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COMMENTARY
June 5, 2004
Ideas v. anti-ideas
It is too much of a simplification to say Europe and America look at the problem of the resurgent Islamic Jihad in different ways. (Canada being more like Europe than America.) There are two radically different approaches -- surrender or fight -- but both may be found on either side of the Atlantic. As President Bush again tours Europe -- celebrating the 60th anniversary of the capture of Rome yesterday and of the Normandy landings tomorrow -- we are again reminded how much has changed. In Rome Mr. Bush had an audience with Pope John Paul II. In exchange for the Presidential Medal of Honour he received from his visitor the Pope gave Mr. Bush a remarkably condescending little homily on Iraqi sovereignty (redundant for the U.S. has just restored it) with an allusion to Abu Ghraib ("the prisoner abuse scandal dealt a bigger blow to the United States than the Sept. 11 2001 attacks said the Vatican's foreign minister), and to the moral authority of the United Nations (which sustained Saddam's regime through it's oil-for-food scam, and is incidentally the chief driving force behind international campaigns promoting contraception and abortion). As John Paul II, he is Holy Father of the Church, but as Karol Wojtyla, he is in many ways a typically myopic post-modern European. As head of the Vatican bureaucracy, this Pope takes the Western politician who -- though a Texas Methodist -- has views most compatible with those of the Catholic Church; the one who has most earnestly consulted with learned Catholic advisers; the one who has taken risks with his own Protestant political base to praise the Pope's mission; then effectively spits in his face. And to what end? To curry favour among a shallow intellectual class that holds the Pope and his Church in utter contempt? This is one Europe -- the Europe that is complicit in its own destruction -- but there is also another. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, spoke for it when he recalled the price the Americans paid to free our continent. Half a million killed in World War II. More than 7 000 killed on D-Day in Normandy; 25 000 killed to liberate Italy. ... See the names of the unknowns buried in Anzio: John Charlie Robert Ted Howard." Mr. Berlusconi speaks not only for an Italy that does not spit upon its ally but for one that does not spit upon itself; which is not ashamed to call itself Western or Christian; which looks upon its own heritage with reasoned pride. The way Americans do. Or rather the way some Americans do. For in the U.S. there is a huge constituency that thinks just like post-modern Europeans. Who blame America even when America is attacked. Who apologize for what they are but will make excuses for any enemy. It is a set of views that fit naturally with a low birth rate as we know from history: with an unending campaign to tear down every moral and spiritual marker in a cause which reduces finally to nihilism. The extraordinary thing about the West that was exposed in the lightning of 9/11/01 is that it is one country in an advanced state of decadence turned against itself. And for one of the parties to this spiritual and intellectual civil war (not a battle of ideas but a battle of "ideas against anti-ideas") it is more important to defeat their internal enemy than to confront any threat from abroad. The loyalties are no longer to nations. Instead an Italian who votes for Berlusconi has more in common with an American who votes for Bush than either of them has with his own countrymen who vote the other way. While in the short term the situation in Iraq is being resolved and material progress made on almost every front against the West's most lethal external enemies the long-term outlook is ghastly. The resignation of George Tenet this week as CIA director gives a glimpse of how this "civil war" proceeds even within the U.S. government. While it is only my speculation I am fairly confident I understand what happened. Mr. Tenet's resignation was not accepted as a propitiatory offering against the nasty review of the CIA's failures that is upcoming from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was instead dropped because he failed to prevent a cabal of agents within the CIA from carrying out a private vendetta against Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq that was ultimately designed to undermine Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the "neocons" in the Pentagon and through them the whole Bush administration. Imagine trying to defend the West with even the Pope and the CIA against you. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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