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Home Front: Politix |
Steyn: The Man in the Muddle |
2004-10-15 |
Registration required Hat tip to LGF 'It's a different kind of war,' says Kerry. 'You have to understand it's not the sands of Iwo Jima.' That's true. But Kerry's mistake is in assuming that because it's not Iwo Jima, it's somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of 'asymmetrical warfare' as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power Germany, Canada, Belgium is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. That's the lesson of 9/11. |
Posted by:2b |
#8 Terrorism is a nuisance? Maybe for the French. Sure it exciting for Jacques to watch the falling WTC and dead American bodies the first time. But after the 18th destroyed skyscraper and 100th blown up airliner, it becomes such a nuisance. Kerry is a dangerous Assbite. |
Posted by: ed 2004-10-15 6:41:36 PM |
#7 We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but theyâre a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know weâre never going to end prostitution. Weâre never going to end illegal gambling. But weâre going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isnât on the rise.â .....snip... But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a âlaw-enforcement personâ, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for âescort servicesâ. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, ....the main beef was that I was not a ârespectable commentatorâ like David Brooks of the New York Times. âRespectabilityâ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an âalternativeâ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a âmanagerialâ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. What a SLAM! |
Posted by: 2b 2004-10-15 6:34:57 PM |
#6 No! Wait a second! I think it should be Troon fishwrap@rantburg.com it's easier to remember. |
Posted by: Shipman 2004-10-15 5:26:46 PM |
#5 Okay /end secret sign |
Posted by: Shipman 2004-10-15 5:24:51 PM |
#4 fishwrap@rantburg.com Password: rantburg When you register for a site, use it. That way other Rantburgers will be able to access the same site. |
Posted by: Fred 2004-10-15 4:21:52 PM |
#3 Here's the full text: These days the most devastating profiles of John Kerry are the puff pieces. Take, for example, last weekendâs New York Times magazine, in which Matt Bai attempted to argue that the Nuancy Boy is a kind of strategic genius who was on to this whole terror thing a decade before anybody else. That line of argument gets a little tiring, so midway through Mr Bai included this relaxing interlude: A row of Evian water bottles had been thoughtfully placed on a nearby table. Kerry frowned. âCan we get any of my water?â he asked Stephanie Cutter, his communications director, who dutifully scurried from the room. I asked Kerry, out of sheer curiosity, what he didnât like about Evian. âI hate that stuff,â Kerry explained to me. âThey pack it full of minerals.â âWhat kind of water do you drink?â I asked, trying to make conversation. âPlain old American water,â he said. âYou mean tap water?â âNo,â Kerry replied deliberately. He seemed now to sense some kind of trap. I was left to imagine what was going through his head. If I admit that I drink bottled water, then he might say Iâm out of touch with ordinary voters. But doesnât demanding my own brand of water seem even more aristocratic? Then again, Evian is French â important to stay away from anything even remotely French. âThere are all kinds of waters,â he said finally. Pause. âSaratoga Spring.â This seemed to have exhausted his list. âSometimes I drink tap water,â he added. You can lead a horse-face to water, but you canât make him drink. Not in this election. Imagine the strain of being unable to answer a simple question of beverage preference without flipping through the old mental Rolodex to calibrate the least politically damaging answer. Water, water everywhere, but gotta stop to think, to quote The Rime Of The Ancient Swift Boat Mariner. If George W. Bush happened to enjoy Evian, I donât think heâd be averse to telling us. I certainly wouldnât. I dislike France for geopolitical reasons, but I like the wine and the food. I like the women. I especially like the cute little girl bellhops in the Ruritanian uniforms at the Plaza Athenée. But John Kerry has invested so much in his imaginary friend in the Elysée Palace you canât even ask him, âHey, bud, whatâll you drink?â without him wondering whether youâre impugning his patriotism. So ask a simple question and get a lot of, as it were, tap dancing. In the debates, itâs easier. He and John Edwards know they have to sound tough, so their writers generally provide them with a line pledging to âhunt down and kill the terroristsâ. But itâs exhausting having to remember when to spit out the tough talk and not to get caught in some fake-o water-gate controversy, and so your concentration wanders and you get relaxed and then you say things like this: âWe have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but theyâre a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know weâre never going to end prostitution. Weâre never going to end illegal gambling. But weâre going to reduce it, organised crime, to a level where it isnât on the rise.â So the Senator has now made what was hitherto just a cheap crack from his opponents into formal policy: the Democrats are the September 10 party. The âIâll hunt down and kill Americaâs enemiesâ line was written for him and planted on his lips. The âItâs just a nuisance like prostitutionâ line is his, and how he really thinks of the issue. What an odd analogy. Your average jihadist wonât take kindly to having his martyrdom operation compared with the decadent infidelsâ sex industry, but the rest of us shouldnât be that happy about it either. Kerry is correct in the sense that even if you dispatched every constable in the land to crack down on prostitution, thereâd still be some pox-ridden whore somewhere giving someone a ride for ten bucks. But, on the other hand, applying the Kerry prostitute approach to terrorists would seem to leave rather a lot of them in place. In Boston, where he served as a âlaw-enforcement personâ, the Yellow Pages are full of lavish display ads for âescort servicesâ. The other day, the Boston Phoenix did a lame hit piece on me, in which, if you could stay awake through the wet cement of the guyâs prose, the main beef was that I was not a ârespectable commentatorâ like David Brooks of the New York Times. âRespectabilityâ seems a weird obsession for a fellow who writes for an âalternativeâ newspaper funded by ads for transsexual hookers whose particular charms are spelled out at length, so to speak. In other words, while you can make an argument for a âmanagerialâ approach to terrorism, the analogy with prostitution sounds more like an undeclared surrender. This is aside from the basic defect of the argument: if some gal in your apartment building is working as a prostitute, thatâs a nuisance â condoms in the elevator, dodgy johns in the lobby; if Islamists seize the schoolhouse and kill your kids, even if it only happens once every couple of years, ânuisanceâ doesnât quite cover it. So the choice of analogy is revealing and, as Kerry says, weâve been here before. Every so often, back in the Nineties, al-Qaâeda blew up some military housing, a ship, a couple of embassies, etc., and the Clinton team shrugged it off as a nuisance. No matter how flamboyantly Osama bin Laden sashayed down the sidewalk in his fishnets and miniskirt he couldnât catch the Administrationâs eye. In 2000, after 17 sailors were killed on the USS Cole, the defense secretary Bill Cohen said the attack âwas not sufficiently provocativeâ to warrant a response. So Osama tried again, on September 11 2001. And this time, like the ads in the Boston Phoenix, he was very provocative. And thatâs the point: even if you take the Kerry doctrine as seriously as the New York Times does, the nuance of nuisance depends largely on the terrorists. When all they could do was kill a few dozen here, a few hundred there, they were a ânuisanceâ to Clinton, Cohen, Kerry and co; when they came up with a plan that killed thousands, they became something more than a nuisance. But that change in status was determined largely by them. They might go back to being a mere nuisance for 2005, just blowing up a US consulate hither and yon in places no one much cares about. But in 2006 they might loose a dirty bomb in Chicago and upgrade to über-nuisance again. The Kerry doctrine leaves it in their hands. And, in this kind of war, if youâre not on the offensive, youâre losing. Thatâs what John Kerry means when he says âwe have to get back to the place we wereâ â back to the Nineties. Memâries light the corners of his mind, misty watercolour memâries of the way we were, but the reason theyâre misty watercolours is that we didnât see clearly what was going on. It wasnât just the nuisance of the biennial embassy bombing, it was the terrorist annexation of flop states and the thousands upon thousands of young Muslim men graduating from al-Qaâedaâs training camps and then heading off wherever the jihad calls. The British Muslim discovered among the Beslan gang, for example: if you downgrade the war to a ânuisanceâ, is that the sort of cross-border trend youâre likely to spot? âItâs a different kind of war,â says Kerry. âYou have to understand itâs not the sands of Iwo Jima.â Thatâs true. But Kerryâs mistake is in assuming that because itâs not Iwo Jima, itâs somehow less of a war. Until recently we thought of âasymmetrical warfareâ as something the natives did with machetes against the colonialist occupier. But in fact the roles have been reversed. These days, your average Western power â Germany, Canada, Belgium â is utterly incapable of projecting conventional military might to, say, Saudi Arabia or the Pakistani tribal lands. But a dozen young Saudi or Pakistani males with a little cash, some debit cards and the right phone numbers in their address books can project themselves to Frankfurt, Ottawa or Antwerp very easily and to devastating effect. Thatâs the lesson of 9/11. So, for all that Bush is accused of being âstubbornâ, itâs Kerry who refuses to change. He is, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer in their endorsement of the Senator this week, âalert to fresh global challenges, yet rooted in the approaches that made the 1990s so productiveâ. Well, theyâre half right. Heâs certainly rooted in the approaches of the Nineties, so rooted that he canât pull himself up and move on, despite the fact that last weekâs report of the Iraq Survey Group completely demolishes every prop of the Kerry world-view. When a man keeps telling you it doesnât count unless the French and the UN are on board, heâs either a fool or a liar â because no serious person can spend 15 minutes on this issue without understanding that the French state at every level, and quasi-state pillars such as TotalFinaElf, were to all intents and purposes Saddamâs concubines, and that the UN Oil-for-Fraud programme had been transformed into the regimeâs most reliable Weapon of Mass Destruction. The attempt to talk the Senator up into a foreign-policy genius is sounding ever more loopy. âHe was getting it,â says Richard Clarke, the embittered Clinton-Bush terrorism âczarâ who now supports Kerry. âAnd the âitâ here was that there was a new non-state-actor threat, and that non-state-actor threat was a blended threat that didnât fit neatly into the box of organised criminal, or neatly into the box of terrorism.â Yes, but what does that mean? Even if he does get the âitâ that nobody else is getting, what difference does it make if he doesnât do anything about it? The âblended threatâ may not fit neatly into the box, but Kerry fits in there perfectly neatly â the box of complacent assumptions about the Security Council, the EU, the G8 â and heâs so snug he has no intention of climbing out. It seems to me that John Edwards has the right idea. In the gym of Newton High School in Iowa this week, he skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. âWe will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinsonâs, Alzheimerâs and other debilitating diseases,â he assured the crowd and, warming to his theme, turned to the death last weekend of Christopher (Superman) Reeve. âWhen John Kerry is president, people like Chris Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.â Read his lips: No new crutches. Now thatâs a campaign promise. President Kerry may be paralysed by nuance, but no one else will be. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerryâs speeches ever do. Just because he canât choose his water doesnât mean he canât walk on it. In its own way, this is easier to swallow than the Richard Clarke line. The notion that he can perform miracles on the wheelchair-bound requires no more of a suspension of disbelief than that he can turn back the clock to September 10. This has been a very dispiriting election, mainly because one party simply refuses to make any intelligent contribution to the debate. John Howardâs splendid victory down under came about at least in part because of the laziness of the Left â Mark Lathamâs Labor party offered a new face with not a single new idea. In the US, the Democrats have gone one further â peddling an old face with old ideas on the theory that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to âget back to where they wereâ, back to September 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing Congressional interns. But all that going back to September 10 means is that youâll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans â and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans â will die in terrorist ânuisancesâ. But he wonât win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. You canât put that world back together. |
Posted by: Classical_Liberal 2004-10-15 2:16:01 PM |
#2 Is it regsitered yet? fishwrap@ ? |
Posted by: Shipman 2004-10-15 1:58:32 PM |
#1 Need a non registration link.... Anyone? |
Posted by: BigEd 2004-10-15 12:15:44 PM |