Nadine, I guess I post this Hanson piece for people here who think like you and me. The others will skip it, unfortunately.
AT WAR
America Must Go It Alone
We're not like the rest of the world--luckily for the world.
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Saturday, August 10, 2002 12:01 a.m.
The world suddenly appears a very strange place. Our friends act as if they were enemies, our allies pose as neutrals, and our foes claim they are poor victims. In the present lull before the storm, pundits and experts advise us what we cannot do rather than what we can and should, and what we are told is so often not at all what we perceive.
Just last week five Americans were blown apart in Jerusalem amid scenes of mass death and mayhem at Hebrew University. Palestinians reacted with glee as 10,000 poured into the streets to rejoice at news of the murders, leaving some doubt about past denials that earlier they had similarly celebrated on hearing that thousands of us were vaporized on Sept. 11.
The terrorists apparently have no expectation that such killing will draw an American response. Yet there was a time not long ago when the U.S. bombed Libya for its complicity in blowing up just a few Americans and let others sort out cause and effect.
Americans are understandably puzzled at the macabre mix of murder and merriment. Why do we give millions of dollars to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, a regime that abets such belligerents? And why are thousands from the West Bank currently seeking entrance into the hated United States?
Meanwhile, Jordan's King Abdullah II politely lectures us about everything from the West Bank to Iraq. The recipient of nearly a half-billion dollars in annual American largesse, he has all but closed his borders to those from the West Bank, a humane stance in comparison to Kuwait's decision in 1991 to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian residents. For all his criticism of our support for Israel, the young king, like his father, wants no part of the extremists' pan-Islamic revolutionary fervor.
Saudi Arabia, the womb of Sept. 11, is considered equally restrained because it subsidizes terrorists covertly rather than publicly, and relegates its government-sanctioned anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism to zany clerics and unimaginative bureaucrats. Thousands of our troops stationed in the desert there are prevented from venturing into Iraq, and are not to fly out to hunt down the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Instead our female soldiers remain veiled as our guns and planes protect the sheiks--but from whom and what?
France and Germany have both announced that they will not support American efforts to topple Saddam Hussein without a clear mandate from the United Nations. They have more faith in a body in which Chinese autocrats sit on the Security Council, and rogue states like Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe vote on such resolutions in the General Assembly. St. Mihiel, Normandy Beach, an American-led NATO resistance to the Soviets, and the ghosts of six million gassed who flit still over the European countryside--the great graveyard of the Jews--are not so much rarely mentioned as utterly forgotten.
The events of Sept. 11 have stripped away the hypocritical veneer of the past, and Americans are just beginning to accept the way things are rather than the way they wish them to be. And such a revelation is stark indeed.
There is not a single consensual government in the Arab Middle East, so we ask autocracies like Egypt to help draft consensual government for the Palestinians. The past American policy of bribing or protecting purportedly pro-Western strongmen is in shambles. Terrorists who murder our innocents are more likely to come from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine, our supposed friends, than from our declared enemies in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The Palestinian Authority and other tyrannies of the Middle East are treated like the Soviet Union of the 1930s: Seen in the West as confused rather than evil regimes, they are given a pass to lynch their own and terrorize others without moral condemnation.
Our European allies--whether out of military weakness, fear of its tumultuous past, envy, concern over oil, terrorists, the thin buffer of the Mediterranean, their own rising Islamic populations or the old anti-Semitism--are likely to oppose us on every issue that has arisen since last September. They have bristled over our tactics and strategy in Afghanistan, the treatment of captured terrorists in Cuba, support for Israel, resistance to Iraq, the former Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and the nomenclature of the Axis of Evil. Indeed, India and Russia are more likely to voice encouragement than our sworn NATO allies, a group that more rapidly professed support for the travails of the Spanish navy off the Moroccan coast than it did for America after Sept. 11.
We should not be alarmed at all about this hypocrisy, because paradox is to be expected in times of uncertainty. Instead, we should remember that in all the recent crises of the past, America has stood nearly alone. By 1942, Europe and most of Asia were fascist, the other continents neutral at best. England was our sole democratic ally. During the Cold War--despite periodic appeasement in Europe and the venom of the elite left--the U.S. stopped the spread of Soviet communism and finally bankrupted its murderous hegemony. In neither case did the League of Nations or the United Nations offer much assistance; both passed sanctimonious resolutions while millions were butchered in silence by Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mao. Our recent encounter with Milosevic was thus predictable.
The reason that we so often must stand by ourselves is that the United States really is different. Our Constitution singularly preserves the sanctity of the individual; American culture is truly a revolutionary society that has empowered millions of free and freed peoples without regard for religion, race, or background--and so unleashed economic and military power never before seen. The common anti-American slurs of "exceptionalism" and "unilateralism" are, in fact, compliments of the highest order.
If the past is any guide to the present, Americans--hard to arouse and rightly reluctant to go to war--will finally have enough of the present nonsense and so seek clarity out of the chaos. We will probably act alone against Iraq. We will defeat the fundamentalists and end the terrorist havens. As before, we will let Europeans stew in their own juices of resentment and inaction. And we will at last rediscover that democracy--as was true in postbellum Germany and Japan--must follow any victory over autocracy, as aftershocks in the Middle East will approach the magnitude that we witnessed in Europe in 1945 and 1989.
Expect most other nations publicly to condemn us as harshly during the ordeal as they will privately thank us in the aftermath. But then, they, not we, are once again on the wrong side of history.
Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is author most recently of "An Autumn of War" (Anchor, 2002).
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