Get serious
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
Washington Times
Commentary
December 7, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will spend the week in Europe and apparently the message she will deliver to our so-called allies is as undiplomatic as it is needed: Get serious. It is a message many other people in this country -- notably the media and academia -- should take aboard, as well.
Some in Europe are in a swivet over unconfirmed press reports the U.S. government has secretly operated detention facilities in unnamed Eastern European countries and covertly transported suspected Islamist terrorists through the Continent's airspace and airports. Anti-American parliamentarians and bureaucrats have howled that such behavior violates Europe's norms and treaties and demanded full American disclosure and contrition.
It is time to remind our friends we are engaged in a war. We fight not just on our own behalf but on theirs, as well. For the Islamists we battle wish to destroy not just freedom in America, but also in Europe.
The more sensible Europeans have begun appreciating the gravity of their situation. The rioting in France is a foretaste of what must be expected from the millions of unassimilated, disaffected and poor Muslim immigrants who now reside in Western Europe. Their young people are systematically recruited and radicalized by Saudi-funded Islamofascist clerics and organizations, particularly in prison.
The danger has only been increased by the European practice of ignoring such problems as long as possible and then, when that is no longer sustainable, of trying to postpone the day of reckoning with appeasement. The outrage expressed at reported CIA activities is, in part, a product of this syndrome.
Condi Rice should impress upon her European interlocutors that neither we nor they have the luxury of halfheartedly and irresolutely fighting this war. Our enemies are adept at using Western civil liberties to protect their operations from investigation and prosecution.
Their apologists would risk our future liberty by insisting we eschew well-established, legitimate and necessary wartime techniques, such as covert operations to deny our enemies insights into our counterterrorism actions and to defeat their efforts to destroy us. Neither America nor European nations interested in self-preservation can accede to such demands.
As Miss Rice conveys this "tough love" message to her diplomatic counterparts, a similar theme should be transmitted to the domestic and foreign media and to academe. The former are roiled by reports of U.S. military personnel selling stories about progress in Iraq to Iraqi newspapers. The latter is pressing the Supreme Court to rule universities can take federal funds without being required to allow military recruiters to do their vital work on campus.
Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, took point with the media on Sunday, declaring on NBC's "Meet the Press" he was untroubled that good news stories about Iraq were placed in the Iraqi press -- as long as the articles were accurate and produced by responsible individuals (for example, U.S. military information operations specialists). He understands better than most how important it is for those who will ultimately determine that country's fate -- namely, the Iraqi people -- to have access to news about real progress, not just the violence and setbacks. How different might the polls be here at home if the American people were given a more balanced portrayal of the facts on the ground over there?
No less in need of a dose of salts are the academic plaintiffs in a case heard by the Supreme Court today yesterday. In Rumsfeld v. the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), the court is asked to strike down as unconstitutional legislation that made federal grants to institutions of higher learning contingent upon welcoming military recruiters.
Ostensibly, the plaintiffs object to what they regard as armed services' discrimination against homosexuals. Their brief cannot conceal, however, a deep-seated hostility toward the military and its mission that is all-too-common in universities.
This is yet another example of a lack of seriousness about the conflict in which we are engaged: the War for the Free World. It should be the duty of every American institution, not just those who benefit from government largess, to facilitate and otherwise encourage U.S. military recruitment.
The alternative will not be to prevent the United States from fielding an army. Instead, it will simply have to do so on a compulsory rather than voluntary basis. While there is an argument for expecting all Americans to serve their country in some fashion, neither the military, prospective draftees nor, last time I checked, academia want a return to conscription.
We had better be clear -- with each other, with our allies, with the press and with academe: This war is deadly serious. We need to use all techniques at our disposal to prevail in it. That means employing covert activities, political warfare (including information operations) and recruiting the finest all-volunteer force possible, with the active support of institutions, communities and families. Doing otherwise will not prevent further conflict. But it may end the present one on very unsatisfactory terms.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times and lead author of "War Footing: Ten Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World."
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