by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Saddam’s Baathists recently blew apart Japanese diplomats on their way to a meeting in Tikrit to discuss sending millions of dollars in aid to Iraq’s poor. Their ghosts join those of U.N. officials who likewise were slain for their humanitarian efforts. On the West Bank, three Americans were killed: Their felony was trying to interview young Palestinians for Fulbright fellowships for study in the United States. In turn, their would-be rescuers were stoned by furious crowds \u2014 not unlike the throngs that chant for Saddam on al Jazeera as they seek to desecrate or loot the bodies of murdered Spanish and Italian peacekeepers in Iraq while the tape rolls. All this, I suppose, is what bin Laden calls a clash of civilizations.<\/p>\n Jews at places of worship are systematically being blown up from Turkey to Morocco \u2014 along with British consular officials murdered in Istanbul, American diplomats murdered in Jordan, and Western tourists, Christians, and local residents murdered by Muslims in Bali, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The new rule is that the more likely you are to help, give to, or worship in the Middle East, the more likely you are to be shot or blown up.<\/p>\n Most of the recent dead were noncombatants. All were either attempting to feed or aid Muslims, or simply wished to be left alone in peace. Their killers operate through the money and sanctuary of Middle East rogue regimes, the implicit support of thousands in the Muslim street, and the tacit neglect of even “moderate” states in the region \u2014 as long as the tally of killing is in the half-dozens or so, and not noticeable enough to threaten foreign investment or American aid, or to earn European disapproval.<\/p>\n But when the carnage is simply too much (too many Muslims killed as collateral damage or too many minutes on CNN), then suspects are miraculously arrested in Turkey or Saudi Arabia, or in transit to Iran or Syria \u2014 but more often post facto and never with any exegesis about why killers who once could not be found now suddenly are. No wonder Pakistani intelligence officers, Palestinian security operatives, Syrian diplomats, and Iraqis working for the Coalition are all at times exposed as having abetted the terrorists.<\/p>\n Yet it hasn’t been a good six months for the Islamists’ public relations. Billions the world over are slowly coming to a consensus that the Islamists’ killing has cast as a shadow over the Middle East \u2014 a deeply disturbed place, better left to stew in its own juices. Only its exports of oil, religious extremism, and terror \u2014 not its manufacturing, science, medicine, banking, tourism, humanitarianism, literature, research, or philanthropy \u2014 seem to earn global attention. This is all a great tragedy, but one that, after September 11, gives us no time for tears.<\/p>\n Remember, even apart from all the killing in Israel and Iraq,\u00a0all<\/i>\u00a0of the deadly terrorism since 9\/11 \u2014 the synagogue in Tunisia, French naval personnel in Pakistan, Americans in Karachi, Yemeni attacks on a French ship, the Bali bombing, the Kenyan attack on Israelis, the several deadly attacks on Russians in both Moscow and Chechnya, the assault on housing compounds in Saudi Arabia, the suicide car bombings in Morocco, the Marriott bombing in Indonesia, the mass murdering in Bombay, and the Turkish killing \u2014 has been perpetrated exclusively by Muslim fascists and directed at Westerners, Christians, Hindus, and Jews.<\/p>\n We can diagnose the cause of this new fascism’s growth \u2014 which has very little to do with the old canard that racism, colonialism, and the CIA are to blame. Instead, corrupt thugs in the Middle East have for years looted state treasuries. They have imposed Soviet-style state autocracy on tribal societies. And they have stripped basic human rights from a skyrocketing population \u2014 one that has received just enough Western medicine and technology to ensure an explosive birth rate, but not enough to encourage the commensurate social, economic, and cultural reform that would prevent such growth from making life in a Baghdad or Cairo desolate.<\/p>\n The demise of the Soviet Union left a terrible legacy \u2014 one rarely acknowledged by our own Middle East specialists. Its Stalinist machinery was left in place to kill and torture in awful places like Libya, Iraq, and Syria \u2014 but without the coercive force of the Soviets to ensure that such deadly antics did not expand across borders to draw the Russians into unwanted confrontations with the United States. In turn, without Communists to worry about, so-called moderates in places like Egypt and Jordan \u2014 excepting, of course, the petrol states of the Gulf \u2014 had very little in common, or much leverage, with the United States.<\/p>\n So with the demise of the Cold War, these pathologies came to full maturity. Globalization enticed the appetites of the impoverished \u2014 as cell phones, the Internet, and videos, along with fast food and cheap imported goods, gave the patina of prosperity. In fact, internationalization only reminded 400 million that they could have the junk of the West, but without its freedom, material security, education, health care, and recreation. It is one thing to call a friend on a cell phone, and quite another to realize that one’s society cannot make the phone, cannot fix it, cannot improve upon it, and cannot even use it as desired \u2014 and is reminded of these failures by the very fact of the imported device’s daily use.<\/p>\n If the onset of democracy in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia suggested that Islam was not incompatible with consensual government, that hopeful message apparently did not catch on in much of the Middle East. Far from attempting to end the endemic problems of sexual apartheid, illiteracy, religious intolerance, polygamy, and everything from “honor” killings to state-sanctioned legal barbarism, most autocracies in the region allowed Islamic extremists and apologists to champion just such “differences” \u2014 as if the existence of such Dark Age protocols and endemic anti-Semitism were proof that the Arab world suffered none of the weakness and decadence of a soft West. Enough fools in the West were always around to nod rather than to challenge such Hitleresque romance \u2014 and even to invite such fascists from the Middle East to speak in Europe and the United States to the “oohs” and “ahs” of a few stupid and spoiled self-hating elites.<\/p>\n Into this vacuum stepped the Islamists \u2014 fed by Saudi money, blackmailing dictators as they saw fit, championing the poor and dispossessed who found their messages of hatred against the United States and Israel a salve for their own wounded pride and misery. It did not hurt that their enmity of the West was about the only topic of free expression allowed in censored state media.<\/p>\n In their defense, the mullahs in the madrassas at least realized that if it were left to corrupt tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Khadafi, and Assad to offer alternatives to the West, the Arab world would soon be caught up in the same liberalization that had swept Asia and parts of South America and Africa \u2014 to the chagrin of the patriarch, imam, and warlord, whose currency is deference received rather than freedom granted.<\/p>\n This strange new fascism explains why millions in the Middle East who in theory do not like a Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin laden still find consolation in the unrelenting opposition of these killers to the West. Kids whose parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein and are now fed and protected by American money and manpower nevertheless dance upon a burned out Humvee while shouting for Saddam to return. The same is true of those on the West Bank who have their capital looted by the Palestinian Authority, their relatives jailed or murdered, and their votes and speech curtailed: They will still praise Arafat to the skies \u2014 if he at least mutters some banality about hating the West. Because these are irrational responses \u2014 people acting from their appetites and impulses rather than their heads \u2014 we here in the United States, in our arrogant worship of our god Reason, with no confidence in or appreciation of our singular civilization, have gone about things pretty much all wrong.<\/p>\n Remember the worry about “getting the message out”? We all know the tiresome refrain: If the Arab world just knew about all the billions of dollars we give; all the Muslims we saved from the Balkans to Kuwait; all the censure we incurred to ease Orthodox Russians’ treatment of Muslims in Chechnya, to stop Orthodox Serbian massacres of Albanians, or to discourage Chinese attacks on their own Muslim tribes; then surely millions of the ill-informed would reverse their opinion of us.<\/p>\n Sorry, the truth is just the opposite. The Arab street knows full well that we give billions to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians \u2014 and are probably baffled that we don’t cut it out. They also know we have just as frequently fought Christians on their behalf as Muslims; they know \u2014 if their voting feet tell them anything \u2014 that no place is more tolerant of their religion or more open to immigration than the United States. Yes, Islamists all know that opening a mosque in Detroit is one thing, and opening a church in Saudi Arabia is quite another. Hitler wasn’t interested in Wilson’s 14 Points or how nicely Germans lived in the U.S. \u2014 he cared only that we “cowboys” would not or could not stop what he was up to.<\/p>\n No, the message, much less getting it out, is not the problem. It is rather the nature of America \u2014 our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive \u2014 what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don’t have confidence in who we are, why should they?<\/p>\n To arrest this dangerous trend requires a radical reappraisal of our entire relationship with the Middle East. A Radio Free Europe, though valuable, nevertheless did not free Eastern Europe; nor did Voice of America. Containment and deterrence did. As long as governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many Gulf states encourage hatred of the United States, we must quietly consider them de facto little different from a Libya, Syria, or Iran. For all the glitter and imported Western graphics, al Jazeera and its epigones are not that much different from Radio Berlin of the 1930s.<\/p>\n We had also better reexamine entirely the way we use force in the Middle East. We did not drive on to Baghdad in 1991 out of concern for the “coalition” \u2014 and got 350,000 sorties in the no-fly zones in return. We chose to worry about rebuilding before the current war ended, and let thousands of Baathist killers fade away, and in the aftermath allowed mass looting and continual killing before our most recent get-tough policy.<\/p>\n In fact,\u00a0anytime<\/i>\u00a0we have showed restraint \u2014 using battleship salvos and cruise missiles when our Marines were killed, our embassies blown up, and our diplomats murdered; allowing the killers on the Highway of Death to reach Basra in 1991; letting Saddam use his helicopters to gun down innocents \u2014 we have earned disdain, not admiration. In contrast, the hijackers chose not to take the top off the World Trade Center, but to incinerate the entire building \u2014 proof that they wished not to send us a message but to kill us all, and to kill us to the applause of millions, if the recent popularity of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen in the Arab street is any indication.<\/p>\n We had better rethink the entire notion of dealing with the mythical moderates within regimes like Iran and Syria. I am sure that they exist, as they existed in Saddam’s Iraq. But we see the moderates now in Iraq and \u2014 with all due respect \u2014 they are not exactly the stuff of Ethan Allan, Paul Revere, or the Swamp Fox. In fact, in the Middle East, tens of thousands of democrats are more passive in their desire for freedom than are a few hundred fascists in their zeal for tyranny. We should accept that dissidents would never have toppled Saddam on their own \u2014 and are not quite sure what to do even in his absence. Victory alone, not stalemate or a bellum interruptum, will free the Arab people and extend to them the same opportunities now found in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n In short, there is no reason for any American diplomat to have much to do in Teheran or Damascus \u2014 the haven of choice for many of the killers who bomb in Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. “Getting the message out” to a Syria is like traveling to Warsaw in 1950 to convince the government there how nicely Poles are treated in Chicago; sending peace feelers to Teheran is analogous to doing the same to Cuba in about 1962; discussing policy with Saudi Arabia is like talking to Gen. Franco about the perils of Mussolini or Hitler; incorporating Jordan in our resistance is like counting on a France circa 1940.<\/p>\n Peace and harmony will come, but only when the Middle East, not us, changes-which, tragically, will be brought along more quickly by deterrence and defiance than appeasement and dialogue. President Bush was terribly criticized for his exasperated “bring them on,” but that was one of his most honest, heartfelt \u2014 and needed \u2014 ex tempore remarks of this entire conflict.<\/p>\n We are not in a war with a crook in Haiti. This is no Grenada or Panama \u2014 or even a Kosovo or Bosnia.\u00a0No, we are in a worldwide struggle the likes of which we have not seen since World War II.<\/i>\u00a0The quicker we understand that awful truth, and take measures to defeat rather than ignore or appease our enemies, the quicker we will win. In a war such as this, the alternative to victory is not a brokered peace, but abject Western suicide and all that it entails \u2014 a revelation of which we saw on September 11.<\/p>\n Despite some disappointments about the postbellum reconstruction and the hysteria of our critics, our military is doing a wonderful job. We should understand that they have the capability to win this struggle in Iraq and elsewhere \u2014 but only if we at home accept that we have been all along in a terrible war against terrible enemies.<\/p>\n \u00a92004 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fighting the worst fascists since Hitler. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Saddam’s Baathists recently blew apart Japanese diplomats on their way to a meeting in Tikrit to discuss sending millions of dollars in aid to Iraq’s poor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[808],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1fG","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4816"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4818,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4816\/revisions\/4818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}