The End of Innocence
by Ken Bell

Among the most inspired and memorable popular musical moments of the 1980s was Don Henley’s End of Innocence, a lamentation of America’s lost innocence tightly coupled with a diatribe against the politics of then-President Ronald Reagan. We were, Henley was convinced, “beating plowshares into swords for this tired old man that we’ve elected king,” to our ultimate demise. Events proved Henley profoundly (though as yet unrepentantly) wrong. The fall of the Berlin Wall was an epiphany for many of his co-religionists.

More recently, many a hardened media cynic and even some of the slowest students of international affairs have attained their own epiphany. They have come to the almost contemporaneous realization that the strategic vision of the Bush administration in our war against FascIslam has proven to be nothing short of inspired, however much our mainstream media preoccupation with intermediate tactical setbacks and blunders may have obscured their vision during the past three years. It’s a tidy illustration of the phrase ‘tipping point’. . . and just perhaps it represents the end of innocence.

The evidence has been accumulating for quite some time, but it was unquestionably the Iraqi election which converted many a Saul into a Paul. While the collective reappraisal remains provisional (and rather reluctantly tendered), the recent events in Beirut have only deepened an emerging conviction that threatens to become a new conventional wisdom.

Conveniently, this new turn on the road to Tarsus occurs almost precisely coincident with the second anniversary of Bush’s decisive, though divisive, entry into Iraq. This invasion was his boldest and most controversial stroke in the war against FascIslam, and for the mainstream media its rectitude and prudence were long in doubt. Perhaps no more.

In Marxist-Leninist terms, Bush has intentionally altered the correlation of forces in the Middle East—and decisively for the better. Freedom, not FascIslam, grasped the initiative in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, and has not relinquished it. This development was not anticipated by Osama bin Laden, whose organization has been gravely wounded. In rapid succession it has lost its primary sanctuary, nearly all its lucrative funding sources and as much as two-thirds of its experienced leadership. This is not, of course, to pretend that there will be no counterattack by our determined enemies. There will be many. But Al Qaeda and its allies have been thrown off balance and are now hard pressed by the relentless global campaign against them.

Thus the most significant achievement of the Bush administration has been that it has completely redefined the terms of engagement. For a quarter of a century, while we remained oblivious, the forces of FascIslam in all its varied forms waged a ceaseless war upon us. While we periodically responded with a desultory military strike or angry denunciation in response to one or another among the escalating provocations, the dominant paradigm for our conduct was the notion that terrorism was at root ‘primarily a question of law enforcement,’ to be responded to ex post facto on a case-by-case basis with a view to arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators for criminal acts in a court of law.

But as of the 11th of September 2001, George W. Bush understood immediately and intuitively that we are at war, not merely engaged in an episodic series of law enforcement operations. He determined to seize the strategic initiative, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. He further sought, to the maximum degree possible, to define the locale and milieu of the conflict, denying that option to the enemy. Further, Bush prosecuted the war vigorously, but in a nuanced manner, using the full range of our not insignificant capabilities—not just military force but also diplomatic, economic, financial, technological, rhetorical and ideological means.

From these overarching strategic decisions have come an array of extraordinary developments, each one of which has been exploited to derive further leverage in the war.

Above all, the Bush administration has untethered the most potent revolutionary force in history—the power of human freedom. It has unleashed the powerful ideas of popular sovereignty and democratization upon one of the world’s last bastions of despotism.

Repeatedly, in both words and actions, the Bush administration has demonstrated its commitment to its professed ideals. Freedom and democracy are at once the objective and also the greatest weapon in the arsenal. The global hegemon has transformed itself into a revolutionary power, the advocate and exponent of renascence and change.

In one respect, this new reality is yet another strange irony of history. The origins of the present war can be traced directly to events which overwhelmed an earlier American administration that emphasized the primacy of human rights in the conduct of foreign policy, the almost grotesquely incompetent Carter administration. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Zia ul Haq’s decision to Islamize Pakistani politics and government; the increasing power and presence of OPEC, and especially Saudi Arabia, in global oil markets; and above all the triumph of FascIslam in Iran, were each ‘present at the creation,’ each an integral element in the genesis of war. Fifty-two American diplomatic hostages held for 444 days wasn’t just a ‘shot across our bow,’ it was a declaration of war—a war we failed to understand or even to perceive until a certain September morning. Now we know.

For the Carter administration, the declaration of the centrality of human rights was meant almost as a reproach to American diplomacy, if not a rebuke to American history. For Bush, on the contrary, it is an act of advocacy, a weapon, and an instrument of change. This radical variance in philosophy has manifested itself in policy. Were there a Hippocratic oath for statesmen—“first do no harm”—Carter violated it repeatedly, and does so still. Bush offers a sharp contrast.

Just weeks after Bush’s intrepid invasion of Afghanistan, a front page “news analysis” article in the New York Times pontificated that the war had become a “quagmire”—on the very day that the Taliban fell.

Afghanistan is no longer ruled by FascIslamists, but has instead for the first time in its 5,000 year history a popularly elected president—an extraordinary fact almost passed over in silence by the mainstream media during our own recent election campaign. Despite media predictions of doom, the Afghani elections were remarkably free, fair and unhampered by violence. Women comprised 40 percent of all voters.

This fall, the voters of Afghanistan will elect a new national parliament and new regional leadership by democratic means. No longer a haven for terrorists, or cowed by the viciously medieval Taliban, Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations on earth, is a fragile emerging democracy. It is legal to fly kites, It is legal to listen to music. Women are no longer beheaded in Kabul’s soccer stadium. Little girls are allowed to go to school.

Yet with clear, rapid and decisive success in Afghanistan, Bush pressed on. Excellent strategic judgment coupled with strong ethical imperatives compelled him to seek authorization for the invasion of Iraq. Since that fateful and courageous decision, the pace of change in the Middle East has discernibly accelerated—and much for the better.

Iraq is the fulcrum of the Middle East. It lies between and borders upon the two greatest state sponsors of terror remaining in the post-9/11 world, Iran and Syria. Each has done everything it can to frustrate Iraq’s liberation. To the south is Saudi Arabia, country of origin for 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, global propagandist for the Wahhabi variant of FascIslam, and the world’s foremost oil producer with petroleum reserves dwarfing those of all other nations. The future course of the War On Terror will depend largely upon what transpires in those three nations, along with developments in Egypt and Pakistan. To the north lies Turkey, our wavering ally.

The course of the Iraq war—or, more accurately, the course of the war as portrayed by oppositionists in the mainstream media—is familiar to all Americans. Especially familiar is the pride and joy of millions of the Iraqi people on the 30th of January, when, against all threats and adversities, they defied the FascIslamist terrorists who oppose their nascent democracy, and voted. The elections were not the final act in the liberation of Iraq, but they have proven to all who have eyes beyond a shadow of a doubt that terror master Abu Musab al Zarqawi was correct in his assessment last year that democracy would “suffocate” and in the end destroy his efforts to foment a FascIslamic revolution.

Iraq, no longer ruled by a homicidal maniac who maimed, tortured, and killed hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen. Despite the continued violence against the Iraqi people by unrepentant jihadists, tens of thousands of lives have been saved, not lost, through liberation. Hussein’s slaughter was far more efficient than the haphazard attacks of the “insurgents.”

Collaterally, as becomes ever more clear, the war brought an end to the largest global financial corruption scandal in all of human history—the United Nation’s Oil for “Food” program. It thoroughly corrupted the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan. It corrupted the ruling party in France. It corrupted Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia, and politicians in Britain and Germany. Billions upon billions went for terror, weaponry, influence, palaces—and for rancid food and expired pharmaceuticals for the children of Iraq. The enormous fraud has been ended, but not yet expiated.

We remain embroiled in a complex, multidimensional conflict which must be won. Perhaps 20,000 jihadists—foreign terrorists from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan; criminals released wholesale by Saddam Hussein at the time of invasion; and Baathist irreconcilables and revanchists—kidnap, behead, bomb and murder the people of Iraq. But the people of Iraq themselves will be the instrument of their own liberation. And democracy in Iraq will revolutionize the Arab world.
Using the leverage of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration has also made extraordinary progress on other fronts in the war against FascIslam.

In Pakistan, the greatest at-risk state, the Islamic world’s only nuclear power, with a government long compromised by Islamization and proliferation, an uneasy alliance has been forged. On 9/11 Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf understood the new reality, and immediately placed his fate with the United States. While the political situation in Pakistan remains tenuous, the fact of alliance permitted the nonviolent severance of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation pipeline to Iran, Libya, North Korea and other terror states.

Within weeks of the successful invasion of Iraq, Libya’s Muamar Ghaddafi began negotiating the divestment of his developmental programs for weapons of mass destruction. Within days of Saddam Hussein’s capture, he capitulated. A sponsor of terrorism since the early 1970s, Libya has dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons infrastructure, and taken the first halting steps toward reintegration into the world of civilized states.

Now, in the aftermath of elections in Iraq, an entirely new world of possibilities has opened. From Morocco in the west to the Gulf states in the east hopeful new developments portend a stunning acceleration in the trend, heretofore excruciatingly slow or absent, toward democratization. Women in Kuwait petition parliament for the vote. Municipal elections of a sort are held in Saudi Arabia. The Lebanese people rise against their occupation by Syrian colonialists, expel them, force the puppet regime to a compromise, and demand free and unfettered elections this May. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak announces that, for the first time in the more than fifty year existence of the present regime, the next presidential election, to be held this fall, will include opposition candidates. As far away as Indonesia, the defeat of an incumbent in free and open elections, and the successful accession of the new President Yudhoyono, strongly imply the increasing maturity and stability of Indonesia’s emerging Islamic democracy.

The Islamic world is wafted by freedom’s zephyr, and though in some places it remains a subtle breeze, elsewhere, unpredictably, it assumes gale force. Syria? Iran? We shall see.

Perhaps it is, after all, our end of innocence.