Will Our Unsought War On Terror Make the World Safe for Democracy?
by Ken Bell

Throughout the course of the past century, the western democracies have engaged in three major life-or-death struggles to preserve freedom from the threat of totalitarian ideologies: against Fascism-Nazism, against Communism, and now against FascIslamism.

In each case a fundamental claim of the totalitarians has been that the western democracies were weak, decadent, corrupted, and ripe for defeat.

Each time, the world’s first constitutional republican democracy, the United States, has proven to be of decisive importance for resolving the conflict on terms which have preserved our freedom.

The present War On Terror is no less than the third great war to “make the world safe for democracy.” If we lose, we lose our freedom. It is imperative that all of us—liberals, conservatives, libertarians—understand that what is at stake is the very survival of our democratic way of life.

Why, then, we must ask, do totalitarians so consistently proclaim the weakness of the democracies? In each of the two previous conflicts, there were times at which defeat seemed perilously close—to some, imminent: June of 1941, December of 1979. Yet each time one or more of the democracies were resilient enough to endure, and ultimately, however narrowly, prevail. The charge of weakness was incontrovertible, but so also was the reality of hidden strengths. This time, too, we have begun to understand some of our weaknesses, and to find some strengths. But the question is of yet unanswered: This time, are they right?

As Winston Churchill once famously remarked, democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others.

So, too, is democracy the weakest form of government—except for all the others. This is the crucial paradox of democracy: that its very virtues are its vices (and vice versa); that its very weaknesses are its strengths.

Recent developments in the War On Terror—in Iraq, in Europe and in the United States—have all punctuated our weaknesses emphatically, and made us all too keenly aware of our deficiencies, while diverting our attention from the inherent strengths that remain.

Dictatorships and totalitarian ideologues appear to speak with a single voice that expresses a single indomitable will.

Democracies speak in a cacaphony of voices, both within and among themselves, expressing what frequently appears to be only chaos and dissension.

Dictatorships and ideologues have an inherent ruthlessness, a callous indifference to human life and liberty which even in the gravest of extremities is impossible for a democracy to attain. In the present conflict, FascIslamists declare openly, even boastfully, that they “harte life and love death,” while we cherish life and abhor death. This truth is at the core of their evil—but it is nevertheless their strength, and our vulnerability. Do we cherish our liberty as much as we cherish our lives? Do we still profess that we are determined to “live free or die”?

Because our governments and their policies depend upon the consent of the governed and the rule of law, they are everywhere constrained, while the enemies of freedom suffer no constraint. They relish the mass murder of innocents as a conscious strategy, even as they exploit our grief at the unintended death of a single individual when we meet force with force.

They resort to violence precisely because it is decisive, admitting of no dissent (the dead, after all, are silent), while the democracies seek compromise—even in obfuscation or delusion—choosing violence only as a desperate last recourse when there is no other choice; and even then, the democratic exercise of force is hedged with rules, restrictions and regrets.

The history of this global war is illuminating. For nearly a quarter of a century FascIslam waged war against America and the West, suffering in return only the most ephemeral, sporadic and desultory of responses: diplomats held hostage for 444 days in violation of all civilized norms, met with a single forlorn failed “rescue” mission; two hundred forty one Marine peacekeepers in anguished Lebanon slaughtered in their barracks as they slept, met with precipitous withdrawal; a first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, a portent of things to come, met with indictment, prosecution and coverup; embassies in Kenya and Tanzania bombed and hundreds of innocent Africans murdered, met with cruise missiles lobbed at pharmaceutical factories and empty terror training grounds; and on and on.

This long history of passivity and prostration in the face of intensifying agression convinced Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri that the atrocities they planned for September 11, 2001 would inflame the Arab world with virtual impunity, provoking only trivial retribution. What another administration might have done is speculative, but with George W. Bush in office, Al Qaeda’s greatest aggression was a strategic miscalculation of extraordinary proportions. America was finally at war.

But bin Laden’s miscalculation is surely comprehensible. Even in the aftermath of the most destructive attack upon the American homeland since the Civil War and 3,000 dead American innocents, a significant fraction of the American populace opposed the elimination of the terrorists’ Afghanistan sanctuary. Even more opposed the critical war measure of driving a strategic wedge into the heart of the terror-breeding region, Iraq, the hub between Iran (the world’s foremost terror state for a quarter century), Syria (second only to Iran as sponsor of terrorists and final destroyer of the fragile Lebanese democracy) and Saudi Arabia (chief disseminator of the most vicious and virulent form of FascIslamic ideological propaganda on a global scale), and, moreover, a state with its own long history of aggression, Repression, terrorism and genocide.

Today, astonishingly, the presumptive presidential candidate of one of America’s two major political parties denies—despite twenty five years of cumulative evidence—that America is at war. “It’s an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public diplomacy effort,” says John Kerry, advocating a return to the failed policies of the past. He has repeatedly declared his intention to return us to that time when, in Condoleezza Rice’s words, “the terrorists were at war with us, but we were not at war with them.”

And so, in this election year, the cacaphony of democracy is the reigning image at home and abroad, grinding down our own troops’ morale as it encourages the hopes of our enemies. The 9/11 Commission in Washington inanely debates in open public forum whether to blame George Bush (!), Bill Clinton, the CIA, the FBI or a host of others—everyone except Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the forces of FascIslam, who alone bear responsibilities.

On Capitol Hill, former Ku Klux Klansman and senior Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, for once without the use of racial epithets, denounce the Bush war strategy early this month as a “blunder, ” ludicrously invoking the same old tired analogy yet again: “Surely I am not the only one who hears echoes of Vietnam . . . . Increasing US troop presence in Iraq will only suck us deeper into the maelstrom of violence.” Byrd demanded an “exit strategy,” which is to say unilateral surrender—cut and run—the Somali option.

Byrd himself only echoed Senator Ted Kennedy’s earlier diatribe when he expostulated that “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam.” Kennedy found agreement in Muqtada al Sadr, the indicted murderer and FascIslamic agitator funded by Iranian terrorists who has fomented the recent rebellion among a small radical faction of Shiites who wish to create a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship in Iraq like that in neighboring Iran. “Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers,” howled al Sadr as he directed the insurrection which has cost more American and allied lives than the invasion itself.

There is a price to be paid for the cacaphony of democracy’s electoral politics, and Al Qaeda understands it well.

In Spain, terrorist bombs killed 200 innocents in the final week of political campaigning, altering the course of an election and engineering the Spanish surrender that has heartened FascIslamists around the globe. (For extensive analysis of Spain’s surrender, see the March edition of the Austin Review.) So gratified were the terrorists that they began kidnapping Koreans, Japanese and others in Iraq in hopes of replicating the results of the Spanish extortion. Their success in Iberia augurs ill for America, for there is now no doubt that Al Qaeda will do everything within their power to strike us here at home before November, hoping to effectuate a similar surrender.

The democracies, then, aren’t susceptible to attack by FascIslamic terrorists solely because they are open societies, tolerant of dissent and scrupulously conscientious about preserving civil liberties, but also because their electoral processes themselves are amenable to ruthless manipulation by conscienceless fanatics, even as some participants in those elections—frequently from purely cynical motivations—are willing to offer “aid and comfort” to those who would seek their nation’s destruction. The hysterical rhetoric of overwrought analogy and ridiculous hyperbole exacerbates Al Qaeda’s lust to perpetrate terrorist acts in the American homeland as we approach our own elections.

There is however, one dimension of the overblown and ludicrous Vietnam analogy which rings true. Senator Joseph Biden compared the recent “uprising” of al Sadr’s FascIslamists, Iranian incendiaries and mercenaries, Syrian-abetted jihadists and Baathist irreconcilables to the Tet offensive of 1968. The analogy is not inapt.

Those who were interested in the evidence knew shortly after the Viet Cong’s attack during the Vietnamese lunar new year celebrations that it had been an utter disaster for them. In fact, it was a defeat so devastating that they never fully recovered, and for the remainder of the war infiltrating North Vietnamese regulars were required to sustain the momentum of communist aggression. But that’s not the way it was reported in the American press.

In the aftermath of Tet, the “most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite, stood and faced the CBS News camera against the backdrop of a severely damaged American embassy in Saigon—and lied to the American people. He declared, without equivocation or qualification, that Tet was a defeat for American and South Vietnamese forces.

Cronkite was joined by a chorus of journalists from across the country who repeated his misrepresentations until they became “fact.” Yes, we know better today. But it was the perception, not the reality, that destroyed Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and poisoned American politics for more than a decade.

The damage was so great that even when we had won the war on the ground, a weak and unelected president, Gerald Ford, who had assumed office upon the resignation of Richard Nixon was unable to persuade Congress to stand behind our South Vietnamese ally when North Vietnamese troops invaded.

We won, then surrendered.

One of the greatest inherent strengths of a democracy is the freedom of the press. This is particularly true in the United States, where the First Amendment declares that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . .” But the First Amendment is no guarantee of accuracy, responsibility or integrity.

Press coverage of the War On Terror, and in particular of the liberation of Iraq, has been woefully irresponsible. Speculative “commentary” or “analysis” in the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times which implied that the recent insurgency of al Sadr and his ragtag militia were signs of a general uprising of the Shiites of Iraq, the prelude to a general civil war, or the first steps toward a united Sunni-Shia revolt against the coalition (rather than of Iranian incitement, for example) are only the latest of hundreds of such absurdities, inaccuracies or intentional disinformation (the WMD “controversy,” Nigerian yellowcake, ad infinitum).

A future issue of the Review will address this issue in greater detail. For the moment we’re content to offer a single example of just how ethically challenged the American mainstream press has become.

You would imagine, following the open confession of CNN that it had essentially served as willing propaganda agent for Saddam Hussein’s regime—particularly when a number of other “journalists” had admitted that their coverage had been skewed by considerations of access, if not blackmail—that the anguished American media would critically examine their own crucial role in sustaining a murderous dictatorship while lying to the American people. You would imagine that the New York Times would be particularly sensitive to such blatant ethical compromises after its history of lying about Stalin’s mass murders and, to this very day, refusing to return Walter Duranty’s tainted Pulitzer.

In mid-March, the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism held a three day conference to examine the American media’s ethical compromises in coverage of the Iraq war. The symposium was welcomed by the dean of the journalism school, Orville Schell, infamous for his consistent whitewashing of mass murder in Mao’s China. Al Jazeera was there, on the program, but Fox News wasn’t welcome. The BBC, CNN and NPR were there, along with the New York Times, but not the Wall Street Journal. The conference spent three days excoriating themselves for their great ethical breach in the Iraq conflict. Lying to protect and serve Saddam Hussein? Think again. The great crime was embedding reporters with the American forces.

Shame.

–From the April 2004 Austin Review