America Alone
America Alone: The End
of the World (part 1)
Mark Steyn
National Post
Published: Tuesday, November 14, 2006
John O'Sullivan, a former editor of National Review, once observed that postwar
Canadian history is summed up by an old Monty Python song. I'm a Lumberjack and
I'm Okay begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the
north woods but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some sort
of transvestite pick-up who sings that he likes to "wear high heels,
suspenders and a bra" and "dress in women's clothing and hang around
in bars."
I know what he means. In 2005, I chanced to see a selection of images from the
Miss She-male World celebrations outside Toronto's City Hall. And what struck me
was not that "she-males" should want to have a big ol' parade showing
off their outsized implants. No, what seemed more pertinent was that the local
government should think Miss She-male World is an event that requires municipal
approval. Of course, if they hadn't approved, they would have been guilty of
being "non-inclusive."
John O'Sullivan isn't saying Canadian men are literally cross-dressers, but
nonetheless a once manly nation has undergone a remarkable psychological
makeover. In 1945, the Royal Canadian Navy had the third-largest surface fleet
in the world; Canadian troops got the toughest beach on D-Day. But in the space
of two generations, a bunch of tough hombres were transformed into a thoroughly
feminized culture that prioritizes the secondary impulses of society - rights
and entitlements from cradle to grave - over all the primary ones.
In that, Canada's not alone. If the O'Sullivan thesis is flawed, it's only
because the Lumberjack Song could also stand as the postwar history of almost
the entire developed world. To understand why the West seems so weak in the face
of a laughably primitive enemy, it's necessary to examine the wholesale
transformation undergone by almost every advanced nation since World War Two.
Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least
one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the
West are all but exclusively about those secondary impulses: government health
care, government day care, government paternity leave. We've elevated the
secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance and
reproductive activity. If you don't "go forth and multiply" you can't
afford all those secondary-impulse programs whose costs are multiplying a lot
faster than you are. Most of the secondary-impulse stuff falls under the broad
category of self-gratification issues: We want the state to take our elderly
relatives off our hands not because it's better for them but because otherwise
the old coots would cut into our own time. Fair enough. But once you decide you
can do without grandparents, it's not a stretch to decide you can do without
grandchildren.
I've always loved Lincoln's allusion to the "mystic chords of memory"
because it conveys beautifully the layers of a healthy society: The top notes
are the present, but the underlying harmony is critical, too; it places the
present in the context of history and eternal truths, and thereby binds us not
just to the past but commits us to the future, too. Yet since 1945, throughout
the West, a variety of government interventions has so ruptured traditional
patterns of inter-generational solidarity that Continentals now exist almost
entirely in a present-tense culture of complete self-absorption. In the end, the
primal impulses are the ones that count. Robert Kagan's observation that
Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus doesn't quite cover it. The
Lumberjack Song and the She-male World get closer: We're Martians who think we
can cross-dress as Venusians and everything will be all right. And like some of
the hotter-looking transsexuals on display at Toronto's City Hall, the modern
Western democracy is perfectly feminized in every respect except its ability to
reproduce.
Americans don't always appreciate how far gone down this path the rest of the
developed world is: In Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is now
somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way to important jobs
like the health department. I don't think Donald Rumsfeld would have regarded it
as a promotion to be moved to Health and Human Services. Yet the secondary
impulses are so advanced that most of America's allies no longer share the same
understanding of basic words like "power." In 2002 Finnish prime
minister Paavo Lipponen gave a speech in London saying that "the EU must
not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will
not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests."
No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, he means it: For many
Europeans, the old rules no longer apply. Yet in the long run this redefinition
of the state is killing them. As Gerald Ford used to say when trying to
ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, "A government big enough to
give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you
have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big
enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any
of it back.
That's the position European governments find themselves in. Their citizens have
become hooked on unaffordable levels of social programs which will put those
countries out of business.
This is the paradox of "social democracy." When you demand lower taxes
and less government, you're damned by the Left as "selfish." And in my
case that's true. I'm glad to find a town road at the bottom of my driveway in
the morning, and I'm happy to pay for the Army, but, other than that, I'd like
to keep everything I earn and spend it on my priorities.
The Left offers an appeal to moral virtue: It's better to pay more in taxes and
to share the burdens as a community. It's kinder, gentler, more equitable.
Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a
citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow's
enjoying the fruits of government health care and the rest, he couldn't give a
hoot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to
bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks
coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, it
turns out, explicitly anti-social. To modify Polybius, it's "avarice"
dressed up with "pretentiousness." And it leads to societal
"indolence."
Somewhere along the way these countries redefined the relationship between
government and citizen into something closer to pusher and addict. And once
you've done that, it's hard to persuade the addict to cut back his habit. Thus,
the general acceptance everywhere but America is that the state should run your
health care. A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose
from dozens of cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store
and millions of porno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death
decisions about his own body he's happy to have the choice taken out of his
hands and given to the government.
. From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright © 2006 by Mark Steyn.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=520cc9f6-8d1e-42f4-9f43-dc3db9b1fb9f&k=72682
© National Post 2006
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Fallujah, then & now (part II)
The U.S. wants to
be a compassionate crusader.
Nice idea. But in
the Middle East, compassion comes off as weakness
Mark Steyn, National Post
Published: Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Can America win its "long war"? If you think the question's
ridiculous, well, other countries are certainly asking it. Because, if America
can't, nobody else in the developed world can.
A good place to start any consideration is the Sunni Triangle. A few weeks after
the fall of Saddam Hussein, I drove into Fallujah. What a dump -- no disrespect
to any Fallujans reading this. I had a late lunch in a seedy cafe full of Sunni
men. Not a gal in the joint. And no Westerners except me. As in the movies,
everyone stopped talking when I walked through the door.
I strongly dislike that veteran-foreign-correspondent look, where you wander
around like you've been sleeping in the back of the souk for a week. So I was
wearing the same suit I'd wear in Washington or New York, from the Western
Imperialist Aggressor line at Brooks Brothers. I had a sharp necktie I'd bought
in London the week before. My cuff links were the most stylish in the room, and
also the only ones in the room. I'm not a Sunni Triangulator, so there's no
point pretending to be one. If you're an infidel and agent of colonialist
decadence, you might as well dress the part.
I ordered the mixed grill, which turned out to be not that mixed. Just a tough
old stringy chicken. My tie would have been easier to chew. The locals watched
me -- a few obviously surly and resentful, the rest somewhere between wary and
amused. As a parodic courtesy, mein host switched the flickering black-and-white
TV from an Arabic station to the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom
about the quagmire.
And I gave no further thought to Fallujah until a year later, when four American
contractors working in Iraq -- Scott Helvenston, Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko
and Michael Teague -- were ambushed while driving through town. They were
dragged from their vehicles, shot, burned, mutilated, and what was left was
dangled from a bridge over the Euphrates while the natives danced in the
streets.
There's not a lot to be said for the oh-my-God-that-could-have-been-me routine.
But, watching the scenes on TV, I did think back to my lunch 11 months earlier,
and wondered about some of those inscrutable toothy grins at the adjoining
tables. Would those fellows have liked to kill me? Well, I'll bet one or two
would have enjoyed giving it a go.
So why didn't they? I'm not brave, and certainly not suicidally brave. And, if
I'd known the Sunni Triangle was the most dangerous place on Earth, I wouldn't
have been there driving around on my own in some beat-up rented Nissan.
But, of course, Fallujah wasn't dangerous in those days. Why? Because, as Osama
gloated after September 11, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse,
they go with the strong horse. And in May 2003, four weeks after the fall of
Baghdad, the coalition forces were indisputably the strong horse. They'd removed
Saddam Hussein -- the self-declared new Saladin -- in nothing flat. And so, even
when a dainty little trotting gelding of a touring writer comes through the
door, they figure he's with the strong-horse crowd and act accordingly
What happened within the next year was that America ceased to be perceived as a
strong horse. It was a range of factors, from the West's defeatist media to the
Bush administration's wish to be seen as, so to speak, a compassionate crusader.
Nice idea. But to the Arab mindset there's no such thing. So the compassion got
read by the locals not as cultural respect but as weakness.
The object of war is not to destroy the enemy's tanks but to destroy his will.
America is extremely good at destroying tanks. If you make the mistake of luring
the United States into a hot war -- i.e., tanks, bombers, ships, etc. -- you'll
lose very quickly. The Taliban did, and so did Saddam Hussein. That's why my
lunch in Fallujah required no personal courage on my part: Just about the safest
time to visit anywhere in the Muslim world is in the month after the United
States has toppled its dictator.
But an enemy folds when he knows he's finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall
of the Saddamites, it's not clear the enemy did know. Even during the combat
phase we were playing the compassionate crusader. The Western peaceniks' prewar
"human shields" operation proved to be completely superfluous, mainly
because the Anglo-American forces decided to treat not just Iraqi civilians and
not just Iraqi conscripts but virtually everyone other than Saddam, Uday and
Qusay as a de facto human shield. The main victims of Western squeamishness in
those few weeks in the spring of 2003 turned out to be not American or coalition
troops but the Iraqi civilians who two years later were providing the principal
target for "insurgents." It would have been better for them had more
Baathists been killed in the initial invasion. It would have been preferable,
too, if the swarm of foreign jihadi from neighboring countries had occasionally
been met with the "accidental" bombing of certain targets on the
Syrian side of the border.
Colin Powell famously framed Iraq in Pottery Barn terms: you break it, you own
it. But Saddam's Baathist apparatus and other parties concluded the opposite: we
didn't have the guts to break it; therefore, we didn't own it.
From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
TOMORROW
A third excerpt from America Alone: Steyn on Western guilt, political
correctness and 'root causes'
© National Post 2006
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=ae75bc37-ad28-4e76-a03a-fc0ecf7e105f
************************************************************************************************************
Loving thine enemy (part III)
The more the
Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily around the room
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, November 16, 2006
After September 11, the first reaction of just about every prominent Western
leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, so did the Prince of Wales,
the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of Canada and many
more. And, when the get-me-to-the-mosque-on-time fever died away, you couldn't
help feeling that this would strike almost any previous society as, well,
bizarre. Pearl Harbor's been attacked? Quick, order some sushi and get me into a
matinee of Madam Butterfly!
Seeking to reassure the co-religionists of those who attack you that you do not
regard them all as the enemy is a worthy aim but a curious first priority. And,
given that more than a few of the imams in those mosque photo-ops turned out to
be at best equivocal on the matter of Islamic terrorism and at worst somewhat
enthusiastic supporters of it, it involved way too much self-deception on our
part. But it set the tone for all that followed, to the point where with each
bomb or plot -- from September 11 to London to Toronto -- the protestations of
Islam's good faith grew ever more fulsome.
Consider the name given to the current conflict: "war on terror." Wait
a minute. Aren't wars usually waged against named enemies? Yes, but, to the
progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent:
There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.
In part, it's societal forgetfulness. In an electronic age, a present-tense
culture, we assume that social progress is like technological progress: It can't
be reversed. Just as you can't disinvent the internal combustion engine, so you
can't disinvent women's rights. Just as the horse and buggy yielded to the steam
train and the Ford Model T and the passenger jet, so the advanced
social-democratic society will march onward to state day care and 30-hour work
weeks and gay marriage and ever greater ethnic diversity -- and nothing can turn
it back, certainly not a lot of seventh-century weirdbeards. Many of us figure
the Islamist plan to re-establish the caliphate is the equivalent of that moment
in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie when Plankton roars, "I'm going to rule
the world!" Towering over him, SpongeBob says, "Good luck with
that."
But you never know: It might be that we're the plankton. "Our enemies are
small worms," Adolf Hitler told his generals in August 1939. "I saw
them at Munich." In Europe today, as in the thirties, the political class
prostrates itself before an insatiable force that barely acknowledges the latest
surrender before moving on to the next invented grievance. Indeed, a formal
enemy is all but superfluous to requirements. Bomb us, and we agonize over the
"root causes." Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest
mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace." Issue
bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we
fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate
female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march
alongside you denouncing Bush and Blair. Murder a schoolful of children, and our
scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims
"jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "healthy-lifestyle low-fat
granola bar." Thus the lopsided valse macabre of our times: the more the
Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room.
As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote, "Clearly, a civilization
that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and
conviction to defend itself." During the Danish cartoon jihad, The New York
Times gave a routinely pompous explanation of why it would not be showing us the
representations of the Prophet: Sensitive news organizations, the editors
explained, had the duty to "refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious
symbols." The very next day, the Times illustrated a story on the Danish
controversy with a piece of New York "art" from a couple of seasons
earlier showing the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. Multiculturalism seems
to operate on the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the
American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to
criticize the president," and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In
my country everyone is free to criticize your president." Under the rules
as understood by The New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its
Judeo-Christian inheritance, and, likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and
belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one has to choose, on
balance Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging
than the Western elites' loathing of their own.
Insurgencies, whether explicitly terrorist or more subtle, persist because of a
lack of confidence on the part of their targets. The IRA, for example,
calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally
but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they
also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only
difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the
first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole
world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've
calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=c20b67cc-a21a-46bc-a6cf-986896e99acd
- From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
TOMORROW
A fourth excerpt from America Alone: Steyn on Islamic terrorism and Western
self-censorship; Visit nationalpost.com for previous excerpts.
Ran with fact box "Tomorrow" which has been appended to thestory.
© National Post 2006
************************************************************************************************************
Franchising terror,
mosque by mosque (part IV)
Communists had
'deep sleepers' who had to be controlled in a hierarchical chain. But with
Islam, who needs that?
Mark Steyn
National Post
Friday, November 17, 2006
Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to
provoke "the Muslim world" would go bananas if any Western politician
started referring to "the Christian world." When such sensitive
guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation
but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political
sovereignty too. There is an "Organization of the Islamic Conference":
It's like the EU and the Commonwealth and the G8 -- that is, an organization of
nation states whose heads of government hold regular meetings. Imagine if
someone proposed an "Organization of the Christian Conference" that
would hold summits attended by prime ministers and presidents and voted as a
bloc in transnational bodies.
So it's not merely that there's a global jihad lurking within this religion, but
that the religion itself is a political project -- and, in fact, an imperial
project -- in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are
not. Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat
bloodthirsty faith in which whatever's your bag violence-wise can almost
certainly be justified. And, yes, Christianity has had its blood-drenched
moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, which remains a byword for theocratic
violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a
typical year.
So we have a global terrorist movement insulated within a global political
project insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents
are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a
very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much
more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in
plain sight. As the Times of London reported in 2006: "An American al-Qaeda
operative who was a close associate of the leader of the July 7 [2005] bombers
was recruited at a New York mosque that British militants helped to run. British
radicals regularly travelled to the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, in Queens, to
organize sending American volunteers to jihadi training camps in Pakistan.
Investigators reportedly found that Mohammad Sidique Khan had made calls to the
mosque last year in the months before he led the terrorist attack on London that
killed 52 innocent people. Mohammad Junaid Babar, one recruit from the Masjid
Fatima Islamic Centre, has told U.S. intelligence officials that he met Khan in
a jihadi training camp in Pakistan in July 2003. He claims that the pair became
friends as they studied how to assemble explosive devices. Babar, 31, a computer
programmer, says that it was at the Masjid Fatima centre that he became a
radical."
And so it goes. The mosques are recruiters for the jihad and play an important
role in ideological subordination and cell discipline. In globalization terms,
that's a perfect model. Unlike the Soviets, it's a franchise business rather
than owner-operated; the Commies had "deep sleepers" who had to be
"controlled" in a very hierarchical chain. But who needs that with
Islam? Not long after Sept. 11, I said, just as an aside, that these days
whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves some
fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line, but if you want to compile
chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week.
- A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta.
- A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John
Allen Muhammed.
- A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.
- A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed
Hedayet.
- A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.
- A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif.
- A terrorist cell bombs the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? Ali Mohamed.
- A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney? Mohammed Skaf.
- A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the
prime minister? Mohammed Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.
These last three represent a "broad strata" of Canadian society,
according to Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police and a man who must have aced sensitivity training class. To the
casual observer, the broad strata would seem to be a very singular stratum: In
their first appearance in court, 12 men arrested in that Ontario plot requested
the Koran.
When I made my observation about multiple Mohammeds in the news, Merle Ricklefs,
a professor at the National University of Singapore and South-East Asian editor
of the 16-volume Encyclopedia of Islam, remarked sarcastically, "Deep
thinking, indeed." Well, gosh, maybe it's not terribly sophisticated. But
then again, when you're dealing with fellows who decapitate female aid workers
in Iraq and engage in mass slaughter of Russian schoolchildren, maybe
sophistication isn't always helpful. Particularly when sophistication seems
mostly to be a form of obfuscation by experts wedded to the notion that Islam is
something that simply can't be understood unless you've read all 16 volumes of
their Encyclopedia, or, better yet, written them.
For those of us who aren't professors of Islamic studies, the obvious course is
to step back and try to work from first principles: What's happening? Who's
doing it? The five-thousand-guys-named-Mo routine meets the "reasonable
man" test: It's the first thing an averagely well-informed person who's not
a multiculti apologist notices -- here's the evening news and here comes another
Mohammed.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=c56b27cf-780a-43fc-9dca-05381ad8fe99
- From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
TOMORROW
A fifth Excerpt from America Alone: Mark Steyn on the United States, 'the
world's first non-imperial superpower'
Visit nationalpost.com for previous excerpts.
Ran with fact box "Tomorrow" which has been appended to thestory.
© National Post 2006
******************************************************************************************
Sleeping giant
The United States
has the most powerful army on the planet. But without the stomach for war, what
good is it?
Mark Steyn,
National Post
Published: Saturday, November 18, 2006
In late September 2001, Maulana Inyadullah was holed up in Peshawar awaiting the
call to arms against the Great Satan and offered this pithy soundbite to David
Blair of Britain's Daily Telegraph: "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love
death."
Compare Mr. Inyadullah with the acclaimed London novelist Margaret Drabble, also
speaking in the Daily Telegraph, just after the Iraq war. She feels the same
way, at least about carbonated beverages: "I detest Coca-Cola, I detest
burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about
history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism and American
triumphalism about victories it didn't even win."
Look at Ms. Drabble's list of grievances. If you lived in Poland in the 1930s,
you weren't worried about the Soviets' taste in soft drinks or sentimental Third
Reich movies. America is the most benign hegemon in history: It's the world's
first non-imperial superpower and, at the dawn of the American moment, it chose
to set itself up as a kind of geopolitical sugar daddy. By picking up the tab
for Europe's defense, it hoped to prevent those countries lapsing into
traditional power rivalries. Nice idea. But it also absolved them of the
traditional responsibilities of nationhood, turning the alliance into a
dysfunctional sitcom family, with one grown-up presiding over a brood of whiny
teenagers. America's preference for diluting its power within the UN and other
organs of an embryo world government has not won it friends. All dominant powers
are hated -- Britain was, and Rome -- but they're usually hated for the right
reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise
America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise
America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the
anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too
Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your
bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime
example of it.
That's one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If
Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be
arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some
such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to
concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that
rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy.
"We are," warns Al Gore portentously, "altering the balance of
energy between our planet and the rest of the universe."
Think globally, act lunarly. The "balance of energy" between Earth and
"the rest of the universe"? You wouldn't happen to have the
statistical evidence for that, would you? Universal "balance of
energy" graphs for 1940 and 1873? Heigh-ho. America is a threat not because
of conventional great-power designs, but because -- even scarier -- of its
"consumption," its way of life. Those Drabble-detested Cokes and
burgers are straining the Earth in ways that straightforward genocidal
conquerors like Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of. The construct of
this fantasy is very revealing about how unthreatening America is.
But others cast the hyperpower's geniality in a different light. Visitors to
America often remark on that popular T-shirt slogan usually found below a bold
Stars and Stripes: "These Colours Don't Run." To non-Americans, it can
seem a trifle touchy. But for a quarter century the presumption of the country's
enemies was that those colours did run -- they ran from Vietnam, they ran from
the downed choppers in the Iranian desert, they ran from Somalia. Even the
successful campaigns -- the inconclusively concluded 1991 Gulf War and the
air-only 1999 Kosovo war -- seemed manifestly designed to avoid putting those
colours in the position of having to run. As Osama saw it, those colours ran
from the African embassy bombings and the Khobar towers, just as Zarqawi figured
those colours would run from the Sunni Triangle. Being seen not to run -- or, if
you prefer, being seen to show "resolve" -- should be the
indispensable objective of U.S. foreign policy. Were these colours to run from
Iraq, it would be the end of the American era -- for why would Russia, China or
even Belgium ever again take seriously a superpower that runs screaming for home
at the first pinprick?
Don't take Osama's, or Saddam's, or Mullah Omar's, or the Chinese politburo's
word for it. Consider those nations who (a) regard themselves as broadly
well-disposed toward America and (b) share the view that Islamism represents a
critical global security threat, yet (c) have concluded that the United States
lacks the will to get the job done. You hear such worries routinely expressed by
the political class in India, Singapore and other emerging nations. The British
historian Niall Ferguson talks about "the clay feet of the colossus."
Admiral Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" has become harder to rouse -- the
La-Z-Boy recliner's a lot more comfortable and pampering than the old rocker on
the porch. In Vietnam, it took 50,000 deaths to drive the giant away; maybe in
the Middle East, it will only take 5,000. And maybe in the next war the giant
will give up after 500, or 50, or not bother at all. Our enemies have made a bet
-- that the West in general and the United States in particular are soft and
decadent and have no attention span. America has the advantage of the most
powerful army on the face of the planet, but she doesn't have the stomach for
war, so it's no advantage at all. After all, if you were a typical viewer of CNN
International, what would have made the biggest impression on you since Sept.
11? That America has the best, biggest and most technologically advanced
military on the planet? Or that the minute you send it anywhere hysterical
congressmen are shrieking that we need an "exit strategy"? The
corpulent snorer in the La-Z-Boy recliner may have a beautifully waxed Ferrari
in the garage, but he hates having to take it out on the potholed roads. Still,
it looks mighty nice parked in the driveway when he washes it.
- From America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it, by Mark Steyn.
Published by Regnery Publishing, Inc. Copyright (Copyright) 2006 by Mark Steyn.
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