Res Publica 2005

Victor Davis Hanson on the real political reality:

We can no more reason with the Islamic fascists than we could sympathize with the Nazis' demands over supposedly exploited Germans in Czechoslovakia or the problem of Tojo's Japan's not getting its timely scrap-metal shipments from Roosevelt's America. Their pouts and gripes are not intended to be adjudicated as much as to weaken the resolve of many in the United States who find the entire "war against terror" too big, or the wrong kind, of a nuisance.

Instead, read the fatwas. You hear not just of America's injustice in Palestine or Chechnya — not to mention nothing about saving Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo or Afghanistan of the 1980s — but also of what we did in Spain in the 15th century and in Tyre, Gaza, and Jerusalem in the 12th. The mystery of September 11, 2001, is not that it happened, but that it did not quite happen when first tried in 1993 during Bill Clinton's madcap efforts to move a smiling Arafat into the Lincoln Bedroom and keep our hands off bin Laden. Only an American with a JD or PhD would cling to the idea that there was not a connection between Group A Middle Eastern terrorists who attacked the WTC in 1993 and Group B who finished the job in 2001.....

Our mainstream media also cannot quite believe we are at war with evil people who wish us dead — something like the crises that have faced all civilizations at one time or another. Instead, to ponder Rathergate or the recent ABC memo advocating bias in its reporting is to fathom the arrogance of the Enlightenment, and the learned's frustration with those of us less-gifted folk who don't quite wish to follow where they lead us. Such anointed ones have taken on the burden of saving us from George Bush and his retrograde ideas. After all, who believes that anyone would really wish to reinstate a mythical caliphate, a Muslim paradise of sharia, gender apartheid, and theocracy spreading the globe through Islamic nukes and biological and chemical bombs? How one dimensional and unsophisticated.

Meanwhile most Americans have already quietly made up their minds. They think the Democratic party is run not by unionists, farmers, miners, truckers, and average folk, but by those rich enough not to have to make a living, and who wish out of either guilt or noblesse oblige to force the dumber upper middle class to be more sensitive, generous, or utopian. Americans also believe Europe has lost its way and is bogged down in a hopeless and soon-to-be scary task of legislating by fiat heaven on earth. We of the tragic persuasion wish them well with Turkey and their unassimilated Islamic populations, but we don't want our hurtful combat troops there after 60 years of subsidized peacekeeping. Americans also don't care much about the Nobel prizes anymore — not when a Jimmy Carter is praised after trying to undermine his own president on the eve of war, and not when the most recent peace-prize winner rants on that AIDS is a Western-created germ agent unleashed to hurt Africa but silent about $15 billion in American aid to stop what her own continent is spreading.