Posted on 06/13/2003 7:19:13 AM PDT by xsysmgr
A merica's friends and enemies often misjudge us. For our enemies, it's sometimes a career decision. It's perfectly understandable that others would misread us because we so often do it ourselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on polls, focus groups, and surveys to analyze the tar out of American voters and consumers. They tell us a lot about politicians' fates, the success of TV commercials, and such. But if you really want to know how Americans feel, you have to listen to country music. We've heard endless analyses of how we've changed since 9/11, but none do more than scratch the surface. I find a more profound analysis in the music of Willie Nelson, Toby Keith, and Darryl Worley.Their hits, and other songs like them, are evidence of a significant American mood change. Many of us — having seen how we kicked tail in Afghanistan and Iraq — are feeling a sense of invincibility and power. And that is a mistake. We are neither omnipotent nor invulnerable.
This new American mood is something I haven't experienced before. Out in Real America — where Maureen Dowd is unread, CNN unwatched, and the Dixie Chicks held to a higher standard of loyalty than Democratic presidential wannabes — Americans are thinking in muscular terms. You don't read it on the op-ed pages, or see it on the network news. Some of it seeps into talk radio. But the one place you hear it loud and clear is in country music. The world would be a better place if Ayatollah Khamenei, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong-il, and their ilk tuned in. They might begin to understand.
The Afghanistan campaign began on October 5, 2001, less than a month after 9/11. The application of focused military power literally shook the mountains where the Soviet army had come to grief a decade earlier. Soon after, Toby Keith sang about how "soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July." That song was an enormous hit, and should have tipped the world off about America's mood swing. Peter Jennings, of course, was first to misunderstand comprehensively. He ruled that "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" was too angry, tossing Keith out of the ABC July 4th Special. One line in the song promises the terrorists, "you'll be sorry you messed with the US of A, 'cause we'll put a boot in your ass. It's the American way." Jennings received hundreds of boots in the mail. He got off easier than the Taliban, who thought we wouldn't act against them — far less act decisively — for giving bin Laden his base of operation.
The Afghanistan campaign brought images of military power that evoked the cowboy frontier. The pictures of our spec-ops troops charging Mazar-e-Sharif on horseback was something out of John Ford's cavalry trilogy. All it lacked was the Duke, and someone sounding "charge" on a bugle. Which is one of the reasons why the seeds of doubt sewn by the critics of the Iraq campaign didn't germinate.
There again, Saddam misjudged us. For starters, he thought we'd allow ourselves to be endlessly tied up in the U.N. Wrong. Then he thought we'd turn tail and run if he successfully re-ran the Mogadishu playbook authored by the late Mohammed Aideed. A lot of the so-called "Saddam fedayeen" found out that the Aideed "technicals" — small pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds — are a really lousy match for an M1A1 Abrahms or an F-16. Throughout the Iraq campaign, we were flooded with more powerful imagery every day. "Shock and awe" over Baghdad, the Third I.D. going through Iraq at highway speeds, Ollie North — with his deadpan delivery — describing one incident after another where the Marines tore through the enemy and raced toward Baghdad.
These images served to do more than create a new level of confidence. They served to make America feel more powerful, and more eager to use its power.
Now, for five weeks in a row, Toby Keith and Willie Nelson have been at the top of the charts in the Washington area with "Beer for My Horses." The message to the bad guys is that, "it's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground," and "when the gunsmoke settles…we'll raise up our glasses against evil forces, singing whiskey for my men, beer for my horses." It's neither good poetry nor profound thought, but it is a strong message of American impatience, an assumption of invincibility. It's a feeling that our friends and enemies need to deal with. They — and we — fail to do so at our mutual peril.
We hear long, hard, and continuously that we need to be patient with our putative allies, such as Saudi Arabia, and with the nations of Old Europe who want us to understand their point of view. In many conversations I've had with people outside the Beltway, I gather that Americans still appreciate that view, but have little left of the patience demanded of us. We have been trying to understand others nations for at least the 58 years since World War II ended. We haven't done as well as we might, and we need to do more. But since 9/11, we have a right to be impatient. Americans realize we are at war, even if Howard Dean doesn't. Nations that ask us to understand them need themselves to understand: it is as much their burden as ours. Just because we are — militarily — the world's most powerful nation, that doesn't mean that it is our burden, and ours alone, to bring peace to the world. Our first duty is to win this war.
These nations also need to realize that our impatience will boil over if there is another 9/11. Many of them will refuse to believe it, but in many ways we under-reacted to 9/11. If there is another, no American president will have the luxury of a patient investigation about how it happened. The Afghanistan campaign will seem like Sunday school to whomever had harbored or helped the perpetrators. And those nations — again, Saudi Arabia is the best example — who talk peace but pay for terror may not survive.
For us, it is a time to be more cautious, not necessarily patient. We have to remember that terrorism's aim is not to kill. It is to intimidate so that men and nations bow to the terrorists' political objectives. We are vulnerable, and any new attacks will be designed to do two things. First, they will be planned to interfere with Mr. Bush's reelection. That means the terrorists will attempt to cause very large numbers of casualties again, or a land a huge blow on our economy, or both. The most recent warnings that al Qaeda may be able to use WMD against us in the continental U.S. is simply a recognition of reality.
If such an attack succeeds, the Democrats have been positioning themselves to benefit from it. All the talk of inadequate funding for homeland security — as if pouring money on Rainbow Tom Ridge will solve anything — is a predicate to their strategy. Bush will be blamed for protecting us inadequately. If the damage is sufficiently severe, and the economy tanks, they may even try to impeach him. If you think they can't do that, think again.
— NRO Contributor Jed Babbin was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and is now an MSNBC military analyst.
Congressman Billybob
Far from it--the Amercan "zeitgeist" HAS turned, but not thoughtlessly so. We have exercised patience FAR over and above the call of duty, and gotten smacked in the kisser for having done so, and have come to the conclusion that the time has come to "..kick ass and take names...".
If the terrorists DO succeed in causing another major incident on American soil, the world will think that the Iraqi "shock and awe" was just a light breeze compared to a hurricane.
BS.
We have allowed the left to dominate our policies for too long and the left is interested in one thing - power. That means the destruction of the USA as we know it. Aiding and abetting our enemies is one way they do that. Undermining our values, our education system, and our courts is another.
What you are hearing in country music is, "Enough! We are tired of that BS. Let's be Americans and act like Americans did before LBJ, Jimma, and Slick Willie and Slimey Hilley!"
The World's Coming Encounter With Andrew Jackson http://www.strategypage.com/strategypolitics/articles/20021128.asp .
The Bush Administration and American Nationalism http://www.strategypage.com/strategypolitics/articles/20021120.asp
Two American Traditions in the War On Terror http://www.strategypage.com/strategypolitics/articles/20021028.asp
The Giants of Flight 93 http://www.strategypage.com/strategypolitics/articles/20021017.asp
These two passages from the 'Andrew Jackson' and the 'Giants of Flight 93' respectively send chills: Europe's peril arises from different issues. They do not seem to have noticed that America's new ”National Security Strategy” - http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssall.html - entails pre-emptive regime change there, including the EU’s, albeit by peaceful means. Governments inhibiting Europe’s “return to strong economic growth” threaten “vital” “U.S. national security interests”. Such blunt statements by a hyperpower are ominous.
That document is a useful guide to what is coming - elimination of terrorist regimes with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in order of threat to America, then elimination of terrorist regimes, then elimination of failing/shaky states possessing WMD if they won’t give those up, elimination of terrorist-supporting regimes (including the EU’s, though the Bush Administration won’t admit this), and finally elimination of such factors fostering terrorism as is feasible, which might include the mere existence of otherwise acceptably behaved tyrannical regimes of Islamic countries. This is a tall order, even for the U.S., and questions are properly raised about American ability and willingness to see this through.
Which brings us back to the American people. Failure to defeat terrorism means further attacks at home, so lack of resolve is not an issue. Ditto for ability. Americans in general, particularly their Jacksonian element, tend to believe in using all available force when involved in a serious war, and being attacked at home qualifies as one. Walter Russell Mead said in Special Providence: "The only reason Jacksonian opinion has ever accepted not to use nuclear weapons is the prospect of retaliation.”
The United States will use whatever means are necessary to win the war against terror, up to and including genocide against whole countries and peoples. See the Autumn 1997 article by Polmar & Allen in Military History Quarterly for what would have happened to Japan had it not surrendered in 1945. The American people, unlike those of Europe and Israel, have a very tribal attitude towards enemy civilian casualties in a major war. Those concerned about fanaticism by foreign peoples are ignorant of American history and power. Japan was fanatical. A clash of civilizations involving the United States would be short, brutal and totally one-sided - significant portions of Asia and North Africa might be reduced to subsisdence-level agriculture and population levels.
And
Students of American character should pay close attention to Flight 93. A random sample of American adults was subjected to the highest possible stress and organized themselves in a terribly brief period, without benefit of training or group tradition other than their inherent national consciousness, to foil a well planned and executed terrorist attack. Recordings show the passengers and cabin crew of Flight 93 - ordinary Americans all - exemplified the virtues Americans hold most dear.
Certain death came for them by surprise but they did not panic and instead immediately organized, fought and robbed terror of its victory. They died but were not defeated. Ordinary Americans confronted by enemies behaved exactly like the citizen-soldiers eulogized in Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture.
Herman Wouk called the heroic sacrifice of the USS Enterprise's Torpedo 8 squadron at the Battle of Midway "... the soul of America in action." Flight 93 was the soul of America, and the American people know it. They spontaneously created a shrine at the crash site to express what is in their hearts and minds but not their mouths. They are waiting for a poet. Normally a President fills this role.
But Americans feel it now. They don't need a government or leader for that, and didn't to guide their actions on Flight 93, because they really are America. Go to the crash shrine and talk to people there. Something significant resonates through them which is different from, and possibly greater than, the shock of suffering a Pearl Harbor attack at home.
Pearl Harbor remains a useful analogy given Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto's statement on December 7, 1941 - "I fear we have woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve." They were giants on Flight 93.
Let's see--the US exercised a similar willingness to withstand Communist expansion, and the evil of Islamism is far more apparent than that ever was (thanks to the willing collaboration of traitors in our government and media), for fifty years--spending money and blood in huge amounts to do so.
I absolutely agree with the bit about the "Jacksonian tradition", and the fact that it is that strain of American thought that America's enemies have thus far ALWAYS mis-understood. BEWARE arousing the Jacksonians from their contemplative slumber, because they are terrible when aroused.
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