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Politics : Attack Iraq? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (1053)	9/13/2002 9:44:05 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8683

Are you Canadian? September 11: Prime Minister Chrétien's version National Post Friday, September 13, 2002 Here are the main lessons we draw from the September 11 terrorist attacks: 1. The murderous spirit of mid-century fascism persists, and has assumed the form of militant Islam. 2. Al-Qaeda managed to destroy the World Trade Center because the West ignored the Islamist threat. This mistake must never be repeated. Future catastrophes can be averted only if the West attacks terrorist networks with pre-emptive military action. 3. Unlike terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, which had defined political objectives, al-Qaeda and its ilk fight under an apocalyptic creed. No death toll is too high, no target off-limits. Therefore, such groups -- and the states that support them -- must never be permitted to acquire weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, the CBC aired an interview with Jean Chrétien, our Prime Minister. Here, by contrast, are the lessons he says that he drew from the Sept. 11 tragedy: 1. "You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others. That is what the Western world -- not only the Americans, the Western world -- has to realize." 2. "The Western world is going to be too rich in relation to the poor world and necessarily will be looked upon as being arrogant and self-satisfied, greedy and with no limits. The 11th of September is an occasion for me to realize it even more." It is one thing to hear such blame-the-West absurdities from left-wing academics and columnists. But to hear this nonsense emanating from the Prime Minister is worse. Here we have our highest elected official using government-subsidized media to tell Canadians that when 19 Arab murderers flew oversized gasoline bombs into buildings full of ordinary working people, the event was an occasion for him to muse on economic injustice -- and the "humiliation" imposed on poor nations. Yesterday, the Prime Minister's Office issued a press release arguing that Mr. Chrétien's words had been taken out of context. But the statement did nothing to prove this. Indeed, the press release made the PM's position look worse by including more objectionable extracts from the CBC interview. To the question "By the end of [Sept. 11] what were you thinking about in terms of how the world had changed?", the PM answered, in part, "I've said that it is a division in the world that is building up. And I knew that it was the inspiration of it. For me, I think that the rest of the world is a bit too selfish, and that there is a lot of resentment." There are several appalling aspects to the Prime Minister's comments. The first is the casual implication that disparities in national income drive people to mass murder -- as if nihilistic terrorism were not a pathology stoked deliberately by wealthy Arab financiers and dictators, but rather a natural economic indicator, such as unemployment or inflation. It should go without saying that there is nothing remotely normal about flying airplanes into buildings, and vast swaths of the world's population -- including East Asia and Latin America -- have struggled successfully in the shadow of Western wealth without spawning popular movements to exterminate those that have achieved greater success. Indeed, the Prime Minister's comment demonstrates his ignorance of terrorist sociology. As a recent study by two Princeton University scholars demonstrated, there is no correlation between terrorism and poverty -- which is why the Muslims who want to kill us are middle-class engineers from Riyadh and Hamburg, not subsistence farmers from Bangladesh. Note that the al-Qaeda operatives who attacked the United States on Sept. 11 were well-fed specimens. Ziad Samir Jarrah, at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93, owned a new Mercedes-Benz. The second prime ministerial absurdity is the implication that the West has actively imposed "humiliations" on the Muslim world, and treated it with "greedy" indifference. How does this square with the fact that the United States was the leading aid donor to Afghanistan in the year leading up to Sept. 11, 2001? The Europeans have lavished billions on the Palestinian Authority, and the White House has sought to give the Palestinians something they have never had since the age of Roman antiquity -- a state of their own. The accusation that the West is a colonial aggressor humiliating the Muslim world is an old theory -- Osama bin Laden has advanced it many times in his various declarations of war. That Mr. Chrétien should draw lessons from Sept. 11 that echo bin Laden's accusations in oblique terms is a disgrace. Eighteen months is starting to seem like a very, very long time indeed. © Copyright 2002 National Post