QandO: The Issue This November

July 29, 2004

The Issue This November
Posted by Dale Franks

Mark Steyn starkly lays out what the alternatives are in the upcoming election.

With every month, nuclear knowhow gets dissipated a little further into the murkier corners of the world. With every year, the demographic changes in Europe render America’s old alliances more and more obsolescent. Even if Kerry’s in the White House, French troops aren’t going to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Yanks in any major Muslim country: Kerry wouldn’t either, if he had Chirac’s Muslim population.
Sloth favours the Islamists. Readers may recall that I wanted Bush to invade Iraq before the first anniversary of 9/11. If he had done, he’d have saved himself a whole lot of trouble, and we might even be rid of the mullahs or Boy Assad by now. The President has to be a terminator: he has to terminate regimes and structures that support Islamist terrorism. And, if every bigshot associated with the cause winds up like Uday and Qusay, the ideology will become a lot less fashionable. All these girlie-man options sound so reasonable, but they’re a fool’s evasion, an excuse to put off indefinitely the fights that have to be fought — in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.

Girlie men are ‘men without chests’ — in the C.S. Lewis sense, rather than the Schwarzenegger one. I didn’t come up with this choice, nor did Arnold. The enemy did. As I wrote back in 2001, the Islamists have made a bet — that we’re too soft and decadent to see this through to the finish. This November, one way or another, they’ll get their answer.

John Kerry tonight gave us all the right "no retreat, no surrender" rhetoric. It sounds good. But he leads a party whose delegates, by a factor of 9:1, wihs us to withdraw from Iraq. They wish to pursue the terrorists, as John Kerry has said, primarily as a law enforcement matter. Well, that's what Clinton did, and the end result was 911.

No matter how stirring Kerry's rhetoric may be for public consumption, the fact is that he will face extraordinary pressure from his own party to slack off on the war on terror. I think it is by no means clear tht he has the required ablity to oppose that pressure.

If he cannot, then we can expect our current problems with Iran, North Korea, and terror to careen out of control. I'm not sure we have the luxury of taking a 4-year holiday from history.

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Comments

Tom Bevan, over at RealClearPolitics.com, made this point a couple of weeks ago:

I don't think there is any question that neither John Kerry, nor John Edwards, nor any other Democratic candidate who ran for President (except Lieberman, of course) would have aggressively pushed to take out Saddam Hussein. I also don't get the impression that any of them would have had the political will or courage to take such a course of action over the objections of their party or certain allies (you know who I'm talking about) even if they felt it was the right thing to do.

Indeed, far more damning than Bush acting on evidence almost everyone in the world believed to be true is to look at a hypothetical in reverse: What if all of the WMD intelligence on Iraq had been spot on and John Kerry were President at the time and chose not to act because of pressure from his party or the objections of allies? I think most Americans would find that prospect deeply disturbing.

As John Podhoretz ably points out this morning, Kerry let the cat out of the bag on '60 Minutes' Sunday night that the hypothetical I've just described might not be so hypothetical after all. Kerry believed Saddam had weapons, said so, voted in favor of taking action against him, and now thinks the whole thing was a big fat mistake.

Kerry might be talking tough now, but throughout the campaign he has stated that he wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq without more of our allies on board.

Posted by: Steverino at July 30, 2004 12:06 AM