I. NORTH KOREA
Let’s stipulate, at the outset, that as loony as North Korean
President Kim Jong Il seems to be, he almost certainly wouldn’t lob
a hydrogen bomb at Los Angeles knowing that the next morning his
entire country would be a smoldering hole in the ground. Thus, as
we debate the significance of North Korea’s recent decision to test
fire a missile potentially capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to
the continental United States, the critical question should be
whether Kim does indeed still recognize that
smoldering-hole-in-the-ground outcome.
This isn’t idle psychologizing. The idea that “9/11 changed
everything” has become a cliche, but the truth behind it, as I’ve
written before, is this: On the day they killed 3000 Americans,
Islamic terrorists effectively called our nuclear bluff. If you
cannot grasp that basic concept, then, to be blunt, you cannot
engage in intelligent debate about American foreign policy. From
the end of World War II until 9/11, America’s national security
rested, first and foremost, on the belief that a direct attack on
the United States would be answered by retaliation on an epic,
unimaginable scale. But after Osama bin Laden hit us, and even
after the Taliban government in Afghanistan refused to hand him
over, we didn’t incinerate Kabul. It was with a scalpel, not a
terrible swift sword, that we deposed the Taliban and proceeded to
hunt after Osama. The sheathing of America’s terrible swift sword
— or, rather, our enemies’ perception of that sheathing, is the
essential change in the international landscape since 9/11. It’s
the current against which we now swim.
Nevertheless, leading Democrats continue to speak and act as
though our deterrence were undiminished. On Meet the Press
last Sunday, Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) insisted that we can send a
“real simple message” to the North Koreans to prevent their
involvement in a direct or indirect nuclear attack on the United
States: “You do something like that, we will annihilate you.” He
then added, to Tim Russert, “We have the complete capacity to
annihilate them.”
Well, yes, we have the capacity. But there’s no longer reason to
think we have the will, regardless the provocation.
Indeed, the war in Iraq, of which Biden is now so critical, was
triggered by this new reality — and, again, if you cannot get your
mind around this idea, you’re never going to understand President
Bush’s decision oust Saddam Hussein. Without the prospect of sudden
annihilation to deter attacks on the United States, Bush decided
that the threat posed by Saddam passing along Iraq’s WMDs — the
continued existence of which, it now turns out, even senior Iraqi
officials were unsure of — to foreign or home-grown terrorists was
no longer tolerable. The fact that Saddam stood in breach of the
1991 cease fire agreement that kept him in power after the first
Gulf War provided the necessary fig leaf for Bush to take him out
without violating international law.
North Korea, of course, is another kettle of fish. But the
underlying reality remains constant. Even though Kim Jong Il’s
much-hyped Taepodong II long-range missile failed less than a
minute after launch, Kim’s decision to fire it off confronts us
again with our post-9/11 state of diminished deterrence. Perhaps
Kim is, like a cranky toddler, only rattling his playpen, demanding
more attention. Or perhaps he’s calculated, in the way crazy tin
pot dictators often calculate, that the moment is right for his
ascendancy, that he can become a major player on the world stage,
that nothing can hinder him at this point, that America, the only
cop left on the beat, would be unwilling to grind out another
Iraqi-type war in North Korea…even with a mushroom cloud settling
over downtown Los Angeles.
These are perilous times. This is the Post-9/11 Era.
You either understand the connection, or you don’t.
***
II. THE MIDDLE EAST
Suppose, with one hand, I grab my two-year-old daughter and
clutch her to my chest, and, with the other hand, I grab an AK47
and go on a shooting rampage in midtown Manhattan. Now suppose, in
order to stop the shooting rampage, the police return fire and wind
up killing both me and my daughter. Whose fault is the death of my
daughter?
If you answered “the police,” congratulations, you’ve got a
future as a terrorist apologist.
After Israel ended its occupation of the Gaza Strip last
September, ceding control to the Palestinian Authority in exchange
for the prospect of a lasting peace agreement, Hamas terrorists
immediately began using the territory to fire Qassam rockets across
Israel’s southwestern border and into Israel. The terrorists
intentionally launched the weapons from between civilian homes in
order to make Israeli retaliation more difficult. Then, two weeks
ago, the terrorists staged a kidnapping from Gaza, grabbing an
Israeli soldier on border patrol, and demanding the release of
thousands of terrorists for his safe return.
To retrieve the solider and end the rocket attacks, Israel sent
its military forces back into Gaza — at which point, Hezbollah
terrorists, operating out of southern Lebanon, staged their own
kidnappings of Israeli soldiers and began firing rockets across
Israel’s northern border. Israel is now responding with targeted
missile strikes and precision bombings of known Hezbollah
locations, which, like Hamas strongholds in Gaza, are intentionally
embedded among civilian homes. In the course of Israel’s actions in
Gaza and southern Lebanon, hundreds of terrorists have been killed
— but so have scores of unarmed civilians.
So whose fault is the death of those civilians?
Here, then, is a microcosm of the struggle between Israel and
its enemies over the last 50 years: One side conceals itself among
local populations, deliberately targets civilians, and seeks to
maximize casualties; the other side retaliates with uniformed
military personnel, deliberately avoids harming civilians, and
seeks to minimize casualties.
Not all stories have two sides. The current crisis in the Middle
East is one such story. The Israelis are morally right. Their
enemies are morally wrong. If you can’t figure that out, you’re
morally lost.
***
III. CHE MANIA
Che Mania is upon us again with the New York premiere last week
of Jose Rivera’s play School of the Americas, a loose
concoction of Cliff notes agitprop, walleyed hero-worship and
prison-cell romance that re-imagines the final days of murderous
Communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This follows 2004’s
critically acclaimed movie The Motorcycle Diaries, which
Rivera also wrote, an account of the evolution of young Che’s
political consciousness — which, in turn, spawned a flood of
academic papers on the Guevara Marxist legacy as well as a tacky
tee-shirt craze among heavily pierced adolescents anxious to rebel
against their bourgeois parents.
For anyone with even a slight acquaintance of Guevara’s body of
work, of course, Che Mania is no more morally justifiable than,
say, Joseph Goebbels Mania. Indeed, one of the ongoing mysteries of
American culture is why Communists do so much better in the P.R.
department than Nazis. Both Communism and Nazism are utopian in
their conception and genocidal in their execution. The latter
justifies its mass exterminations in the name of ethnic purity; the
former, in the name of socio-economic purity. Either way, the
shallow graves get filled.
Once you recognize that Communism and Nazism are moral
doppelgangers, your perspective begins to shift. For example,
former Senator Joe McCarthy morphs from the arch-villain of George
Clooney’s Hollywood imagination to a kind of cross between Simon
Wiesenthal and Ted Kennedy, an obsessive boor who might be forgiven
his quirks and excesses because, in the end, he was on the side of
the angels. On the other hand, the graying ponytailed leftists
skulking around the faculty lounge at the local university morph
from endearing cranks to the Boys From Brazil — stubborn holdouts
in the cause of ideological holocaust.
It’s worth remembering the true nature of his mission as Che
Mania rolls on.
