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Posted on 10/04/2001 8:32:42 AM PDT by Jean S

Contrary to the pieties currently being circulated by the useful idiots of our "peace movement," war is never the consequence of strength; rather, it almost always stems from perceptions of weakness and the efforts of enemies to exploit such weakness.

Four of history's worst blunders took place in the narrow time frame between Sept. 1, 1939, and Dec. 11, 1941--Hitler's attack on Poland (in response to which Britain and France surprised Der Fuehrer by declaring war on Germany); the German invasion of the Soviet Union; Japan's attack upon the United States at Pearl Harbor; and Hitler's subsequent, but by no means necessary, declaration of war on America.

In each case, the attacking party had underestimated the side it attacked because it had been led to believe that America was weak. That such estimations ultimately were wrong made them no less tragic for all concerned.

More recently, Saddam Hussein dismissed American threats of military force following his invasion of Kuwait because his reading of the American character, allegedly based on his study of our Vietnam experience, suggested that we had grown soft and lost our will to fight. Later, once Operation Desert Storm actually began, those inferences from Vietnam further misled him into believing that a low tolerance for casualties would lead us to throw in the towel as the number of our soldiers sent home in body bags increased.

Such thoughts float to the surface because a similar underestimation appears to have taken place in the thinking of those who launched and aided the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And as with those attacked by the Axis Powers in World War II, we ourselves bear much of the blame for encouraging such perceptions on the part of our enemies.

This is another way of saying that nothing in our response to terrorism over the past decade or so, a response which largely consisted of an ineffectual mixture of tough talk and plink-plink, pinprick missile attacks on empty buildings, put terrorists or the states that sponsor them on notice that they would pay a price for their activities.

To the contrary, our failure to respond firmly to the deliberate killing of Americans in various parts of the world only produced three counterproductive results: to make us a more inviting target for more and bigger terrorist attacks; to encourage enemy governments to give the kind of support to terrorist groups that make such increasingly lethal attacks possible; and to discourage potential allies in the Middle East from cooperating with us against the terrorists.

The message all too often sent from Washington was that it was generally safe to murder Americans in cold blood; that we would not complicate our diplomatic efforts by accusing foreign governments of supporting terrorism, and certainly wouldn't run any risks to attack terrorist camps in such countries, even though we knew that those were the places where the people who had killed our people could be found.

The pattern for such a craven approach was probably set, ironically, soon after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, when, according to terrorism expert Laurie Mylroie in her book, "Study of Revenge," officials in the Clinton administration suppressed investigative findings suggesting the involvement of Iraqi agents in the attack. The reason: fear of finally having to do something about Saddam Hussein; fear, in other words, of having to actually take a firm stand against terrorism.

Terrorists and the governments that support them probably also couldn't help but notice certain other events that followed, including the American decision to tuck tail and run away from Somalia after 18 Army Rangers were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu in October 1993, and the manner in which our pilots, out of a fear of casualties, were ordered to fly sorties during the war over Kosovo at altitudes that both reduced their effectiveness against the Serbs and increased the "collateral damage" inflicted upon innocent civilians.

Within this context, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's taunt that "Americans don't have the courage to come here" may reveal more about how we are viewed by such people than we care to admit.

Great powers will always have enemies, but the key question now before us is not why we are hated, but why those who hate us were led to believe they could attack us and get away with it.

Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.

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