Posted on 10/22/2002 1:43:50 PM PDT by Utah Girl
Every now and then a terrible flash of lightning illuminates the darkling plain where, in Matthew Arnold's famous lines, "ignorant armies clash by night." We then see the contours and consequences of our crisis in stark and sudden clarity.
North Korea's admission that it has been secretly been conducting a nuclear-weapons program in breach of its agreement with the United States is one such flash of illumination. The terrorist bombing that murdered hundreds of tourists and their hosts in Bali is another. Both demonstrate the shortsighted folly of appeasing the terrorists of al Qaeda and their state sponsors in Iraq.
Take, first, those arguments of the appeasers that have been demolished by the North Korean case — that diplomacy could and should be used to dismantle Saddam Hussein's nuclear program; that in any event Saddam posed no real threat since he had been successfully "contained;" and that even if there was such a threat long term, we need be in "no hurry" to deal with it.
How hollow and self-deluding those arguments sound today. Consider each one in turn:
1. Diplomacy had allegedly "solved" the problem of North Korean nukes eight years ago. In 1994 the New York Times editorial had celebrated the Clinton administration's agreement with North Korea in the following terms: "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement . . . has put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster." And more nonsense of that kind. We now know, of course, that though presidential candidate George Bush was mocked by the "experts" two years ago when he criticized the Washington-Pyongyang agreement as dangerously lacking in "transparency," he was absolutely right. Apply the lessons of North Korea to Iraq. North Korea and Iraq are both dangerous because they are both secretive totalitarian regimes bent upon maximizing their power through the possession of nuclear weapons. Those who ignored these transparent facts in the case of North Korea — including Bill Clinton, the U.S. State Department, the New York Times, Jimmy Carter (and not forgetting the Nobel Prize Committee) — should humbly observe a vow of silence on Iraq. Instead they are observing a vow of silence of North Korea. (I must acknowledge my debt to Andrew Sullivan for listing their earlier embarrassing statements on North Korea on his website.)
2. If North Korea did not possess nuclear weapons, it would pose a threat solely to South Korea (because of its large conventional army.) But the presence of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula renders that threat nugatory. In other words, before last week's North Korean admission, we were "containing" North Korea as we contain Iraq. Today, however, North Korea poses a threat to Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and U.S. forces in Asia because it is a terrorist regime suffering from a pronounced kamikaze complex that may now be equipped with the nuclear weapons to cripple its neighbors. Similarly, if Iraq possessed nuclear weapons, that would give Saddam Hussein the ability to invade his neighbors, threaten Israel and generally throw his regional weight around. For the West might reasonably be unwilling to take the risk of sending its armies to challenge a nuclear power in its own backyard — or at least Saddam Hussein might act on this calculation and spark off serious conflict.
3. What's the hurry? The hurry is to ensure that Saddam Hussein does not acquire nuclear weapons, as North Korea did, while the U.S. is obsessing over the details of nuclear anti-proliferation diplomacy. Much hinges on this. If Saddam acquires nuclear weapons, Iraq would then pose the same kind of dangerous and insoluble conundrum as North Korea does — and in a part of the world that is both more vital and more unstable than North Asia. A little haste seems a reasonable price for avoiding that.
To many anti-American critics in the U.S. as well as abroad — what Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian calls "the Blame Australia First, Blame America Second mob" — all these arguments are beside the point. They maintain that al Qaeda blows up discos and Saddam finances suicide bombers only in response to the hostile foreign policy of the U.S. and its allies. Hence we could safely ignore a nuclear Iraq or North Korea if we were to pursue an isolationist or pacific or left-wing foreign policy. In other words, if people are trying to kill us, we must have done something awful to them. Stop doing it — and all will be well.
The Bali bombing would have blown this argument away if those who hold it were amenable to rational argument. For who were the victims of the bombings? Not Americans but Indonesian workers and Western back-packers from Australia, Germany, the UK, France, other European countries. Some of their governments have been firm U.S. allies in the war on terrorism, others weak sisters, and the Indonesian government a timid bystander while radical Islamist terror groups organized and plotted under their noses. Yet all their different peoples were murdered without apparent distinction.
To radical Islamist terror groups, however, one distinction was very apparent. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, the victims were all infidels — whether Western Christians or Balinese Hindu "idolaters." And all were therefore legitimate targets.
To the Western mind, it is a matter of polite indifference if somebody else holds a heretical religious belief. Indeed, a willingness to tolerate different and competing religions within the same polity is the very foundation of the West's liberal tradition. To the medieval minds of the Osama Gang, however, heresy is itself a serious affront — and open heresy in an Islamic country is regarded by them as an intolerable affront, one punishable in Bali and elsewhere by death. If this sounds a harsh verdict even on radical Islamism, remember that a death penalty was imposed on Salman Rushdie for writing a heretical novel by a radical Islamist Ayatollah and that a sizeable minority of Moslems accepted the reasonableness of this.
Western left-wingers find it difficult, indeed impossible, to grasp the fundamental nature of this hostility to the West's cultural and religious tolerance even when radical Islamism obligingly expresses it the clearest terms. Their own unacknowledged hostility to the West — their post-colonial guilt and multicultural masochism — simply gets in the way. They instinctively side with the Third World in any dispute between it and the West even when the West is plainly taking the more progressive position. For all their multiculturalism, they cannot really believe that people shaped by a different culture really hold different attitudes on everything from God to women's rights. They persist against all the evidence in seeing them as Western progressives in fancy dress. And they accordingly seek an explanation for Bali in the conduct of Western policy rather than in the beliefs of the bombers.
But the terrorists' hostility cannot be appeased by changing our foreign policy — or indeed by changing our domestic policies to make Western society more accommodating to Moslem immigrants. We would need to transform Western societies to conform completely with Islamic law and practices — ultimately to convert wholesale to Islam — if we are to persuade the radical Islamists to stop murdering us. Unless we take the view that Paris is worth abandoning the Mass, we really have only two choices: we can commit suicide by degrees or we can fight them. For individual Western nations to opt out of the common struggle and seek a separate peace by appeasing the terrorists would merely ensure that they would perish one by one — each victim, in the words of Edmund Burke, "an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Radical Islamism and North Korean paleo-Bolshevism are what Burke called "armed doctrines." As such they can be reasoned with only after they have been unambiguously defeated. After North Korea and Bali we have no excuse for thinking otherwise.
Now, that's a sobering thought!
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