VDH

Victor Davis Hanson on Election 2004

"The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify the trauma and savagery of their attack — and do so often enough to make 300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." The message of Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our will, is the target.


Al Qaeda and their appendages in Iraq do not know the requisite numbers of dead or wounded Americans necessary to break the resolve of the United States, but brag that with 1,000 fatalities they are nearing their goal — and thus a few more will give them a change of administration, schedules for withdrawal, an abandoned interim Iraqi government ripe to pluck, and a Lebanon-like paradise to reconstruct the lost sanctuary of Afghanistan. In other words, they are desperate for a reprieve from their looming destruction. Al Qaeda — "the Base" — without a base is not much of a terrorist organization since its own proud appellation has become an ironic joke.


Despite the three-week victory over the Baathists, there is some reason for the Islamists' optimism that they can break our will — given a decade of nonchalance after the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar towers, the USS Cole, and an assortment of other unanswered murders in the 1990s. The April withdrawal from Fallujah — whether due to worry about Iraqi civilian or our own casualties — was a grievous blow. The Spanish debacle was an even worse Western defeat. Killing about 200 Spaniards got a Socialist and anti-American prime minister elected and an almost-immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq — even though such appeasement was met not with thanks but with a subsequent attempt to blow up the judges of the Spanish High Court.


Meanwhile, here at home, John Kerry talks about timetables for departure and cessation of the present course. His supporters on the extreme left from George Soros to Michael Moore blame George Bush, not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, for the current televised butchery. There is a reason why candidate Kerry now painfully insists that he would not precipitously withdraw — because everyone else worldwide, from a Chirac and Schroeder to Arafat and most of the Arab world — suspect that, in fact, he will."