September’s thirty days have passed all too slowly. They must
have seemed a lifetime to Floridians who have hunkered down through
a hurricane onslaught that isn’t over yet. To Dan Rather, September
must have seemed like a decade. His credibility has sunk to a level
equaled by a select few: the U.N. Security Council, the EUnuchs of
the European Union, and Vichy John Kerry.
A friend of mine, ruminating about Rather’s misfortune, gave
forth a long sigh. Said he, “Jed, I was raised a good Catholic. But
I didn’t believe I’d lived a good enough life to be rewarded so
well.” Though he isn’t going to be led out of CBS headquarters in
handcuffs, Rather’s future is behind him. Arrogance and bias have
been Rather’s downfall. The EU’s is being cut from the same cloth.
After forcing the Turks to prostrate themselves at the feet of the
EUnuchs for more than a decade, and having an all-too-compliant
Turkey do virtually anything asked of it to gain admittance to the
EU, the Turks only last week passed what should have been the final
obstacle when their parliament passed a list of legal reforms. In
answer to this, French Finance Minister Nicholas Sarkozy — the Mr.
Bean-like Chirac protégé campaigning to succeed his
mentor — said that Turkey’s application for EU membership can’t
succeed for at least another fifteen years. If the EU took ten
years to plan a way to strengthen the hand of Islamic radicals in
Turkey, they couldn’t have come up with anything better.
That stupidity is equaled by the same Europeans’ calls for
“reform” of the U.N. Now that they have helped prevent any U.N.
action against terrorists and the nations that support them, the
EUnuchs are backing a proposal to add Germany, Brazil, India, and
Japan as permanent members of the Security Council. Even the Brits,
who should know better, are backing this proposal.
U.N. reform is on the minds of all the U.N.’s pals. The U.N. is
sinking in its own diplomatic quagmire, and they’re desperate to
paper over the problems. Adding India to the Security Council is a
good idea. It’s a democracy and represents a huge population, with
military and economic power. But adding Germany? Brazil, even
Japan?
In truth, nothing can fix the U.N. Its charter prevents it from
distinguishing between good and evil, and its membership reflects
that very problem. Of the 191 members, fewer than 50 are
democracies. What Vichy John Kerry and the rest of the Dems won’t
admit is that for the U.N. to have legitimacy in anything, its
voice must be the voice of free peoples speaking through
duly-elected governments. Unless you toss about three-quarters of
the members out of the U.N., you can’t fix it. No matter how many
members may be added to the Security Council, its paralysis and
inaction will only continue. And to this, Mr. Kerry will devote his
presidency if, heaven help us, he has one.
IT’S NOT FLIP-FLOPPING anymore. Mr. Kerry shouldn’t be hiring more
Clintonistas to help him find a message. Better to replace his
campaign manager with Indiana Jones to penetrate the dark caves
where ideas breed. Perhaps Mr. Kerry can’t help it. When he views
any conflict, he sees Vietnam. When Iraq’s interim prime minister
Iyad Allawi addressed Congress last week, Kerry was quick to
criticize him for putting too-good a face on what Mr. Kerry insists
is the ongoing disaster there. Kerry is all about schedules for
withdrawal. Allawi, to his undying credit, is all about
winning.
Mr. Allawi is, undeniably, an enormously brave man. Having
survived Saddam’s murder squads’ attempt on his life, Allawi lives
with constant personal danger. Mr. Cheney had it right when he
blasted Kerry for his outrageous remarks. But as outrageous as
Kerry’s remark was, it betrays his true feelings and gives us an
important insight to what Kerry will do.
Mr. Kerry has made up his mind about the Iraqi election to be
held in January. No matter the result, no matter how many Iraqis
have to die to achieve it, Mr. Kerry will hold the Iraqis to an
unreasonable standard. He — and most others of his party — will
join the EUnuchs and the U.N. in condemning the result as
illegitimate. He — and they — will demand continued “supervision”
of Iraq, denying its newly elected government its place in the
world. Kerry sees Allawi and his successors as the new versions of
the Thieu, Ky, and Diem regimes in Vietnam: American puppets, to be
cast aside at the first chance.
Allawi apparently sees this coming, and is now giving more
cooperation to American commanders. Our operations in Najaf are
over. According to my sources, al-Sadr’s militia was not destroyed
entirely, but about two thousand were killed, which is a mighty
good start. In Ramadi, Fallujah, and elsewhere operations are
continuing, and will grow in size and intensity. Terrorist Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, the al Qaeda chief in Iraq, is the man who
beheads hostages. Our spec ops guys are on his trail, and they may
get him soon. If not, he’s very likely to be killed by the
increasingly-paced air strikes around Fallujah. He, and others like
him, aren’t the source of the insurgency in Iraq. As I have written
often before, Syria and Iran are. September hasn’t been good for at
least one of them.
BASHAR ASSAD’S HOPES MUST be sinking as fast as Dan Rather’s
ratings. Last week, Hamas leader Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil died in
a car bombing in Damascus. It’s more than reasonable to believe
that his death is the handiwork of Israeli intelligence. If Khalil
is a legitimate target in Syria, so are the hundreds of other
terrorists who openly base themselves there. Mr. Bush should be
pounding Assad’s government in the press, and telling Israel to do
whatever it can to destabilize the Assad regime. The UK’s Daily
Telegraph reported that Assad is trying to get Iran to take
about a dozen mid-level Iraqi nuclear weapons experts off his
hands. He doesn’t want the attention he’s attracting from
Washington. As well he shouldn’t.
Assad, like the rest of the bad guys, is watching our polls. If
Bashar thinks September was bad for him, in the immortal words of
Leo Durocher, wait’ll next year.
September has been a terrible month, as months in war must often
be. October will likely be worse. In Iraq, violence will grow as it
will in Afghanistan where an election is to be held. Terrorists —
especially al-Qaeda — have been anxious to disrupt our elections.
But they don’t get it. They may kill some of us, even many of us.
What they don’t understand is that we’re not yet a people at war,
with the single-mindedness we have always achieved in pursuit of
victory. If another attack comes to America, the response will be
something they never conceived.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the U.N. and Old Europe Are Worse
Than You Think (Regnery Publishing).
