennt would support their child's desire to get into a war when the strategy appears to be to hope that we will in the end be saved by a people who haven't done anything right since they released the Hebrew slaves.
Even though I don't agree with it, it is an alternative of sorts. Of course the problem with the summer of 2001 was that eventually, 9/11/01 rolled around. And the whole point of the WoT is to prevent such attacks in the future while Kerry's "plan" would only guarantee we'd forget about it.
First, he suggests greatly increasing our troop strength in Iraq, on grounds we cannot properly fight this terrorist insurrection with the numbers we maintain there.
Second, he calls for a return to an active military draft in order to increase our overall troop strength to achieve the first goal.
Third, he thinks Donald Rumsfeld should be replaced by another personality, perhaps John McCain, to be given plenipotentiary powers to run the war until victory is achieved.
Fourth, he advises establishing a department of propaganda (to be openly labelled as such?) to counter all the negative publicity that is issued in routine barrages every day.
Michael, I hope I did not paraphrase you too incorrectly.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
No, you did it pretty accurately and succinctly. I would have done it that succinctly but then they'd revoke my professional bs'ers credentials.
For the record I was writing about a "non-combat draft" and only if the job can't be done by civilian contractors, to take over stateside or overseas non-combat MOS' - driving a truck in Germany, programming a computer in 29 Palms as examples. This would free additional soldiers and Marines to move into combat units.
And the people who are probably doing the most to discourage enlistments are called "Parents." I would love to watch the political fate of the first politician to suggest prosecuting parents for opposing their kid's entry into war. That would be entertaining.
Anyway, I am against the draft for any purpose. We don't need it and we don't want it. It is a violation of individual freedom. I want this War fought and won by free men and women who choose to fight in this War out of love for our country and for the freedom it stands for.
I think I am offficially done wasting time on you.
Back in the Korean War years, every eligible male in this country without an educational, medical, hardship or some other deferment, either joined one of the US military branches voluntarily, either for active duty or in a reservist capacity, or was drafted through the selective service. So in 1952, when I completed high school at age 18, I joined the US Army Reserves. The next year I was called to active duty some two months before the Korean War ended.
There was no major hardship for any of the millions of us at that time, and there will be no such hardship now, if selective service is reinstituted. Nobody burned their draft cards. Everybody showed up on time when so ordered, and underwent training for the purpose of receiving orders and carrying them out, which is what any army is all about.
Anyone who might want to bolt the country and move to Canada or Europe to escape compulsory military service is, of course, capable of doing so. But I would then permanently revoke their citizenship and permanently cut off any possibility of any such person ever even visiting this country. Then some of the hard core traitors among them would be free to take up like among al-Qaida in Iraq. And we would be free to catch them and kill them.
Among other things, I would declare a state of war. Not against a specific government, but certainly against the whole of salafist Islam. And that state of war would continue until we had destroyed them.
And if we were to go to war on a serious level, I would then shut down any school that attempts to resist entry to the facility of military recruiters.
In addition, I would use the government's power to shut off the flow of all federal tax dollars to any school system in this country that permitted such treason.
Moreover, I would also freely use the sedition laws to stamp out anything that impeded our national war effort.
And yes, my mouth almost waters at the thought of all this. It is my way of bringing back my childhood memories of the greatest generation of Americans, and the way they and the rest of us conducted ourselves in wartime. Nobody then let down Uncle Sam, and the job got done.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
One of the most basic Western freedoms is freedom of thought and expression, freedom of religion, speech, and press, as articulated in the First Amendment to our Constitution. As John Milton wrote in his Aeropagitica: "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." The embodiment of this freedom is a book. And John Milton wrote: "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature. Who destroys a good book kills reason itself, the image of God, as it were, in the eye."
In 1933, when the Nazis took over Germany, they staged massive public book-burnings. They particularly singled out books by Jewish authors. Many Jews fled to England or America. If the Nazis had at that time taken this one step further and sent out assassins to England and America to pursue and kill Jewish refugees, and if the Nazi government openly refused to stop, we would have considered it an act of war and we would have declared war against the Nazi regime long before Pearl Harbor. We would have said to them: "Your tyranny is bad enough on your own soil, but when you extend to our soil, that is intolerable."
When Salman Rushdie wrote a novel, The Satanic Verses, that Muslims considered heretical, he was condemned to death and forced to flee to England. But it did not stop there. The Muslims sent out assassins to England to pursue him and kill him, and to this day he is still in hiding. This has happened to other Muslims, including American Muslims, who dared to break with Islam. In other words, the Muslims are not content with persecuting deviants in their own countries but insist on extending their tyranny to the soil of free, Western countries, including America.
Peter Schwartz, in The Intellectual Activist, has seen this as what it obviously is, an open act of war against the West, against the central Western value of freedom of thought. It must be treated as an act of war. We must say to the Muslims, as we would have said to the Nazis: "Your tyranny is bad enough on your own soil, but when you extend it to our soil, that is intolerable."
So, why have we not declared war? Because the poison of Political Correctness has already seeped into our brains, the cancer is eating away at our will to live, we have succumbed to a soft, permissive, relativistic, nihilistic attitude that says: "Anything goes, as long as it is anti-Western." Political Correctness will destroy us unless we destroy it.
We must declare war against any Muslim nation, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc., that sends assassins to our country to kill Salman Rushdie or others who dare to dissent from Islamic doctrines. We must require any Muslims who wish to stay here to openly condemn these assassins, to openly repudiate the fatwas against Rushdie and other dissidents, to vow loyalty to our crucial Western value of freedom of thought. If they refuse, then they must be expelled from our midst. They are then avowed enemies of our Western freedoms. If they will not abide by our Western laws and our Western values, then they do not belong on our Western soil. We must tell all Muslims: "You are either 100% with us or else 100% with the terrorists."
I agree with everything you wrote except regarding the draft. I do not want my country defended by cowards whose sole motive for being in the military is to stay out of jail. For Ayn Rand's argument on the immorality of the draft, its incompatibility with capitalism, I refer you to her excellent essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
That said, I have no problem with making the right to vote contingent upon military service. As I have said in earlier threads here in Dean's World, voting is a privilege, not a right, and I would be quite happy with reserving that privilege to soldiers and veterans, our warrior elite. (I include medical officers in the military.) Please note that I said military service. The sole legitimate function of government is to protect the life, liberty, and property of the individual, and, by extension, the military security of the nation -- not to "do good" in general. That must be left to private institutions and individuals. The best "good" one can do outside of being a warrior is to work for a private employer, or to be a private employer, or, the highest estate of all, to be a priest or priestess of the Divine.
As to Islam, I say we must declare War against all political Islam. As I said the other day, Islam must be destroyed as a political entity. We must enforce complete separation of mosque from state. Since government, by its very nature, is force, we must see to it that Islam no longer has control or influence over any government. We must render Islam as completely non-political as Buddhism, or Jainism (which, literally, never hurt a fly), or Christianity in the New Testament era, or Judaism in the Diaspora, or Shintoism after World War II.
The problem of Islam is that every imam who has the right to write a fatwa considers himself to have global jurisdiction and for his judicial judgments, up to and including ones with a death sentence, to be carried out anywhere his followers go. The problem isn't in our military but rather that our State department and intelligence services are not collecting these fatwas and, where they impinge on US territory and US citizens, dealing with the problem these judicial judgments raise.
If a Syrian imam sentences a US citizen to death, we should know about it. It should be raised as an issue with Damascus, and if they do not control their own, they should understand that this imam's life is forfeit.
Very good.