Posted on 08/19/2006 2:16:33 PM PDT by Right_Wing_Madman
Across Vermont and Massachusetts and even parts of New Hampshire the bumper stickers proclaim confidently: “WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.”
And they have a point. War isn’t the answer so much as a question: What are you? And is what you are worth defending? There have been two answers to that recently. Jens Orback, Sweden’s Minister of Democracy, said on a radio discussion:
"We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us."
Who knows? Maybe he’s right. In Malmo, where the Muslim population is 40 per cent, ambulance drivers will not go into most areas without police escort. Still, maybe that will change when the Health and Justice Ministries are in Muslim hands.
But for Israel it’s not an open question. They know that Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran don’t just want to win, to rule, to dominate: they want to kill every last Jew – or, if that’s just an opening negotiating position, at the very least drive them out of the Middle East and somewhere else. Israelis have no choice but to cut straight to the real question: Is what we are worth defending? And so they have acted, not just to punish Hezbollah but also to send a message to the larger enemies beyond.
The problem is that much of the world – the transnational agencies, the global summits, the EU, the ICC – is in the hands of men like Mr Orback. Do you know the name Jim Callaghan? No reason why you should. He was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom before Mrs Thatcher. In fact, he’s the reason the Brits wound up electing Mrs Thatcher. Very nice chap. Affable, decent, modest. But he once confided to a friend of mine that he thought Britain’s decline was irreversible and that the government’s job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. He wasn’t alone in this: an entire generation of Britain’s political class, on both sides of the aisle, felt much the same way. So their instinct, when confronted with a crisis, was to “manage” it rather than solve it.
Does that sound familiar? There are now calls for the UN to send peacekeepers into southern Lebanon – in other words, to protect Hezbollah from getting battered any further by Israel. But hang on, aren’t there already UN peacekeepers in Lebanon? Why, yes. But, as the old song says, “Who Takes Care Of The Caretaker’s Daughter While The Caretaker’s Busy Taking Care?” Or as Roger Ailes of Fox News quipped on the day Patrick Kennedy was released from rehab: “At the Capitol, they’re installing crash barriers to protect the crash barriers.”
The defeatism of the Callaghan generation had its limits: it foresaw economic decline, and geopolitical decline. The defeatism of the Jens Orback generation goes beyond that: it accepts civilizational suicide - as a given, can’t be reversed, no choice but to embrace our fate. If you don’t share that view, then every time you cut the Orbacks of the world in on the decision-making process you’re making your position worse.
“You may not be interested in war,” said Trotsky, “but war is interested in you.” The Israelis have always grasped that. If war is going to come, why not ensure that it comes at a time and place as advantageous to one as possible? That’s a large part of what’s happening in the Middle East. If you try to avoid confronting Iran now, you’ll only have to confront them under worse circumstances later. Jimmy Carter, who embodied the west as a smiling eunuch, wanted to avoid confronting the newborn Islamic Republic three decades ago and now it’s a nuclear power. As I always say, there is no “stability”: behind the polite façade of the UN peacekeepers patrolling the stalemate, history is always on the move; the bad guys get new weapons, new rockets – and, as we’ve seen in Haifa, these bad guys use what they have to their full extent. So what will they have in five years’ time?
Within the American right, there’s an argument about whether this is “World War III” (as Newt Gingrich sees it) or “World War IV” (as Norman Podhoretz has designated it, III being the Cold War). It’s not just semantic: it gets to the heart of how we see the struggle. If WWIII were like I and II, it would be an easier sell: carrier groups, massive invasions; that’s the kind of war we do well. But, if WWIV is like the Cold War, that’s the kind we don’t do at all well. If you think Jim Callaghan was a defeatist, what about Schmidt, Mitterand and Trudeau? The last’s contribution to Cold War resolve was to let Cuban military transports refuel in Canada en route to Africa. I don’t wish to put down just the political class here. With the best will in the world, one cannot credit the peoples of France or Italy with any meaningful role in the defeat of Communism: au contraire, they elected large numbers of ‘em to their own parliaments.
Of course, the Politburo’s subject peoples were pretty enervated, too. Which was good news for us. This time round, the enemy is, to say the least, more motivated, and we’re even more slumped in civilizational ennui. The UN and EU are in détente mode, but détente with a death cult makes even less sense than last time round. We’re told by Chirac and Putin and Zapatero and co that Israel is being “disproportionate”. And, if “proportionate” means being like that Swede, they’re right. But if the cry is “Death before disproportion!” then include me out.
National Review, August 14th 2006
ping
I am with Coulter who advocates sending in the missionaries over all this PC accomodation.
War is Not the Answer...It is a Question:What are you? And is what you are worth defending?
I predict most moonbats upon hearing this will suffer strokes.
The money quote - there's always at least one in Mr Steyn's essays.
"We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us."
Premature Stockholm Syndrome. Seems to be running rampant throughout the EU.
Machiavelli, perhaps the wisest political thinker of his age, said that war could not be avoided, only delayed to the advantage of your adversaries. Olmert is out of his mind; stark raving nuts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.