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Posted on 09/12/2001 6:16:58 PM PDT by LibertarianLiz

You can understand why they're jumping up and down in the streets of Lebanon and Palestine, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action-thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. They have reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential refugee, spending the day of infamy bounced to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a staff which obviously knows less about the power of symbolism than America's enemies do.

And, for those on the receiving end, that "money shot," as they call it in Hollywood -- the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as old chimneys at an abandoned paper mill -- represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure of the U.S. and a worse moral failure of the West generally.

There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade school photo-op. The federal government has no constitutional responsibility for education: It is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton's forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on Earth must fill his day with piffling initiatives designed to assuage the niggling discontents of pampered soccer moms and other preferred demographics: elementary school programs, prescription drug plans for seniors, "lock-boxes" for this and that, and a thousand other trivialities.

And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. If you drive around Vermont and California, you spend a lot of time behind cars with smug bumper stickers calling for more funds to be diverted from defence to education, as this would prove what a caring society we are.

Yesterday was a rebuke to those fatuities: The first charge of any government is the defence of its borders -- and, without that, it makes no difference how much you spend on prescription drug plans for seniors.

From the end of the Gulf War to September 11th 2001, the world's only superpower took a long weekend off, loaded up the SUV, went to the mall. Yesterday's atrocities were a rude awakening from the indulgences of the last decade, with some awful stories to remind us of our illusions -- disabled employees in wheelchairs, whom the Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.

The first named victim I was aware of was the wife of the Solicitor-General, Barbara Olson, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of those good-looking blond "former federal prosecutors" who turned up on Larry King every other night during impeachment -- smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton administration. She was on the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Pentagon and had time to call her husband, Ted (yesterday was his birthday), to tell him her flight was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the passengers and flight crew -- including the pilots. God knows what those final moments were like: At what point did she realize she wasn't in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but a cooler customer with bigger plans?

President Bush, echoing a long line of British prime ministers responding to IRA attacks on shopping streets and railway stations, called the perpetrators "a faceless coward." "Cowardly," agreed Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Baker. Those British prime ministers were wrong and so are the President, the former Secretary of State and the Mayor of New York. The men or women who do such things are certainly faceless but not, I think, cowards. A coward would not agree to hijack a plane. Many others might do it for, oh, $20-million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: Those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. But very few of us would agree to hijack a plane for the certainty of death. We should acknowledge that at the very least, it requires a kind of mad bravery, a bravery 99% of those of us in the West can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson's phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so.

What causes are we willing to die for? By "we," I mean "the West," though in truth these days that umbrella doesn't cover a lot -- the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any useful sense. But even America's sense of purpose has shrivelled away over the decade since the Gulf War: Why was there such a comprehensive intelligence failure? Is it because the U.S. has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance -- satellites, telephone interceptions --and virtually eliminated human intelligence -- the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? And is the delusion that you can fight terrorism with computers from outer space just another wretched example of the nouveau warfare pioneered by Mr. Clinton in Kosovo? Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it, and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental terrorist group can find four jet pilots willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton Doctrine told the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer had the stomach for a single body bag. The doughboys of the Great War went off singing, "We won't come back till it's over/Over There!" But not Mr. Clinton's army: We won't go over till it's over/Over There! It ill behoves such a craven warmonger to call anybody else a "faceless coward."

There are cowards elsewhere, too. The bleakly funniest moment in the non-stop coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that "the United Nations building had not been hit." Well, there's a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week, the plenipotentiaries of the West were in Durban holed up with the emissaries of thug states, treating them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how abject the West's apology for past sins should be. Yesterday's sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward: They mean what they say, and we should take them at their word. We should also cease dignifying them by pretending that the foreign ministers of, say, Spain and Syria are somehow cut from the same cloth.

But there is a long-term lesson for the U.S., too. It is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position -- that the pre-eminent power on Earth can collectively leap in its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way -- is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you. Niall Ferguson, in his book The Cash Nexus, argues that imperial engagement is in fact the humanitarian position: The two most successful military occupations in recent history were the Allies' transformation of West Germany and Japan into functioning democracies. Ferguson thinks the U.S., if it had the will, could do that in Sierra Leone. But why stop there? Why let ramshackle basket cases like the Sudan or Afghanistan be used as launch pads to kill New Yorkers?

Instead of empire, the U.S. belongs to NATO, a defence alliance of prosperous Western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab. The U.S. taxpayer's willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the softening up of America's so-called "allies," freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned. Our own peace-loving Dominion is a haven for terrorist groups of every stripe, any member of which can get a Canadian passport just by faking a Quebec baptismal certificate and then driving a rental car over to Vermont. Ottawa had better hope none of the fingerprints on yesterday's mayhem belong to chums of Ahmed Ressam, or Washington might realize that the undefended 49th parallel is a concept from another age -- when the U.S. and Canada were both serious Western powers. That is no longer the case. Those nations who persist in finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world's future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after yesterday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: Whose side are you on?

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