Year Four

To reiterate: we are near the beginning of a decades-long conflict that must end with the entrenchment of liberalism and liberal ideas in the Islamic parts of the world. Such a cultural shift will span presidencies and generations, but is the only way we can address the root causes of apocalyptic terrorism. We must make apocalyptic terrorism unthinkable, not in the sense that it is too horrible to contemplate — because it plainly is comfortably contemplated by a significant segment of Islamic society — but in the sense that it never comes to mind as a reasonable course of action. The cult of death that has taken hold so many people, of which Al Qaeda is merely its most powerful manfestation, must be destroyed and replaced by liberal ideas of tolerance, respect for others and the rule of law. Remember that “freedom for others is safety for ourselves.”

And at the start of the fourth year that America faced that fact that it is at war, where are we? War in Afghanistan that drove out the Taliban, depriving Al Qaeda of direct access to state resources. War in Iraq, which I feel was necessary as a first step to the liberalization of the Middle East and was prudent given the knowledge of the time, though I’m unsure of timing (but will accept if changing the timing prevents the overthrow of Saddam). A difficult occupation in Iraq: though going better than the quagmire pundits would have us believe, it is still a long-term national project to introduce the notion of liberal society to post-totalitarian states. Large-scale terrorism from Indonesia to Madrid to Moscow, each of which would have rated among the worst terrorist attacks in history only a few years past, which showed this disease had metastized a long time ago. But there have been no new attacks in America, in part through luck, in part because the intensity of our response took Al Qaeda by surprise.

The most distressing thing has been that Paul Berman’s analysis of liberalism’s reaction to terrorism seems to be more correct than not. This political season, at least from the point of view of someone watching the RNC protests in New York, has been dominated by the fringes, most loudly by the leftist fringe who don’t seem to realize that there’s a war on, who are more afraid of Ascroft than bin Laden, who apparently believe that America is the source of all evil flowing through the world. Even the mainstream left seems to have lost its way: shortly after Beslan, I heard NPR’s commentator dance around the word “terrorism” and refuse to call the people, who deliberately targeted children and shot them in their backs as they ran, by the proper label of “murderers”. What has happened to liberalism and the left to become so bloodless, to not call murderers by their name?

A long time ago, I had thought the Republicans had been driven into insanity by Clinton’s successes and apparent invulnerability to there attacks and insinuations in the 1990s. How times have changed: the Democrats are now far beyond the borders of sanity now. How else to explain the paranoia and self-destruction they’ve found themselves in for the past few years? The recent spat over the forgedobviously forged — Bush Guard Documents have been the height of insanity: someone on the left created these documents, and 60 Minutes, apparently hot for a masterstroke to destroy Bush and locked firmly in a “Bush is a liar” mindset, ignored obvious problems with the document to broadcast it nationally. What are Democrats thinking? At least some are aware of the damage this can cause the party.

The beginning of this Year Four coincides with the height of the American political season, and I don’t know who to vote for. Oh, if Lieberman had been a candidate, it would have made it easy for me, but there was no chance of that: I feel that Democratic primary voters are more interested in “electability” than in thinking about the larger war, who apparently think that this larger war is an invention of Karl Rove. On the other hand, I feel that Rumsfeld should have been fired for the post-Saddam planning, and for Abu Ghraib, which has arguably damaged the reconstruction as anything else that has happened in Iraq. I feel Bush has failed to articulate the overall strategy of liberalization in a useful manner, and may not be able to because he’s been tarnished by arguably unfair characterizations. But I feel that he believes that there is a war going on, though some of his advisors may not. And I believe a Kerry Administration will consider the war as a police or prosecutorial matter, not as a war of ideas and a priority for national efforts. Foreign policy and national security trumps domestic issues for me right now: we’re not badly off, and a lot of the unresolved things will fix themselves over time.

So we’ll wait and see what happens in the coming year.

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