Nelson Ascher @ EuroPundits

Two monumental blogs.

First, The Future? Oct. 2:

.... A Kerry presidency will, at best, resemble Clinton’s and, at worst, Carter’s. It was during both these administrations that several dangers were allowed to grow and get out of control. Clinton was responsible for not taking them seriously as, by the way, Reagan and the first Bush were too. Carter on the other hand saw not only those specific dangers, as in the case of the Iranian Revolution, but even the Cold War (and its last chapter, the invasion of Afghanistan) through his own prism. According to him all was America’s fault. The most active ideologists of the Democratic party think exactly like that.

Now, the WoT is winnable. One can make many mistakes and still come out the winner. Israel’s case is the best example. The Israeli’s left most remarkable victory took place in 82, when Peace Now began acting and managed to hinder Sharon’s plan to destroy the PLO completely in Lebanon. But that was only the first disaster. Then came Oslo, then Israel’s political and diplomatic establishments came under European influence. But, when in 2000 the war began for keeps, the Israelis, though slowly, changed their minds and went on to fight for their country’s existence. For over twenty years we’ve been hearing that terrorism is the result of legitimate grievances that have to be addressed and that, anyway, there’s no military solution for it. For over twenty years the Israeli liberal establishment and its MSM have avoided saying that the country was under Jihadist attack. For over twenty years there has been talk there about the necessity to distinguish between a fanatical minority and a moderate majority of Palestinians. Though all these mistakes didn’t doom Israel, they made the whole thing terribly costlier in lives and money.

Does the same apply to the US? Probably. A substantial part of its population is still unconvinced of the nature of the dangers. That means that there’s the probability of an administration being elected that will begin to retreat in all significant fronts. As a result, the Jihadists will get a badly needed respite, they will regroup and launch their counteroffensive. Then the Americans will be reminded about who their enemy is and will either force the administration to act or will vote in a different one in the next elections. In the meanwhile, the US mainland will be imperiled and the human and financial costs of fighting the Jihadists will sky-rocket. Still, the US is a big, rich and powerful nation and maybe it can afford such losses. However emboldened the Jihadists become in the short-term, in the long one the odds are against them.

Blame has to be laid at the door of the current administration. The truth is: it hasn’t been candid with the American people due both to lingering political correctness and to some kind of elitism. Thanks to the first, I’m coming to believe, it didn’t objectively define the central enemy, a Muslim but mainly Arab movement based on extreme nationalism and a supremacist religion. Thanks to the second, the administration didn’t think it fit to present the whole data to the public. In ways similar to what the MSM did, Bush and his people didn’t want to exacerbate the American population’s anger. They talked much less to the general public than was needed. I understand how complex the game is, how they tried to avoid being branded “Islamophobic”, how much they didn’t want to alienate potential Muslim allies or even Old Europe....

Second, Why I Won't Vote for Bush, Oct. 20:

.... I remember when a friend of mine came to visit me, maybe 15 years ago, with the newest issue of “Veja”, the Brazilian equivalent of Time magazine. He was outraged. That had to do with a teenage girl who lived in one of Sao Paulo’s most exclusive residential closed suburb had been gang-raped and killed. No, it wasn’t the crime that outraged my friend, but the fact that the magazine gave the story its cover-page. You see, he told me, had it been a poor black girl from the slums, she wouldn’t have made it even to the magazine’s most hidden page. I told him: of course not, but it’s not the slum-dwellers who subscribe to “Veja” and if such a thing can happen in the town’s wealthiest place, that’s a sign things are getting really bad and that’s news. I also told him: if you happen to find a roach at night in your kitchen, that means there’s at least one roach in your house. But if you find one at high noon in your living-room you can be sure your house’s roach-infested.

That’s one of the meanings of 9/11. That you cannot be safe in Darfur or Beirut, in the Phillipines or Indonesia, that’s a problem. But if you can be murdered by Islamic terrorists while you’re on the top floor of the WTC, then that’s not a problem anymore. That’s much bigger. The progressive idea was to turn, for instance, Beirut into NY. If that’s not being accomplished, this is bad enough. But when people start turning NY into Beirut, we’re definitely moving backwards. And fast.

An attack that manages to ground all US and most of the world’s air traffic and close down the stock markets around the planet is something qualitatively different from a bomb in an Ulster pub. Human life is fragile, so is democracy, the world economy, globalization etc. The US can absorb U$ 1 trillion in damages. The rest of the world cannot. The US can survive a nuke in Manhattan. Brazil can survive a nuke in Sao Paulo. But Brazil cannot survive a nuke in Manhattan. What most of the world’s anti-Americans fail to understand is that whatever harms deeply the US harms us even more. Were Africa to suddenly disappear, it wouldn’t make much of a change in the life of New Yorkers. Were NY to disappear, Africa would go along.

So, this is what I have to say for those who think that Americans have overreacted to 9/11. Actually they have under-reacted. One more attack on America and Latin America will be condemned to a further hundred years of solitude and misery....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 10/22/04 06:56:57 AM
Categorized as International.