May 10, 2004

A Site Update is Underway.

The design of this site is being updated. It may look kind of funky until everything’s in place.

Mistreatment of Iraqi Prisoners: Some Perspective.

The mistreatment of some Iraqi prisoners is wrong, and President Bush is dealing with it appropriately.

War isn’t pretty. We can do better.

But it is essential when we’re faced with an enemy that’s trying to kill us. The Islamofascists want to nuke us. We have to deal with it.

Let’s review :

...Roll the tape backward from the USS Cole in 2000, through the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the Khobar Towers in 1996, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the destruction of the American Embassy and annex in Beirut in 1983, the mass murder of 241 U.S. Marine peacekeepers asleep in their Lebanese barracks that same year, and assorted kidnappings and gruesome murders of American citizens and diplomats (including TWA Flight 800, Pan Am 103, William R. Higgins, Leon Klinghoffer, Robert Dean Stethem and CIA operative William Francis Buckley), until we arrive at the Iranian hostage-taking of November 1979: That debacle is where we first saw the strange brew of Islamic fascism, autocracy and Middle East state terrorism—and failed to grasp its menace, condemn it and go to war against it.

I mean, come on. We have to deal with Islamofascism, and it won’t go away by itself. Those guys are going to just keep on killing Americans until we make them stop.

Yes, there is a cost to be paid in lives—a relatively small number, by the standards of past wars, such as World War II, in which 50 million people died. But people are going to die either way. If we leave the terrorists alone they’re not going to leave us alone—they’re going to keep finding and killing Americans, as they have been doing since 1979. How many times more people died just on 9/11, than have died in the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq combined?

So let’s take a moment and review the fantastic achievements of the War on Terror to date:

... George W. Bush [...] has, in a mere 2 1/2 years, reversed the perilous course of a quarter-century. Since Sept. 11, he has removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, begun to challenge the Middle East through support for consensual government, isolated Yasser Arafat, pressured the Europeans on everything from anti-Semitism to their largesse to Hamas, removed American troops from Saudi Arabia, shut down fascistic Islamic “charities,” scattered al Qaeda, turned Pakistan from a de facto foe to a scrutinized neutral, rounded up terrorists in the United States, pressured Libya, Iran and Pakistan to come clean on clandestine nuclear cheating, so far avoided another Sept. 11—and promises that he is not nearly done yet. If the Spanish example presages further terrorist attacks on European democracies at election time, at least Mr. Bush has made it clear that America—alone if need be—will neither appease nor ignore such killers but in fact finish the terrible war that they started.