The American Epiphany

Reader Stephen responded to my post Grooved To Run. My response grew to the point where I decided to make it a separate post. His quoted words are in maroon. however there is only one country i can see that is gripped by blood lust and it isn't Iraq.

Sorry, but either you aren't looking very hard, or don't get the same news there in Oz that we do. Did you see the clips of the Palestinians dancing in the streets celebrating the WTC attack? Have you read the sermons of the mullahs to the people?

But, hey, we've been talking tough to them of late, so maybe that's understandable. How about a sermon from a service at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, broadcast on Saudi state television, September 6th...

You do know that Saddam tried to asassinate Bush41 and the Emir of Kuwait in 1993, right? And about the '93 attack on the WTC, the '01 attack on the USS Cole, the embassy bombings in '98, the Beirut bombing in '83?

I'm also kinda wonderin' how much more of this you think we are supposed to endure before we can morally strike back. did you really mean all you said above ? it is disturbing when politicians push an agenda, you give the impression a large portion of the population feel the same way, this is worse.

I meant every single word of it, and then some. Nor do I think I'm alone, or even in the minority.

You see, I think the Islamofascists truly screwed the pooch here. We were content to let the Third World go hang itself. Immediately prior to the 9/11 attacks, the most common criticism of the world, from the Euros in particular, was that we weren't involved enough in what was going on. Nothing new there. The American people have historically been isolationist to a fault, to the point of allowing horrible things to happen in other parts of the world.

Case in point - WWII. The Japanese ran rampant through China and SE Asia, commiting atrocities galore. Ho-hum, who cares. Germany rolls over the Sudentenland, Poland, the Low Countries, France, and starts bombing Britain. Sorry fellas, here's some Lend-Lease trucks, no foriegn entanglements and all that. (Most American schoolkids don't even know that WWII started years before Pearl Harbor.) Then comes Dec. 7, 1941. Things changed after that.

Similarly, all throughout the past few decades, we've ignored what goes on in most countries internally. Sure, we leaned on South Africa to end apartheid, but that's because they were white, and of European extraction, and we (and the rest of the UN) set the bar higher for those societies than we do for the wogs. Idi Amin killed more black Africans than the government of South Africa ever did. Mugabe's doing it now. But, due to our racism, which lets us explain all this away as "that's just black boys being boys, they can't be expected to do no better" and the collective guilt some of us are still carrying around over our own extended struggle with the slavery and racism in our past, they get a free pass. But, I digress, as I am wont to do. We were talking about American isolationism, right?

No human rights in the Arab world, who cares? Unless the women and children getting killed have blue eyes and blonde hair, it doesn't count - not our fight, no national interest.

One baby falls down a well, and the nation goes nuts. In India, religious fanatics on both sides are torching each other in trains by the dozens. (shrug) Stupid wogs, what do you expect?

Africa is a fucking charnel house, with the population actually declining due to drought, AIDS, and internecine warfare. Peace is coming soon there, though it will be the peace of the grave. Doesn't even rate a prime-time blurb on the evening news.

Saddam gasses the Kurds, well, that's just what barbarians do, you know. Khmer Rouge, what's that, some new brand of makeup? Idi Amin? Whozzat? Hey, Joe Bagadonutz, find Rwanda on a map for me. Uh, gimme a hint, what continent? He couldn't find it with both hands if it was tatooed on his ass.

I'll give you fifty bucks for every US citizen that can correctly point out Tajikistan, Nigeria, and Qatar on an unlabeled map, if you give me a buck for every one that can't, and let you go double or nothing if they can state why each of those countries are important in the war on terror. The odds go up to 100-1 if the sample comes from a group of people that call themselves "peace activists."

Sure, the UN dragged us kicking and screaming into places like Somalia and the Balkans, where most Americans didn't really give a shit who was killing who, because we're the only country with a military that is capable of enforcing UN resolutions, and the Euros have long grown accustomed to using us as their proxy forces - leaves them more money for their socialist welfare states. Ah, the US Army, mercs for the planet, 'cept we don't get paid.

Meanwhile, over here in God's Country, history has been declared oficially dead. We're fat and goddam happy with our 547 channels of satellite TV, 401Ks, AOL chatrooms, and domestic politics. Gee, how we gonna spend that moolah we used to spend on the Cold War? Osama who? We're fiddling with the remote control while the world burns. Sure, a few whackos like me simmer and stew and rant, but hey, I'm a history nut and a Marine that lost a few pals in Beirut, and I know that "world peace" is just a theoretical state whose existence we are able to imagine from the fact that there are sometimes pauses in between wars, mostly so the combatants can reload, and that the world is riven by a level of mortal racial and religious hatreds that a) make a Georgia redneck honky and a black separatist look like bumpin' buddies, b) have existed for centuries, and c) are not gonna go away anytime soon. This, by the way, makes me a "warmonger" in the eyes of some of my friends.

Then comes the American Epiphany. 9/11. The Pearl Harbor of the New Millenium. The Mother of All Wake-Up Calls.

Guess what, Joe? What goes on in the rest of the world does matter. Those oceans we used as a moat with the Navy patrolling it like hungry crocs to keep the Bad Guys away doesn't work anymore in a world with cheap air travel and suitcase nukes, especially in a country of open borders, generous immigration polices, personal liberties, and a relaxed level of police surveillance.

Seems the social discontent of the economic backwaters of the world does spill over onto us, after all. No man is an island - each is a piece of the whole, a part of the main. Seems the bells tolling in Afghanistan, and Iraq and Iran and the West Bank and Zimbabwe and East Timor and every other sinkhole ruled by dirtbag dictators, kleptocracies, and mad mullahs were tolling for us, too, but we just didn't wanna hear it, and hit the mute button so we could hear the ballgame.

So, now, the radical Arab world has our attention. Congratulations, guys. Be careful what you pray for, you just might get it.

We know a lot more about the Arab world now. Now we're reading the Koran, and hearing on the news about the Saudi TheoPolice running girls back to die in burning buildings because they didn't meet the dress codes to get rescued. Now we know that they're teaching children in the madrassas that Jews are apes and pigs. Now we know what Shar'ia is, and how it demands that a Nigerian woman be buried to the neck and stoned for having unmarried sex.

It's pissing a lot of people like me off, and makes us wonder if it's the right thing to do to pretend the concept of human rights is not a universal, and goes away once you leave the States. It makes us wonder if people that can sincerely believe in that twisted fucking backward religion, which they clearly do, as they're willing to kill themselves for it, a religion every bit as nasty as the Xian one was before it grew up and out of the doctrine of conversion by the sword, would have one tiny qualm about loosing the nastiest stuff they can get their hands on in our infidel direction.

The conclusion that seems to predominate now in the American public is that they wouldn't.

I think the terrorists and their defenders are right, too. We do need to address the root causes of terrorism, and drain the swamp where it breeds. Problem for their Grand Design is it doesn't mean giving more money to corrupt tyrants like Arafat and Mugabe to squirrel away in their Paris bank accounts while their people starve, or letting them shove Israel into the sea. It damn sure doesn't mean converting to their fanatical flavor of Islam. It means to overthrow the regimes that promote and support that flavor, Wahabbism, and toss it and them into the trashpile of history, where it can rot along with the corpses of communism, nazism, and all the religious theocracies the rest of the world has outgrown.

If the only way to keep us safe from things like a bioweapon attack in LA, or more jets flying into our buildings is to export US-styled liberal democracy at the point of M1 main gun muzzle to every stinking swamp of a Third World ratbag nation on the planet, then that's what's going to happen. It was always the right thing to do, but Osama and his buds made it a matter of selfish national interest, too.

You see, much, I think, to our discredit, we've never, as a nation, really been moral enough to want to go fight for other peoples' human rights. We got our belly full of that in the Civil War, thank you very much. It's always had to be our ox getting gored before the American people would cry havoc and unleash the wardogs. Sure, we fought in Korea and Viet Nam, but only in the teeth of considerable domestic opposition, and only by the politicos at the time hardselling these conflicts as a matter of our national security, however correct history will decide they proved to be.

We have preferred to simply build strong defenses, contain our sworn enemies, and let the virii of our economic strength, technology, and popular culture eventually bring the sick regimes down. It worked pretty well on the Warsaw Pact, and it's eating away the Arab world like a runaway cancer. Conquest via the Almighty Dollar, with generals Coke and Intel and Nike and Hollywood leading the divisions of microchips and music videos. That's why the radical Muslims and the other repressive regimes have to ban western-style culture. Once you've seen Britney's bellybutton, it's kinda hard to go back to liking the tent women, and it's even harder to keep the women in the tents, too. Keep the PC's out of the Cuban people's hands, they might find out how the other half really lives on the other side of the walls that keep them in Fidel's Worker's Paradise.

I've said it before, as have many others - they don't hate us for anything we've done, they hate us for what we are. A free people, with free women, free to fuck and drink and vote and speak and pray as we see fit, or not, and not the way a mullah tells us to. Sure, they'll use Israel as an excuse, and there will always be a few fools that will believe them, but the truth is our cultures are as inimical to one another as matter and anti-matter - they cannot coexist peacefully. It's either them, or us, and I unabashedly choose us. military action doesn't mean your strong or brave,

Arrogant? How does that follow? Confident, perhaps, and rightly so. Vengeful? You better goddam believe it. The sooner the rest of the planet finds out that the consequences of killing US civilians in a terrorist attack is having your head handed to you, then the less of us, and consequently, the less of them will die, and that's an altogether Good Thang. It'd be nice if they learn to love us and our freedoms, but I'll settle for fear. you can't win.

I'm in a quandry here, as whether the best response to that statement is, "You wanna bet?", "Hide and watch?", or to just laugh. You are kiddin', right? We could prolly take down Saddam with just the Marine Corps and a few carriers if we really had to, though that's certainly not the way to do it. But maybe that's just me being arrogant. if it is possible you will be creating more hate, more orphans to become the next generation of terrorists

Oh, c'mon. That tired old cycle of violence argument? That must explain the generation-spanning waves of Russian, German, Japanese terrorist attacks we've been plagued with lately. There's so many of them we barely notice the Confederate, Mexican, and Native American suicide bombers anymore.

One final point. I certainly believe in the concept of six degrees of separation. I hope that by putting this out on the web, it'll get to somebody that'll get it to somebody, etc., until it wends it's way to some of the Head Poobahs in the Arab world. This is a prediction.

At some point in the coming conflict over there, probably about the time the shooting starts, somebody's going to ponder the advisability and efficacy of using a few of your human bombers over here, and trying to turn some American civilians into nail-studded pieces of bloody mush. Before you decide to do so, consider this - what do you think Israel would be doing to you right now if it was the most powerful country on earth, and there was nobody keeping the lid on their responses?

I know my people. The gloves will come off. About the second or third time this happens, every single shred of pacifist sentiment, fair play, or even prudent restraint in the conduct of the war, is going to blow away as if they never were. The clamor, the political pressure, we will put on our leaders to stop these attacks, will rise to the point that they're going to quit worrying about who's ultimately responsible, civilian casualties, collateral damage, world opinion, or anything else, and start killing people the bombings stop. Look in the index of your history books under terms like Dresden, Tokyo, and firestorm. You don't want to push us that hard. Our present taste for precision warfare may prove to be a passing fad.

Sure, we know that you don't really care for your people the way we do. But we know exactly what you do hold most dear. If you wish to continue to be able to make the pilgrimage to, or worship in, Mecca, without having to wear a lead-lined thobe, you might wanna hold off on giving those those bombers the green light.

Pearl Harbor was Dec. 7 1941, not Jan. 7 1941.

Also, you seem to be on the verge of criticizing the US for not intervening in Africa or many of the other nations that have terrible/nonexistent human rights. There are several good reasons for this:

1) Different nations have different amounts of human capital. No sub-Saharan African nation has gotten its act together sufficiently to build an industrial society, with the exception of tiny (1.6 million) Botswana, whose industry is mainly taken care of by foreigners. Iraq and Iran, by contrast, have enough engineers/scientists to pursue nuclear arms. Iran in particular has many gold medalists in international Math Olympiad competitions, and the Iranian expat community has done very well overseas. In short - different nations have different return-on-investment for nation building.

2) Often the natives shoot at us. Witness Somalia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc. People aren't happy when foreigners intervene, even if their motives are pure. Americans (rightly) don't want American blood and treasure to pay for the human rights of some nation they've never heard of.

3) The main difference with the Arab states is that they'll come back to bite us if we leave them be. I wouldn't care about 'em if not for 9/11. But once they killed 3000 of our people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, they got our attention.

mld, 9/22/02, 10:23 AM

Ignorance is no excuse

Your reasonings here serve more, I think, as a historical explanation of why we have not yet done anything in places such as Zimbabwe, rather than any supportable rationale for not doing anything in the future.

Two of your reasons have a common thread - that of American self-interest. Self-defense, and "return on investment." More disturbingly to me, in reason two, you say that it's "right" to decline to act because it's only for human rights in a nation most Americans have "never heard of." There, you seem to imply two things: first, that our collective ignorance of what goes on in some parts of the world excuses our lack of action in those parts, and second, that human rights are an insufficient casus belli to change a regime.

I categorically reject both assumptions. The proper response to the first apology, ignorance, is education, not passive acceptance of an uniformed elctorate. As to the second assumption, I would have two responses; first, the right thing to do remains the right thing even if there is no tangible immediate benefit, and second, that it is in the long term best interests of the United States, (and every other free democratic republic) to help any other political entity on the planet achieve the political, personal, and economic freedoms that we now enjoy.

Care to argue otherwise? :-)

PS- Thanks for the catch on the Pearl Harbor date. What was I thinkin'? I fixed it, but will leave this comment as record of my boo-boo, lest I be charged with an Orwellian tendency to rewrite the past history of the blog.

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Not bad, but consider the following: Despite what PC ethicists lake Rawls or Ackerman might teach, material goods do not fall from the sky like "manna" or arrive in a magic "cargo." OTC, values like freedom and consistent, impartial law allow the creation of wealth, and wealth beyond subsistence gives rise to military power, which secures the peace. We have already changed history, to maintain the peace the world must recognize that we are ready to change geography.

mld, 9/27/02, 12:03 AM

I don't disagree...

...with anything you've stated there, but am unsure exactly how it relates to what I was discussing in the original post, or the following comments. Is there a connection I'm not seeing?

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Nice to hear the unvarnished truth - I must tell you that I know many wonderful people that are Muslims or think that they are - but remember there was a time when Christians were quite the same (Nowdays you don't hear of many Christians hanging Wiccans under the biblical injunction "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"). We can only hope that Islamic people will remember the original Meccan surahs which tried to establish a tolerant universal religion for all peoples. Honestly, though I have little hope of that.