Four Years Later

[thedrifter]

Sunday, September 11, 2005
Four Years Later
By Nicholas Stix

Insecurity

Do you feel any safer now than you did four years ago? It sounds like a campaign slogan, dun’it? Well, do you? You probably do, if only for psychological reasons: No human being can continue feeling the way Americans felt four years ago for any amount of time, without suffering a psychological meltdown. Otherwise, all of America would look like … New Orleans.

And in some ways, we probably are safer, no thanks to the federal government. Al Qaeda may at the time have had a few bright logistics people, but the fact that the group was composed of Arab aristocrats notwithstanding (or more likely, because the group was composed of Arab aristocrats), it had very little bench strength. After it blew up its frontline murderers on 911, the group that remained proved to be dominated by imbeciles.

Not that the federal government didn’t bend over backwards to aid and abet AQ.

Rather than profiling young, Arab men, airport security focused on harassing white grandmothers, octogenarian Medal of Honor winners, and fondling attractive younger women. But racial profiling was definitely in effect: Non-white security screeners were targeting white passengers for abuse, and ignoring potential terrorists.

And rather than upgrade airport security, which was supposedly the point of the exercise – you know, so we wouldn’t have any more 911s -- George Bush yielded to pressure from the likes of Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer from New York, to turn the program into a racist welfare program. And so, rather than firing the dunces dominating airport security, and replacing them with literate, intelligent, English speakers, the government retained the dunces, doubled their salaries, gave them luxurious benefits where before they had had none, and made them Federal Workers.

According to Schumerian (as opposed to Sumerian) political science, if you raise an incompetent’s salary, and make him a Government Employee, his work performance will magically improve. Apparently, George Bush agrees.

The initial Transit Security Administration plan was to require that every screener have a high school diploma. However, when it turned out that many of them did not have diplomas, and Schumer, Bush, et al., decided that the real purpose of the program was not to protect Americans and other travelers, but to put as much money as possible into the pockets of minority group members, especially immigrants, even that requirement was trashed, in favor of “work experience.” But as Israeli security guru (formerly of El Al) Isaac Yeffet said of the screeners, “They have experience – the experience of failure!” Yeffet emphasized that people too slow to even get a dumbed-down high school diploma are simply too dim to be trainable for the job at hand.

George Bush proved his commitment to upgrading airport security by retaining incompetent, racist Democrat holdover Norm Mineta, who over sixty years later is still trying to get even with all whites for the white federal officer who confiscated his baseball bat when the Mineta family was sent to a World War II internment camp.

In the wake of 911, the newly created Transportation Security Administration was supposed to protect air travel. But as Michelle Malkin has written, the TSA turned into a multibillion dollar black hole of waste, corruption, and incompetence. “It's difficult to determine when the TSA stooges undermine homeland security more: when they're asleep on the job -- or when they're awake.”

Meanwhile, according to a report cited in May by Veronique de Rugy, private airport screeners do a much better job at a much lower cost than TSA screeners.

In New York, briefly after the London bombings, police were checking the bags of every fifth subway rider seeking to board trains in Manhattan. (I went to Manhattan about two weeks ago, and the practice was no longer in effect.) I’m not sure they were checking the bags of young Arab men, even when they were the fifth person. All an Arab homicide bomber would have to have done to kill everyone on a subway train would be to … look like an Arab homicide bomber. As in bearded, with a swarthy, Arabian complexion, wearing a heavy coat on a summer’s day, with lots of objects creating lumps around his middle and upper body, and maybe for good measure, muttering “jihad” and “Sheik bin Laden” to himself in Arabic. The NYPD officers, trained for years in “diversity seminars” to look away from individuals who fit criminal profiles and fight off their own judgment and experience, wouldn’t dare pull over someone who looked like a terrorist. That would be “racist.” In such a situation, after letting the terrorist pass onto the train unmolested, an officer might search the line for the most All-American, masculine-looking white guy he could find, and mercilessly hassle him, until the explosion knocked the cop onto the ground.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out, prior to 911, Bush had refused to employ sensible security measures to protect us from Arab terrorists, because he was courting Arab political support which, as Sailer noted, amounted to half of one percent of the electorate. Call it the Norquist Doctrine, after the influential GOP political strategist who, according to Daniel Pipes, recently married a “Palestinian” Islamist (who has a cushy federal job), and apparently converted to Islam, and who is suspected by Paul Sperry of himself being an Islamist. That’s the good, old GOP, keeping us all safe and snug. No wonder Mencken christened it “the stupid party”!


The North American Union

Then there’s border security, or the lack thereof. George Bush says that he puts protecting America first, yet he wants to eliminate American sovereignty. As millions of illegal immigrants – including young, Arab males -- continue to stream across the Mexican border, Bush is still pursuing his stealth amnesty in ways that show ever more contempt for the intelligence of the American voter. The most recent outrage was in having GOP pollster, Matthew Dowd, us last month on the op-ed page of the New York Times, in effect, that if we let illegal immigration go for another 20 years, Mexico will run out of Mexicans to send us. (Translation: In 20 years, we’ll have accepted illegal immigration. This was the application of the O’Connor Maneuver to immigration policy, named after Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who in her 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision called on America to accept affirmative action for another 25 years, at which point she apparently believes, no one will be able anymore to do anything about it.)

Bush’s ongoing policy of supporting the Invasion of the Techie Snatchers has dangers even beyond the destruction, as Paul Craig Roberts has repeatedly warned, of America’s technological corps, her system of higher education, and her economy. As the knowledge essential to run the systems on which the American economy and American security are based falls increasingly into the hands of underpaid foreign help who have no political allegiance to the U.S., that help will be tempted to engage in industrial sabotage and espionage, in furtherance of their own political and economic interests. The American engineers and scientists whom Bush and American corporations have betrayed and replaced with cheaper foreign help via H-1B and L-1 visas and offshoring, will also be tempted to visit their wrath on American corporations and the American government.


The War over the War

Well, at least there’s the war.

Oops.

The majority of Americans are now fed up with the war, and skeptical that fighting Arabs in Iraq is keeping us from having to fight them at home.

I supported going to war against Saddam Hussein before the war, and see no reason to change what I said then. I never supported Bush’s Wilsonian rationale that we must spread democracy throughout the world. I saw the war in Iraq: 1. As a proxy war, in place of the one we needed to lead against our primary enemies in Arabia, the Saudis; 2. As necessary to assert ourselves in Arabia; and 3. In order to finish Gulf War I, which since Saddam had violated the peace conditions from the get-go, had never ended.

continued.....

[thedrifter]

However, the war has not gone well, and that is not good for American security. There are six reasons for that poor showing:

1. Bush has accepted so much of multicultural doctrine and practice, that he cannot possibly succeed in the long run in Iraq. Democracy requires cultural homogeneity; multiculturalism is the doctrine of racial and ethnic civil war, as means to the end of installing an anti-western dictatorship in a given country.

2. As I have previously written, in a situation of war, rebellion, and/or looting, order must be imposed immediately. That means immediately shooting and killing looters, and imposing martial law (both of which are pretty much simultaneous, since no looter will believe that martial law has been imposed, until he sees his other looters getting shot down like dogs), and letting the whole world know about it. Bush went in the opposite direction, afraid – as per multicultural practice -- of the Arab world seeing images of American soldiers gunning down Arab looters.

3. MTV-Style Tempo: You can sometimes impose democracy at the point of a gun – indeed, there is no other way to impose it -- but it takes time. After World War II, we imposed democracy at the end of a gun in West Germany and Japan, but we took our own sweet time at it. Unlike in Iraq, where we handed over sovereignty barely one year after laying low the Iraqis, we didn’t hand over sovereignty to the Germans until 1950, and made the Japanese wait until 1952. And we didn’t refer to them as the “Germans” and “Japanese,” either. We weren’t concerned about their feelings or dignity or sense of humiliation. We engaged in ruthless de-Nazification (and the Japanese equivalent) and re-education, and relentless propagandizing in the national and local press of the countries we occupied. And the hand-over of sovereignty in those countries was merely symbolic. We kept tens of thousands of servicemen in each country for years thereafter, and the locals knew just what those Americans were there for, even if American politicians wouldn’t say so. (In West Germany, in particular, as one local told me, the American troops were there to quell any rebellions that might arise. He didn’t see our boys as there to protect the Germans from the Russkies, but then, he was a communist. The US troops were in fact there to protect against enemies, both internal and external.) But George Bush gave in to pressure to do a quickie democracy in Iraq. No can do.

4. Bush fell for the notion, propagated by ‘60s Lefties – most of whom never believed what they were saying – that democratic ends can only be achieved via democratic means. But no democracy ever came about democratically! If the Founding Fathers had given all of the colonists a vote in the matter, today we’d be saying, “God save the Queen!” Our democratization projects in West Germany and Japan succeeded precisely because both were imposed undemocratically. (And it didn’t hurt that both nations were racially and culturally homogenous.)

5. Iraq will end up either in the hands of another bloodthirsty dictator, or cut up into at least three sections: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish. I fear that the Bush Administration will perpetuate the tradition begun by his father of betraying the Kurds, the only people who understand self-government and have any value in Iraq.

6. My criticisms of George W. Bush notwithstanding, fairness demands that I cite as well his handicap of prosecuting a War on Terror in the face of a media and political Fifth Column which has sought to cause America to lose the war from the get-go. Given so many claims by media and political types that the problem is the War in Iraq, as opposed to the War in Afghanistan, many readers may have forgotten that most of the same people – most notoriously Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr.’s New York Times -- said the same things (“quagmire”) before we went into Afghanistan that they said before we went into Iraq, in order to discourage Bush from retaliating against those who had launched the worst attack ever on American soil. The American Left has decided that only socialist presidents may prosecute wars, and that they will use every means, fair or foul, legal or illegal, to destabilize any Republican president who wages war on any enemy for any reason. That clear if unstated Democrat position has put Bush in a bind. If he pulls out of Iraq any time soon, the Democrats will clearly have won the War over War. If Americans voters see warmongering as the exclusive prerogative of the Democrat Party, they will cease to respect, and thus cease voting for, the GOP.


The Jewish Question

Many observers have claimed since before the War in Iraq, that the chief winner of such a war would be Israel. This claim is just as dumb and incredible as it was when it was first promoted at least three years ago.

Israel’s status in America has two bases: “Never Again” and as the only democracy in the region.

“Never again” refers, of course, to the need to prevent a second Holocaust. Many American Jews have invested a great deal of time, money, and political capital towards preventing a second Holocaust (while many other American Jews, something that anti-Semites will never understand, have invested a great deal of time, money, and political capital towards bringing about a second Holocaust).

Israel‘s status as the region’s only democracy would end, were a democratic Iraq to succeed.

(The claim that we are fighting the War in Iraq just to help the Jews, er Israelis, was initially promoted by anti-Semites, but has since been adopted by some folks who are not anti-Semites, but who have spent too much time reading the work of anti-Semitic colleagues. In this situation, I tend to overdose on irony, since some of my closest associates are gentile anti-Semites. I have enjoyed much more support from gentile anti-Semites than I have from Jewish anti-Semites.)

In any event, if George W. Bush were a puppet on a string controlled by Israeli interests, Ariel Sharon would never have pulled out of the Gaza Strip. It was George W. Bush’s pressure that caused the Israeli government to act against its own vital interests, without ultimately benefiting American national security, since the Arabs hate us as much as they do the Jews of Israel.

And a man who was a prisoner of ideology would not have an Al Gonzales sitting at his right hand.

Four years after 911, America is much the poorer, but no safer than she was early on that beautiful, fateful morn.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Terror war all but forgotten on home front
September 11, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Sept. 11, 2005 -- the fourth anniversary of the start of the war. That is, if you believe it's a ''war'' A lot of people didn't want to, even in those first days.

About a week after, one of my local radio stations held a fund-raiser and this is how their trailer for it opened. Cue the terminal-illness-movie-of-the-week soupy piano. Then:

''After the tragic events of Sept. 11 . . .''

And, by the time I'd heard it half-a-dozen times, I retuned the dial and never listened to the station again.

It wasn't a "tragic event" or even one of a series of unfortunate events. It was an "attack," an "act of war." I sat at the lunch counter with a guy who'd tuned out the same station on the grounds that "I never heard my grampa talk about 'the tragedy of Pearl Harbor.' " But, consciously or otherwise, a serious effort was under way to transform the nature of the event, to soften it into a touchy-feely, huggy-weepy one-off. As I wrote last year: "The president believes there's a war on. The Dems think 9/11 is like the 1998 ice storm or a Florida hurricane -- just one of those things."

I didn't know the half of it. If an act of war is like a hurricane -- freak of nature, get over it -- it's evidently no great leap to believe that a hurricane is an act of war. Katrina was thus "allowed" to happen because Bush "hates black people." The Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to blow up New Orleans' 17th Street levee so that the flood would kill the poor people rather than destroy the valuable tourist real estate.

Whatever. As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee . . .

On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost. When the media look at those Bush approval ratings -- currently hovering around 40 percent -- they carelessly assume the 60 percent is some unified Kerry-Hillary-Cindy bloc. It's not. It undoubtedly includes people who are enthusiastic for whacking America's enemies, but who don't quite get the point of this somewhat desultory listless phase. If the "war" is now a push for democratization and liberalization in Middle East dictatorships, that's a worthy cause but not one sufficiently primal to keep the attention of the American people. You'd have had the same problem in the Second World War if four years after Pearl Harbor we were postponing D-Day in order to nation-build in the Solomon Islands.

Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. To those on the right who scoffed that you can't declare war on a technique, I pointed out that Britain's Royal Navy fought wars against slavery and piracy and were largely successful. Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had.

And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Although Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terror movements -- the IRA or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

As with IRA killers and the broader Irish nationalist population, these shared aims provide a large comfort zone in which terror networks can operate. And it enables the non-violent lobby groups to use the terrorists -- or the threat of terrorists -- as part of a good cop/bad cop routine. Thus, the Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists -- even though both elements share the same aims. You can pluck out news items at random: In London, a religious "hate crimes" law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ontario, the moves toward sharia courts for Muslim community disputes; in Seattle, the introduction of gender-separate, Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools. The 9/11 terrorists were in favor of all these things.

So four years on we're winning in the Middle East and Central Asia, floundering in Europe and North America. War is hell, but a war that half the country refuses to recognize as such staggers on as a very contemporary kind of purgatory.

Ellie