Sparrowhawk
09-29-02, 05:48 PM
it's not often that I post something this long. but what Ms Decter has to say was impressive thoughful and is needed for us to gain a true prospective about what we shoudl do about Iraq.
<b>< have highlighted what I felt was important for those of you that do not wish to read the full article, but it is worth reading all of it.</b>
<hr>
The following is adapted from a speech delivered by Ms. Decter on June 8, 2002, at sea aboard the Crystal Symphony, during the first Hillsdale College cruise, “A Salute to Freedom.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2002/may/midgebig.jpg
I have lately been thinking about war – as I imagine most Americans are doing at least some of the time these days – and doing so, I keep remembering what <b> Winston Churchill said about World War II. He called it “the unnecessary war.” Yet no one fought harder and at greater cost to his reputation for Britain to arm itself for that war. What Churchill meant by calling it the unnecessary war was that had Britain and France – and, let us say it, the United States – not been so confused or so dreamily slothful in the mid-1930s – (for instance, pretending to themselves that when Hitler moved his army into the Rhineland, as Germany had been forbidden at Versailles to do, he would be prepared to rest content) – the Nazis, who were at that point still very weak, could almost certainly have been stopped in their tracks.
Thus it was that everyone temporized while Hitler built: </b>the British heaping scorn on those who, like Churchill (indeed preeminently Churchill), kept urging the government to expand the Royal Air Force; the French hunkering down behind what they pretended to believe was an impregnable Maginot line; and the <b> Americans once again caught in the old debate about whether what went on in Europe had anything – or if anything at all, exactly how much – to do with us.
What Hitler meant to do, he had said in his book and, later, in his speeches. But few so-called “distinguished” and “sensible” Western statesmen could credit him with actually believing the things he said. </b>So Hitler was embraced by Austria, he was handed Czechoslovakia, and not all that long after, having signed a deal with the Russians, he marched into Poland. In 1938, the British Government had agreed that there should be a conference among Britain, France, Germany and Italy, at which the territory belonging to Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland would be handed over to the Germans – which, of course, it subsequently was, along with the rest of that poor abandoned country. Indeed, it was to be twice abandoned by the West: once to the Germans and, near the end of World War II, to the Russians. In any case, hearing of plans for a four-power conference in 1938, Churchill wrote a letter to a friend in which he said, <b> “Owing to the neglect of our defenses and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later. . . .”</b>
Why should I have been thinking about all this lately? Well, not just because thoughts of Churchill offer such bright moments in the contemplation of the so largely God-forsaken century through which the world has just passed – though they do. But because – though it is sometimes hard to believe – <b> the United States is now at war. And because the war we find ourselves in at this point may also turn out in that Churchillian sense to have been an unnecessary one. </b>
The Gulf War and Our War
What might have happened – let us ask ourselves the question – if, in the Gulf War of 1991, then-President Bush and his generals had determined, as many of us had supposed at the time, that the aim of the war would not merely be to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait, but to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime and free the Iraqis in order to establish, if not a democratic, then at least a reasonably benign, government? It is hard, as the philosophers tell us, to argue a counterfactual; but let us just suppose that we had smashed the Saddam Hussein regime – which we were, after all, only weeks away from doing: members of the much vaunted Republican Guard, you may remember, were surrendering even to news photographers. We would have been required to stay in Iraq for a while. But in our helping to set up a government and bringing some relief to the hungry and generally brutalized Iraqis, who knows how far the foundations of the other hated and hateful regimes in the region might have been shaken? Indeed, can we be absolutely sure that after sending all those hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia in the operation known as Desert Shield, the reason we called off the war only days – or maybe weeks – before genuine victory was not at the request of the Saudis? <b> After all, the despotic and unpopular Saudi regime probably has the most to fear from anything that shakes the political stability of the region.</b>
The war we are in now, the war against terrorism, is, we can all agree, a more complicated affair than was the Gulf War. For one thing, the <b> terrorists appear to have no country – or rather, they have many: they come from many countries – and at the same time none needs take responsibility for them. They have many countries in which to train, and there are many governments and some private sources willing to finance them. </b>It is usually to the advantage of the terrorists that they appear to be simply an organized gang of men (and sometimes women) who are full of grievance about something, whether we are talking about the IRA, the Basques, the Tupaq Amaros, the PLO, or al-Qaeda; and until now – and even now to some extent – it has been to their advantage that the country or the center of power that is actually behind them remains a matter of some concealment.
Our current President Bush took his lumps, both foreign and domestic, for the speech in which he made so bold as to name the members of what he called the “Axis of Evil.” You would have thought, indeed, that he had nuked these countries rather than merely called them by name. One of the members of this Axis of Evil, North Korea, began to behave somewhat better, at least temporarily, as a result of having been frightened by that speech. The others, sheltering comfortably beneath the fury of the international press, including much of the American press, against an American president’s speaking harshly of his country’s enemies, continued on about their dirty business.
<b> We are at war. Faced with those terrible Churchillian alternatives, shame or war, the President chose national honor. And those who said you cannot go to war in Afghanistan – it is too hard; the terrain there is impossible; the winter there is impossible; look what happened to the Russians – like those who made equivalently specious arguments about the Nazis, argued in vain. To be sure, we had the advantage – strange word – that Churchill and his circle did not have in the mid-30s: that of tasting the enemy’s fire and brimstone on our own soil, in one of our own great cities. And at least one result is that ordinary Afghanis, the centuries-long victims of what the imperial European powers used to refer to as “The Great Game,” and latterly victims at the hands of their own terror-driven government, are beginning to smile. They are beginning to smile, to listen to music, to rebuild their houses and to dream of governing themselves. Perhaps they will even accomplish this last. And who but the American Army could have – and even more important, who but the American army would have – made this possible?
Retribution Plus
It is no wonder the Saudis are rushing around the Middle East and Crawford, Texas, playing the unaccustomed role of peacemaker. </b>They know what General Colin Powell should have known in 1992 and what Secretary of State Colin Powell should know in 2002: namely, that <b> if Saddam Hussein goes, the populace of Iran, which is, we are told, growing more pro-American with every passing day, will soon be in the streets bringing down the mullahs – unless, of course, the people of Saudi Arabia, fed up to the teeth with the deprivations and brutalities of Wahhabbism, take to their own streets first. And what, in that case, would happen to Syria? And might Lebanon – that former jewel of the Middle East, first disrupted and terrorized by the PLO and then taken into brutal custody by Syria – once again open its arms to its former, now mostly escaped, Christian population? </b>
It is too pleasing to contemplate. It is too pleasing not to contemplate.
(Continued)
<b>< have highlighted what I felt was important for those of you that do not wish to read the full article, but it is worth reading all of it.</b>
<hr>
The following is adapted from a speech delivered by Ms. Decter on June 8, 2002, at sea aboard the Crystal Symphony, during the first Hillsdale College cruise, “A Salute to Freedom.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2002/may/midgebig.jpg
I have lately been thinking about war – as I imagine most Americans are doing at least some of the time these days – and doing so, I keep remembering what <b> Winston Churchill said about World War II. He called it “the unnecessary war.” Yet no one fought harder and at greater cost to his reputation for Britain to arm itself for that war. What Churchill meant by calling it the unnecessary war was that had Britain and France – and, let us say it, the United States – not been so confused or so dreamily slothful in the mid-1930s – (for instance, pretending to themselves that when Hitler moved his army into the Rhineland, as Germany had been forbidden at Versailles to do, he would be prepared to rest content) – the Nazis, who were at that point still very weak, could almost certainly have been stopped in their tracks.
Thus it was that everyone temporized while Hitler built: </b>the British heaping scorn on those who, like Churchill (indeed preeminently Churchill), kept urging the government to expand the Royal Air Force; the French hunkering down behind what they pretended to believe was an impregnable Maginot line; and the <b> Americans once again caught in the old debate about whether what went on in Europe had anything – or if anything at all, exactly how much – to do with us.
What Hitler meant to do, he had said in his book and, later, in his speeches. But few so-called “distinguished” and “sensible” Western statesmen could credit him with actually believing the things he said. </b>So Hitler was embraced by Austria, he was handed Czechoslovakia, and not all that long after, having signed a deal with the Russians, he marched into Poland. In 1938, the British Government had agreed that there should be a conference among Britain, France, Germany and Italy, at which the territory belonging to Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland would be handed over to the Germans – which, of course, it subsequently was, along with the rest of that poor abandoned country. Indeed, it was to be twice abandoned by the West: once to the Germans and, near the end of World War II, to the Russians. In any case, hearing of plans for a four-power conference in 1938, Churchill wrote a letter to a friend in which he said, <b> “Owing to the neglect of our defenses and the mishandling of the German problem in the last five years, we seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later. . . .”</b>
Why should I have been thinking about all this lately? Well, not just because thoughts of Churchill offer such bright moments in the contemplation of the so largely God-forsaken century through which the world has just passed – though they do. But because – though it is sometimes hard to believe – <b> the United States is now at war. And because the war we find ourselves in at this point may also turn out in that Churchillian sense to have been an unnecessary one. </b>
The Gulf War and Our War
What might have happened – let us ask ourselves the question – if, in the Gulf War of 1991, then-President Bush and his generals had determined, as many of us had supposed at the time, that the aim of the war would not merely be to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait, but to destroy the Saddam Hussein regime and free the Iraqis in order to establish, if not a democratic, then at least a reasonably benign, government? It is hard, as the philosophers tell us, to argue a counterfactual; but let us just suppose that we had smashed the Saddam Hussein regime – which we were, after all, only weeks away from doing: members of the much vaunted Republican Guard, you may remember, were surrendering even to news photographers. We would have been required to stay in Iraq for a while. But in our helping to set up a government and bringing some relief to the hungry and generally brutalized Iraqis, who knows how far the foundations of the other hated and hateful regimes in the region might have been shaken? Indeed, can we be absolutely sure that after sending all those hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia in the operation known as Desert Shield, the reason we called off the war only days – or maybe weeks – before genuine victory was not at the request of the Saudis? <b> After all, the despotic and unpopular Saudi regime probably has the most to fear from anything that shakes the political stability of the region.</b>
The war we are in now, the war against terrorism, is, we can all agree, a more complicated affair than was the Gulf War. For one thing, the <b> terrorists appear to have no country – or rather, they have many: they come from many countries – and at the same time none needs take responsibility for them. They have many countries in which to train, and there are many governments and some private sources willing to finance them. </b>It is usually to the advantage of the terrorists that they appear to be simply an organized gang of men (and sometimes women) who are full of grievance about something, whether we are talking about the IRA, the Basques, the Tupaq Amaros, the PLO, or al-Qaeda; and until now – and even now to some extent – it has been to their advantage that the country or the center of power that is actually behind them remains a matter of some concealment.
Our current President Bush took his lumps, both foreign and domestic, for the speech in which he made so bold as to name the members of what he called the “Axis of Evil.” You would have thought, indeed, that he had nuked these countries rather than merely called them by name. One of the members of this Axis of Evil, North Korea, began to behave somewhat better, at least temporarily, as a result of having been frightened by that speech. The others, sheltering comfortably beneath the fury of the international press, including much of the American press, against an American president’s speaking harshly of his country’s enemies, continued on about their dirty business.
<b> We are at war. Faced with those terrible Churchillian alternatives, shame or war, the President chose national honor. And those who said you cannot go to war in Afghanistan – it is too hard; the terrain there is impossible; the winter there is impossible; look what happened to the Russians – like those who made equivalently specious arguments about the Nazis, argued in vain. To be sure, we had the advantage – strange word – that Churchill and his circle did not have in the mid-30s: that of tasting the enemy’s fire and brimstone on our own soil, in one of our own great cities. And at least one result is that ordinary Afghanis, the centuries-long victims of what the imperial European powers used to refer to as “The Great Game,” and latterly victims at the hands of their own terror-driven government, are beginning to smile. They are beginning to smile, to listen to music, to rebuild their houses and to dream of governing themselves. Perhaps they will even accomplish this last. And who but the American Army could have – and even more important, who but the American army would have – made this possible?
Retribution Plus
It is no wonder the Saudis are rushing around the Middle East and Crawford, Texas, playing the unaccustomed role of peacemaker. </b>They know what General Colin Powell should have known in 1992 and what Secretary of State Colin Powell should know in 2002: namely, that <b> if Saddam Hussein goes, the populace of Iran, which is, we are told, growing more pro-American with every passing day, will soon be in the streets bringing down the mullahs – unless, of course, the people of Saudi Arabia, fed up to the teeth with the deprivations and brutalities of Wahhabbism, take to their own streets first. And what, in that case, would happen to Syria? And might Lebanon – that former jewel of the Middle East, first disrupted and terrorized by the PLO and then taken into brutal custody by Syria – once again open its arms to its former, now mostly escaped, Christian population? </b>
It is too pleasing to contemplate. It is too pleasing not to contemplate.
(Continued)