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Posted on 04/05/2003 5:54:55 AM PST by Valin
This past week, I went to an intriguing talk by Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis, an authority on Islamic history and the contemporary Middle East.
It was an intellectually stimulating lecture, but it elicited a few questions I feel I must pass on before delving into its substance. First, the Toronto history professor who introduced Professor Lewis had the shiniest, most carefully parted hair I’ve ever seen grace the skull of an academic. I’m talking neat, glistening newscaster hair, with every piece in its proper place. How are we going to function as a society if our intellectuals start sporting better coifs than our executives and trial lawyers? Won’t it throw things off? This was disturbing.
Second, Lewis delivered his talk to a packed auditorium (okay) from a dignified wooden podium (okay) beside a table covered with a cheerful blue gingham picnic cloth dotted with painted-on daisies and black-eyed susans (not okay). Why choose to accompany a serious lecture about the state of the Middle East by an eminent scholar with a bright and jolly floral tablecloth? Why have a tablecloth at all? Hell, why even have a table? This was also disturbing.
Third, I think everyone in the audience had SARS. Every time Lewis paused, at least thirty people in the auditorium started hacking and sneezing. The woman beside me blew her nose at the end of each new point as if in agreement or in disgust, I couldn’t tell. This was also disturbing and has caused me to take my temperature about seventy times since the lecture, just to be safe.
Luckily, the actual content of Lewis’s speech was enlightening and disturbing only in the sense that it brought out a point that has lingered in my mind since 9/11. Perhaps, he argued, the United States really did have an indirect hand in bringing about the attacks on itself, not in the ridiculous sense that many in the left have suggested (too rich, too Zionist, too capitalist), but because they allowed a perception to develop that the U.S. would not defend itself or fight back against those who attacked it.
According to Lewis much of Osama bin Landin’s appeal among his followers has stemmed from his ability to capitalize on a new sense of Muslim empowerment. His message is based on a belief that the West has become weak, providing a great opportunity for Muslims to reassert themselves. He and his followers saw the defeat of the Soviet Union as a triumph of Muslims over infidels due to the Muslims’ success in Afghanistan. And now they see the West as a soft enemy incapable of self-defense.
Americans? Hit them and they’ll run. Just look at the Vietnam War, Somalia, the embassy bombing in Nairobi, Kenya. The message was clear: the Americans will respond to violence against them with little more than harsh words and a tendency to pack up and head home.
I thought Professor Lewis’s point felt intuitively right. Even on a micro level, it is doubtful the 9/11 terrorists would have conceived their hijacking plans as they had if they had anticipated that American passengers and flight crews would have fought back with hard violence. (Thankfully, the terrorists underestimated individual Americans in this respect.) But if there is doubt in your mind, just consider that Saddam Hussein has been giving out copies of the movie Black Hawk Down—which brilliantly portrays a bloody battle in Mogadishu in which 18 U.S. soldiers died after being ambushed by angry Somalis —as a primer to show that the Americans are “a paper tiger” and, as Lewis said, a soft enemy.
After all, immediately after the 1993 Mogadishu incident—in which U.S. Rangers and Delta Force members still killed hundreds of Somalis despite being ambushed—President Clinton pulled U.S. troops from Somalia although popular opinion would have supported sending more. Somali warlord Aidid was left in power, and the American troops’ sacrifices and acts of bravery were essentially nullified. As author Mark Bowden, who penned the 1999 book Black Hawk Down, wrote recently: “The lesson our retreat [in Somalia] taught the world's terrorists and despots is that killing a few American soldiers, even at a cost of more than 500 of your own fighters, is enough to spook Uncle Sam.”
This is why the current war in Iraq is so vital, even beyond the important objectives of liberating the Iraqi people and containing a brutal dictator who has been building up weapons of mass destruction (which would of course be reasons enough). It is also an opportunity for the United States to destroy the perception that it is a weak, incapable power that will not fight back if attacked.
It is a chance to show, once and for all, that the Americans are a strong, proud, brave, and unwavering people. And that if you hit them, they will not run. They will fight. Honorably, honestly, and righteously.
The American Enterprise Online:
In a time and place of our choosing, with overwhelming firepower directed at the correct targets, sparing as much of the innocent as possible, and willing to help rebuild a peaceful and free society when we're done.
More accurately stated--Americans are all of the above AND they are VERY slow to anger, but, once aroused, they are terrible adversaries.
And an excellent opportunity to expose Islamists for the sniveling cowards that they are, as they scatter like cockroaches into the Iraqi woodwork.
The wheel has turned.
It was Sen. John Kerry from MA not former Sen. Bob Kerr from NE.
The take-away message for terrorist is, support Democrats inside the US and attack US forces and interests whenever there is a Democrat in the White House.
Yep....and the author neglected to mention our doing absolutely nothing about the 241 Marines who were killed by a suicide/homicide bomber in Lebanon in '83. Reagan's first instinct was to retaliate harshly against Syria, but Weinberger successfully convinced him that our Saudi "friends" would be none too happy about such an approach. This non-action convinced Islamoterrorists worldwide that we were too weak-minded to fight them, and encouraged them to commit more ambitious atrocities.
I'm a big Gipper fan, but this was undoubtedly his worst moment.
And if Algore had been elected, it is a perfectly reasonable and accurate perception.
Bombs would be exploding around him and he would be out destroying those evil SUVs.
A fatal error.
A couple of things are becoming clear:
There is no advantage in being the superpower if we are too timid to actually excercise that power.
For generations, the bad guys noticed that our desire to be "liked" had brought us exactly to that impasse.
The evil in the world had no problem exploiting that idiocy.
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