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Posted on 10/16/2001 11:30:17 PM PDT by MadIvan

WE are losing the propaganda war. That is the smart thing to say at the moment. While we are sending bombers and missiles to Afghanistan, the Taliban are broadcasting pictures of injured children and conducting journalists around bomb sites that were once (it is claimed) poor villages - and they are winning on points.

Our Government has been so concerned with the business of war abroad that it has failed to keep up the verbal fight for understanding at home. As a result, so they say, the public is losing confidence in what this action is supposed to be about.

Really? Does our lack of self-belief go as deep as this? Was it unforgivably slipshod of the Prime Minister and his famously competent media managers to take their eye off the ball and allow us, in that brief moment of radio silence, to go wobbly?

Perhaps it is true that Tony Blair was too enamoured of his starring role on the world stage to remember that the audience at home needed to be nursed through its confusions. Maybe. But then again, he might just have assumed that it went without saying that the murder of some 5,500 innocent civilians required reciprocal action.

He may have thought (apparently wrongly, according to the new wisdom) that - whatever the complexities of the project - the justification for a military response to this outrage was self-evident. If so, he seems to have underestimated our capacity for moral equivocation and our immediate inclination to distrust our own leaders.

I suppose this is largely the fault of my generation. Ever since the 1960s, the default mode for educated Western people has been contempt for their own political institutions, particularly when they become involved in any military intervention. Every generation wants its own Vietnam.

But let me tell you, as one of the undergraduate cohort at Berkeley who invented the student revolution and spent much of her youth protesting against American action in southeast Asia: the war against Taliban terror is no Vietnam. And not only because the Vietcong never flew planes into American buildings. One of the reasons that compelled many of us to march against the Vietnam war was that the regime that America was propping up in South Vietnam had reneged on its promise to hold democratic elections (because it feared that the Communists would win).

It was the belief that America was being hypocritical in its supposed commitment to democracy that fuelled a great deal of the outrage among idealistic young protesters, long before the use of napalm made the war seem utterly grotesque. We thought we knew what America was supposed to stand for: democratic freedom, even if that meant that people made political choices of which it did not approve.

Islamic fundamentalism itself - let alone Osama bin Laden's maniacal version of it - holds no brief for democracy. It is oppressive, not in the glib contemporary sense, but in the strict technical meaning of the word. It is opposed to virtually every single human liberty that people who profess to be liberals believe in.

Of course, it is disturbing to see a large, rich country attacking a small, poor one. But it is the poor country (or those whom it protects) that has declared war, and done it in the most iniquitous way it is possible to imagine. There can be no confusion about who the good guys are in this. It is a war, as much as the one against fascism was, between open and closed societies, between freedom and totalitarianism, between enlightenment and enforced ignorance. If we cannot keep hold of that fundamental principle, then we are truly lost.

But self-loathing has become a reflex: a fist that automatically punches the body to which it is attached unless it is firmly held down. And holding it down requires constant reiteration of the basic truths that Mr Blair seemed to think he could take for granted.

First, bin Laden and his psychopathic outfit are evil figures of comic book proportions. They have been compared to the nihilistic enemy of James Bond, but they are more like the incredible, diabolical characters in a Superman adventure who threaten to destroy the planet if they cannot achieve their ends. Second, they have made it clear that they will not be stopped or deterred by anything short of their own destruction - undermining Western support for Israel being only the first small objective in their war to the death with the infidel.

What of the practical difficulties? Who are we fighting and how do we find them? Does raining down fire from the sky accomplish anything but the degradation of an already suffering population? It is bewildering and unconventional. Yes, all that is true. But if you say that fighting isn't a solution, all that I can reply is: "Fine. What do you suggest?" Negotiation? What shall we negotiate? Our support for Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East and thus throws up some awkward governments whose policies we may not like but whose democratic legitimacy we must recognise (see above moral lecture)?

If bombing is not the answer, what's the question? Destabilising a government that harbours terrorists who commit mass murder seems like a perfectly comprehensible war aim to me, especially if that government is replaced by a democratic system of even the most fledgling kind. If those who are now tormented with doubt about this action and its consequences really want to see an end to the horrors of warfare, then they must support the spread of those forms of political organisation that make people least inclined to go to war: liberal democracy and free market economics.

Having a voice in government and a stake in the future through the right to own private property (with the dignity which that imparts) is what the West has to offer, and what it must consistently defend. So long as our governments are doing that, their case should stand transparently on its merits.

Janet Daley is good. This article should be forced to be read out in Berkley, I think. ;)

Best Regards, Ivan

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be." - Winston Churchill, 1940

This then, my lords and gentlemen, is the message which we send forth today to all states and nations, bound or free, to all the men in all the lands who care for freedom's cause. To our Allies and well-wishers in Europe, to our American friends and helpers drawing ever closer in their might across the ocean, this is the message-lift up your hearts, all will come right. Out of depths of sorrow and sacrifice will be born again the glory of mankind. - Winston Churchill, 1941

"What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?" - Winston Churchill, 1941


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