Posted on 11/27/2001 2:03:28 AM PST by JohnHuang2
NEW YORK, Nov. 26 — The great irony of the anti-terrorist campaign is the emergence of George W. Bush as the world’s leading liberal. We see the women of Kabul enjoying life beyond the burqa, the TV sets dug up from their hiding places, the smiling faces of Afghan men and women able to enjoy some basic level of human freedom.
THESE ARE THE stakes in the global war against bin Laden and his crowd. The fanatic Islamists want to repress their people, especially women. The West, led by the American president, fights for the right of people to observe, or not observe, their religious beliefs and cultural traditions freely.
Which side is winning this struggle? The side whose culture appeals most to the other.
Which side is losing? The side whose culture feels most threatened by the other.
And just as terrorism is the weapon of the weak against the strong, cultural repression is the tool a threatened culture employs to protect itself.
A society that forces women to wear a burqa under threat of a public beating is not a society on the rise. It is a culture so endangered that it would rather punish than persuade. It is one that tries to control a person’s thinking by dictating how he or she dresses.
The American side of this fight brings a different culture into battle. “When an American says that he loves his country,” Adlai Stevenson once said, “he means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
I have thought of that definition often in recent weeks. I think it’s what this fight is about.
Bin Laden and his boys don’t want people to enjoy this sense of individual freedom. Most Americans do.
This vast disagreement in principle makes it all the more vital that President Bush honor our freedoms at home even as he champions them abroad.
Bush’s recent executive order gives him the authority to try those he suspects of terrorism before military tribunals. It exposes non-citizens to trial by a panel of military officers. The commander-in-chief of those officers will charge suspects with committing or aiding terrorism against this country.
This executive order is inconsistent with the cause of freedom.
“There’s jubilation in the cities we have liberated,” the president said last week of his triumphs in Afghanistan.
Throwing captured fighters before a military tribunal may be appropriate treatment, but it is a sorry way to deliver justice here in the land of the free.
With the war exceeding all expectations, the left is distraught, confused, muddling in the throes of abject frustration, casting about pell-mell in their feverish chase for something -- anything -- to criticize or find fault with the Bush administration over.Enter the phony issue of 'Military Tribunals'. That libs are bursting spasmodically into tears over the possible 'infringement' of Osama Bin Laden's "constitutional rights" and cherished "protections" is perhaps the clearest signal yet of the smashing advance of Operation Enduring Freedom. But for Bush's implacable foes to stoop to defending the dubious claims of foreign combatants pledged to the total annihilation of the United States and the extermination of its people -- beyond a striking testament to the war's copious success thus far -- stands as a glaring emblem to the rancid pathology and unbridled nihilism so pervasive on the left.
Only two weeks ago, Matthews theme du jour was the 'growing' "quagmire" in Afghanistan; America was swiftly sliding, once again, down an all-too-familiar path -- down the slippery slope into morass, a la Vietnam, we were grimly warned.
Trotted out nightly on Hard Ball were an endless parade of military "experts", drearily counseling defeat, heralding disaster. Rather than freeing the world from the jaws of terrorism, the war in Afghanistan will only stoke the unquenchable fires of militant Islam and radicalize millions of angry Muslims, driving them inexorably into the arms of Osama Bin Laden, intoned the "experts"; retribution will only usher in the next phase in an endless cycle of violence.
In short, the war against terrorism was unwinnable -- a pointless exercise in unmitigated futility. The juggernaut of fundamentalist Islam can never be stopped through force -- it can only be placated, assuaged. Only by offering concessions and making "conciliatory" gestures can we hope to quell the "rage" and sooth the "mistrust" militant Islam reserves abundantly for the "Great Satan".
The intervening events of the past two weeks, needless to say, have amply shown to all but the blindest of partisans which side was clearly right.
The imbecilic 'blowback' theory, hitherto widely expoused by the pinheads, has been thoroughly discredited. The 'Arab street', far from erupting with riotous rebellion as predicted, instead has been surprisingly muffled, even as the bombing continues unabated right through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The widespread, violent street clashes in Pakistan during the early days of the military campaign, while never ubiquitous, have largely tappered off or vanished altogether. Moreover, with the collapse of the hardline regime in Kabul and the triumph of the Northern Alliance, the ebullience and fervor once felt for the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden has mostly abated. Bin Laden paraphernalia, which only weeks ago soldout like hotdogs at a game, now go begging in the streets of Pakistan.
All of these stunning developments run diametrically contrary to the dark and dismal predictions of lugubrious pessimists who anticipated only the worst outcome from our military actions. It betrays their woeful misunderstanding of the region's traditional culture, its customs and attitudes, specifically how prowess, backbone and might are respected and revered, even as weakness, spinelessness and wishy-washy vacillation/indecision are held in the lowest contempt. In these attitudes, some see the matrix for the caustic hostility towards women found in the more peripheral forms of Islam.
Crushing the Taliban, rather than inflaming Muslim sentiment and destabilizing friendly Arab regimes, as the "experts" predicted, has thoroughly demoralized the once cocksure hardliners, sweeping away into disrepute and discredit the avant-garde and revolutionaries.
It is impossible to overstate the psychological significance of the crushing defeat of the Taliban. The survival of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, to many, became a miracle of "God", and militant fundamentalists saw in the Taliban government the purest embodiment of the will of Allah on this green Earth. Taliban ruler Mullah Mohammed Omar was seen as Allah's veritable emissary.
Little wonder why "defending" the Taliban and "fighting" the "infidels" became the rallying cry of the region.
But not any longer. The massive defection of Taliban soldiers and the jubilant celebrations as Northern Alliance troops victoriously marched unopposed into Kabul dealt a final, devastating blow to the beliefs and confidence of many who trusted Allah would never allow the 'godless' 'infidels' to triumph. The 'invaders' will never topple the 'faithful' Taliban, or so they thought.
Adding insult to injury (from the fundamentalists' perspective), razing the Taliban was achieved at zero cost in terms of combat fatalities for America and her allies.
Where was Allah during all of this? And why didn't he come to the aid of his "faithful servants"?
These are some of the questions now haunting even fundamentalists who are now on the defensive.
It's time for Chris Matthews and his ilk to consider some humble, belated introspection as well.
My two cents...
"JohnHuang2"
Wake up utopian america and support bearing arms for your country.
He is an unreconstituted liberal no matter what others say.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I am sure the next time a presidential election rolls around, Matthews will be playing the undecided moderate again, and we will have to deal with newbies trying to tell us that he really is not that bad, that he is more conservative than we think, etc etc etc.
But we will remember- Matthews is a Democrat partisan shill, without a bone of objectivity in his body nor a glimmer of honesty in his soul.
I only skimmed over his whining.......just wanted to read your rebuttal!
Just dumb how far libs will go to be morons.
I wonder if W uses "Evil Doers" in order to poke a stick in the eyes of the Islamists. From my readings of the Qu'ran, I get the impression that demons are called *Evil Ones*. This would be like GHWB mispronouncing Saddam's name. I have no cite, but Rush has said that the mispronounciation carried a derogatory meaning in Arabic.
I'll add that I am a fan of JH2.
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