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COMMENTARY
July 23, 2003
Smelling blood
It would appear the 101st Airborne managed to pick off Uday and Qusay Hussein yesterday in Mosul Iraq. This is an item of news that is almost impossible to package as "a setback for the U.S." Good progress is certainly being made in the extermination of dispersed Saddamite opposition and in the reconstruction of Iraq. Yesterday as well Sergio Vieira de Mello the U.N.'s special representative took the first step to recognizing the new U.S.-supported governing council as the legitimate government of Iraq. For their hit in Mosul the U.S. forces were working as ever with information provided to them by Iraqi allies who've been feeding them leads at their own risk since before the invasion. The Americans are often working blind. Even now as we approach the second anniversary of 9/11 the CIA is desperately short of its own human agents in the field and overly dependent on high technology to know what is happening. This is the legacy of a catastrophic failure of nerve the U.S. retreat from international responsibility over the previous two presidencies. The CIA was stripped of its ability to get down and dirty in dangerous frontier environments; and hamstrung with debilitating rules and regulations devised by sherry-drinking legal academics with no appreciation whatever of reality. It was somehow forgotten that the prevention of events like 9/11 itself ultimately depends on deadly accurate intelligence assessments which can never be obtained without human operatives. It never ever makes sense to follow civilized rules when your enemy does not play by them. As Lee Harris has recently so cogently argued from the philosophical side and Robert D. Kaplan and others have spelled out in practical detail this is an ages-old issue in the defence of civilization itself. The enemies of civilization must be given no quarter; there can be no "rules" beyond the frontier; the purpose of engagement is not to win friends and popularity. It is instead to find and utterly annihilate the enemy -- in this case all those secular and religious "Islamists" dedicated to our own destruction. There are no fine points of procedure and excessive compunction about "collateral damage" is a surrender to the other side. The balance of terror must remain with us: those hesitating to take our side must learn that hesitation is fatal. Nor can we wait for the kind of evidence acceptable in a courtroom before acting upon each threat. As long as civilization has existed it has survived by doing the necessary against savages who threaten from its frontiers. It has engaged them there in order to avoid being unable to engage them in the middle of Imperial Rome or the middle of Manhattan. This is unfortunately lost on a "liberal" media establishment which subordinates all commentary and reporting to the desire to score cheap political points against such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Flood-the-zone coverage of picayune issues is itself a threat to our survival. For the choice before the people of America is not between a Bush and a Gore; it is between Bush and real monsters; between us and people dedicated to our destruction. And the power of the enemy does not depend on his strength but on our weakness; not on his malice but on our restraint. As Daniel Pipes explained yesterday paraphrasing Lee Harris: "Al Qaeda destroys airplanes and buildings that it itself could not possibly build. The Palestinian Authority has failed in every field of endeavour except killing Israelis. Saddam Hussein's Iraq grew dangerous thanks to money showered on it by the West to purchase petroleum Iraqis themselves had neither located nor extracted." And the ability of such enemies to regroup against a West trying to defend itself now depends on the media's ability to hog-tie the West's legitimate political leaders. Shortly after 9/11 Robert Bork the great American jurisprude told me he feared for the future even at the moment America was rallying to her own defence when he read what was being published in the New York Times. The paper was already gearing up to oppose whatever the Bush administration did; its former editor Howell Raines was already telling his colleagues I can feel in my bones a new Vietnam. Now the reader should know that in newsrooms across North America editors consult the New York Times before deciding which foreign and national stories should be given prominence and which should be ignored. That one paper alone has power far beyond its own readers to create media sensations over trivial things. And public opinion can be effectively swayed when the media give a consistently false view of what is important subordinating the large reality to their small vendettas and "gotchas". Mr. Bork said he could feel in his own bones the media taking the stomach out of the American will and predicted that "a couple of years down the road" we would be getting the sort of nonsense that I am reading every day in the papers now -- with their "Vietnam effect" on public opinion. That is why small but highly visible pieces of good news are crucial just now -- of which the killing of Saddam's sons would be an example. At a moment when the "liberal" media are smelling blood let us pray it turns out to be their own. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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