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COMMENTARY
March 15, 2006
Hail the chief
Prime Minister Harper has done what few politicians do (and those only the greatest, or the stupidest) by going to Afghanistan. He has staked his future on changing public opinion on a crucial issue. According to the one poll I’ve seen (Strategic Counsel) he has already galvanized support for our mission in Afghanistan -- and at the moment when we were getting our first serious casualty warnings. It was not Stephen Harper who sent our troops in. But it is Mr Harper who realizes that the mission is crucial to the West, and therefore to Canada.He was moreover exactly right, when he said yesterday in Kabul beside Afghanistan’s legitimately-elected president, that, "We can ignore the dangers if we want, but the dangers will not ignore us. Unless we control the security situation in countries like Afghanistan we will see our own security diminished." A miracle in the polls: overnight, support for our mission went from 27 to 55 percent. Opposition to it dropped from 60 to 41 percent. That is leadership. And in addition to the pride I take in our prime minister, let me take some pride in my country. I know from our history, and in my guts, that we are not a nation of wimps. We have been there, and we have done our bit in the past. Ask Hitler, if you meet him in hell. Mr Harper not only went to Kandahar, he said unambiguously that Canada will not cut and run. That was the “line in the sand” for which the public were looking. Bold, clear leadership will get support. Timid, confused leadership will not. Of course, a leader may boldly and clearly lead his people over the cliff, but that isn’t the case here. We cannot go wrong, at this moment in history, by opposing the Islamist threat to our civilization in any of its manifestations; and that includes blowing jihadis out of Afghan caves. Afghanistan is among the many front lines in this strange, multidimensional war. (The battle to defend our free press over the Danish cartoon apoplexy is another.) On any of the fronts, retreat will cost us far more than stoic resistance. Ditto in Iraq. Nothing I have written recently, in which I have been trying to reassess the scale of our predicament, should be taken as counsel of retreat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, or elsewhere. In Iraq, for instance, despite the burst of vendetta killings touched off by the terror attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, I refuse to buy into the media’s “civil war” meme. (This is the code for, “let’s high-tail it”.) The struggle there continues between those trying to establish a sane, secular, representative, constitutional, and puissant political order, and those trying to prevent its establishment. We must achieve the best we can. If Iraq should prove incapable of such government, so that Americans and allies must shoot their way out, then very well -- we are defeated, and we learn from the defeat. But we can only learn what Israel seems to have concluded from its attempt to find a modus vivendi with the Palestinians. And we would then have to build an impossible wall, a cordon sanitaire, between East and West. This is what the jackals of our Left, who dominate our academic, media, and legal institutions, do not understand. That it is in order to avoid the full confrontation, between all of “us” and all of “them”, that we are in such countries as Iraq and Afghanistan. We are fighting a fanatic enemy, on his home soil. The alternative is fighting him on our soil. Appeasing this enemy, or refusing the battle, will not win him over. Alternatively, the jackals do understand this, and they are advancing Shariah under the cover of multiculturalism -- but I don’t think even our Left is that crazy. Innumerable protestations of “respect for Islam”, and denunciations of Bush and Danish cartoonists, did not prevent Tom Fox’s body being dumped on a side road in Iraq. He was a sincere, if deluded, Christian activist, who according to his group, Christian Peacemaker Teams, “combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone”. The group claims not to demonize anyone, and yet they vilify people like me. But let me say: to look into the eyes of the devil, and see God, is not what Christ taught. He taught, “Get thee behind me.” He taught forgiveness, not facilitating evil. The three hostages taken with Tom Fox are Canadians, and we can only pray for them now. But in Afghanistan we can do something. Our guys are currently confronting the sort of people who murdered Tom Fox. Who will, for their satanic cause, murder anyone in their path, no matter how innocent. We fight them there, or we fight them here. There is no “third option”. We fight, or we surrender. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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