FrontPage Magazine - Spectator.co.uk


Sorry, some links today but not much commentary from me. Another editorial from a sensible Englishman.

[...]I was in Florida researching a book on the second world war on 11 September 2001. In the week after the attack the airlines were down, so I drove across rural Florida and Georgia, watching the flags come out and the patriotic messages go up on the billboards. People were calling the radio shows. One question dominated, the same one I heard in bars, shops and around dinner tables: ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ ‘It’s just a minority,’ I said.


I returned home and realised that it wasn’t a minority at all. To my astonishment, it included many of my liberal and left-wing friends, and writers and thinkers I admired. In that first week a cartoon in the Guardian painted President Bush as an ape dumbly trying to impersonate Winston Churchill, while the Independent offered a blind, deranged Bush firing his cowboy six-shooter and treading on a dead Arab. And all this before a single American bomb had been dropped on Afghanistan, and with 3,000 bodies — we still thought 10,000 then — warm beneath the rubble.


I called up a friend in the television business. We both said we were fearful. I was talking about Islamic terrorism, perhaps next time with a nuke, but it turned out he meant ‘the mad cowboy in the White House’. It struck me then that, after so many years of opposing American foreign policy, the Left could not see beyond Vietnam-era slogans. It could not recognise that a toxic stew of rogue regimes, apocalyptic weapons programmes and a perverted form of Islam posed a deadly threat. It posed a particularly deadly threat, come to think of it, to the values of the Left itself: to women’s rights and gay rights; to secularism, pluralism and multiculturalism. In fact, you name the liberal ‘ism’ and Osama was against it. But one ‘ism’ still trumped all: anti-Americanism.


The coming endgame with Saddam will — at the very least — rid the world of a proven danger, and lessen the chances that the next terrorist attack will take out millions not thousands. If war comes, will innocent Iraqis die? Certainly. More than the Americans will admit, fewer than the peaceniks will claim. But innocents have been dying for decades under this revolting regime.


We’re told that war will drive Muslims into the arms of al-Qa’eda. But remember what bin Laden said in the days after 9/11: ‘America is weak, it cannot take casualties, it ran away in Somalia.’ Throughout the 1990s the West responded tamely to attacks by bin Laden (the African embassy bombs, the USS Cole), to attacks by groups linked to Saddam (the Saudi barracks bomb, the assassination attempt on Bush’s father, the first World Trade Center attack), and to the continued refusal of Iraq to disarm as required by the Gulf war ceasefire. Ten years of this weakness only encouraged our enemies to be bolder. [...]