9/11: From Osama to Obama, The Defeat of the West? (Part 2)

Sorry for the delay in posting part 2. I tossed two earlier versions of this post as they had become too long and tried to encapsulate too much. Let me, mostly, concentrate on how the seeds of the West's defeat were fertilized during the years since 9/11/2001. While trying to restrict the time frame, I, however, do have to note that the ground for the defeat was prepared over many years especially with the progressive take-over of the universities, the education business, in general, the law profession, ever-growing government bureaucracies, and, of course, the media, to include Hollywood. I would note, in particular, that the pernicious doctrine of "cultural relativism" did much to sap the West's will to defend itself: We have, the Wise Ones tell us, no basis for judging whether one culture is better than another.

Under the current calamity we have in the White House, the process of defeat was greatly accelerated and even celebrated. In fairness, however, we must note that even under Bush, whom I generally admired as a competent war leader, actions were taken to undermine the effectiveness of our efforts. While I think Bush--and certainly Cheney--understood the battle that commenced on 9/11 as part of the long war, the administration let itself get mau-maued by the purveyors of political correctness. One of the tragic errors made early in this latest battle was the promotion of the nonsense that we all should go about our lives as normal. Shopping, it was proclaimed, was a patriotic duty! If you don't shop the terrorists have won! This helped undermine, in my view, the seriousness of the message delivered by 9/11.

An even greater mistake, a colossal one, in fact, was the administration's line that this was not a war against Islam, because "Islam means peace," apparently a confusion generated by the word "Islam" sounding similar to Salam (Peace). The terrorists, we have been repeatedly told, are not "real" Muslims: "real" Muslims follow the Religion of Peace. Salam, however, has nothing to do with Islam, which, in fact, means "submission." I remember, for example, just days after the attack receiving a telegram from State sent to all embassies asking for suggestions on how best to drive home that we were not at war with Islam. With the smoke still rising from the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a grassy field in Pennsylvania, Secretary Powell visited Washington DC's massive Saudi-financed Islamic Center to assure Muslims that we meant them no harm--and I won't get into the effort to let the Saudis off the hook for 9/11. This would have been the loose equivalent of, say, having had Secretary Hull visit Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, December 8, 1941, to stress that we were not really at war with Japan because "real" Shintoists would not have attacked Pearl Harbor. I saw, by the way, the same behavior by the British Ambassador in Indonesia in the wake of the outrageous 7/7/2005 bus bombing in London; he fell all over himself explaining that Britons did not blame Islam for the massacre.

Once we went to war, the splendid US and allied militaries did what Western militaries know how to do better than anybody else on the planet: conduct a complex, highly technical, lethal, and effective campaign that soon had AQ and the Taliban dead, running, or hiding.

It all quickly went downhill from there.

Let me turn for a moment to Iraq. Was the take-down of Saddam justified? I thought so at the time and continue to think that Saddam was a dangerous monster who had in the past used WMD, and had sought a nuclear capability (remember Project Babylon and Gerald Bull?) Nearly ALL the intel from many intel services indicated that Saddam had not given up his nuclear ambitions. Saddam had links to AQ and was a financial enabler of Palestinian terrorism. He was a destabilizing force in the region. He had to go. His regime soon found out what it was like to get on the wrong end of the world's only true military superpower.

The Iraq invasion, despite the last-minute betrayal by Turkey, was brilliantly executed. The problems began when the progressive dominated bureaucracy--and government is a major redoubt for progressives regardless of who's in the White House--began with nation building. Once again we got into the business of exporting parliamentary democracy and, as in Afghanistan, ignored the history of the country we had just invaded. In the name of women's education and empowering networks of non-governmental organizations, etc., we began breaking things we should not have broken. If you break old institutions and practices, you better have something real strong and real fast to replace them. We didn't. We did not intend to occupy the place for decades as we did in, say, Japan. No.  We took the top off the pressure cooker, and were surprised when the thing exploded.

Then came the ultimate act of progressive madness. Will deal with that in the next episode of The Defeat of The West.