Winston Churchill was the greatest man of the first half of the
20th Century, and Ronald Wilson Reagan was the greatest of the
second. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore, alongside those of
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. It was Reagan
whose cheerful faith in America, and steadfast opposition of the
Soviets, brought the Cold War to its end. He knew that the economic
might of America, even coupled with its military might, was not
enough to defeat the Soviet Gulag masters. The Gipper saw that what
made American victory possible was also what made us different from
both friend and foe. He — like all our greatest wartime presidents
— knew that America’s strengths were in its uniqueness. Our
devotion to freedom, the stability of our Constitution, and the
innate goodness of Americans were the facts that enabled us to
defeat those who threaten our freedom.
He was right, when so many in Europe, the UN, and here in
America were so wrong. Then, as now, the EUnuchs and the UN wanted
to appease. Reagan pushed the deployment of American nuclear
missiles in Europe, started the process to create a defense against
Soviet missiles, and brought us victory in the Cold War. He proved
— resoundingly, for a generation — that American decisiveness was
right, and European appeasement was wrong. Now Dubya is proving it
for his generation, against the same tides of opinion.
It’s fascinating: the convergence of the whackos of the left and
right in their hatred of George W. Bush. The American
Conservative features a piece by Taki Theodoracopulos that
could have been written by Michael Moore. His thesis — to the
extent he has one — is that America should return to our
ostrich-like posture of the Clinton days: “I guarantee you that
resurgent Islam will also vanish into the dustbin of history as
long as Uncle Sam minds his own business and stays out of the
backyards of people who wear towels on their heads.” Righto. It’s
all our fault, and 9-11 would never have happened if we hadn’t been
meddling in the Arabs’ home districts. Such as Kuwait after Saddam
conquered it in 1990?
Taki — and the other neos and paleos and other hyphenated
conservatives who are awash in defeatism — need to wake up and
smell the coffee. The Islamist terror regimes of the 21st century
are following an ideology that requires the eradication of our
freedom, and which cannot be ignored or contained. Isolationism is
not an option. Islamism must be defeated decisively and with
sufficient finality that the regimes that support it cease to
exist, and are not succeeded by others of their ilk. I think I’d
rather have Madeleine the Short back to run our foreign and defense
policy than naifs such as Taki. Fortunately, we have better minds
running things right now, and one of them came up with the question
of the year.
Speaking in Singapore, Big Dog Don Rumsfeld asked whether the
zealots and extremists who are bent on destroying our way of life
are producing new terrorists faster than we are killing them. He
said, “It’s quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent
approach to this.” It’s worth parsing Rumsfeld’s statement because
it goes to the heart of the central question of our time: what is
our goal in this war? Until we define where we want to go, we can’t
get there.
The “we” Mr. Rumsfeld referred to is America and those few
nations willing to fight terrorism rather than appease it. The
“this” he referred to is the ideology that creates terrorism
against the West. Killing terrorists and even their leaders doesn’t
solve the problem. When we get OBL, the war will not be even half
won. We have to defeat those “zealots and extremists” who produce
terrorists, which means we have to defeat their ideology just as we
defeated Soviet communism.
To do that, we will have to do what we’re doing in Iraq — and
improved versions of it — again and again. Removing terrorist
regimes will do more to defeat the threat than anything else. A
distant second, but still important, is a new kind of diplomacy.
American diplomacy — such as it is — lacks a religious component.
We need to focus both the State Department and the CIA on
cultivating and supporting Islamic religious reformers. Those who
resist religious reform should be our target; those who support it
— and by so doing weaken the terrorist support system — are our
friends. Until we recognize and adopt this approach, little will
change in the Islamic world, and this war will go on for decades to
come.
Now — with the imminent departure of George Tenet from the CIA
— we have the chance to change the CIA enough to do its job. Tenet
had to go, and should have gone long before. On his watch we had
the 1998 al Qaeda bombings of embassies in Africa, 9-11, and his
famous assertion that the Iraqi WMD were a “slam dunk.” His
departure comes before the reports of the 9-11 Commission and the
Senate Intelligence Committee, which both will shred what little
remains of the CIA’s reputation. Tenet was allowed to leave
gracefully, before Mr. Bush would have had to fire him.
Tenet’s departure (in one of those wonderful non-coincidences)
is accompanied by the supposedly unconnected resignation of James
Pavitt, the CIA’s deputy director for operations — i.e., America’s
chief spy. Both of these men were part of the embedded CIA culture.
Replacing them with people who aren’t is absolutely essential to
reforming the CIA. As I’ve written before, the CIA, DIA, NSA and
FBI need to be reformed along the lines of the Pentagon. All of
them should be mandated to operate jointly, and one of the men who
have led Pentagon transformation into “jointness” should be tagged
to reform the intelligence community. Legislation will be needed.
Time’s a’wasting, Mr. President.
With all these serious things going on, we can all be thankful
for the comic relief provided, again, by our pals at the
Transportation Security Administration. Having seen what al-Q did
on the Madrid trains, they’re now testing a screening system for
checked bags on trains. According to last Friday’s Washington
Post, “The screening will occur from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
weekdays and will affect only the five train lines that begin at
Union Station and allow checked bags: the Carolinian, Silver Star,
Capital Limited, Cardinal and Palmetto.” Didja get that, OBL? If
you want to bomb some trains, we wouldn’t want you to have to guess
which ones are protected, and which ones aren’t.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of, Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse
Than You Think.
