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Jewish World Review March 1, 2004/ 8 Adar, 5763

Mark Steyn

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Consumer Reports


It's the war, stupid

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
A year or so back, a publisher took me to lunch and pitched me several cheerfully trashy ideas, including one where I'd follow the Democratic nominee around and mock him mercilessly. Didn't appeal. So he said, 'Well, is there any book you've got in mind?'


I replied that there was. 'It's about the end of the world,' I said. He guffawed and I said, 'No, honestly, I'm serious,' and started to explain. But, 15 seconds in, I got the vague sense he was planning on slowly backing towards the exit without making any sudden movements or undue eye contact - or he would have done, if only he hadn't been wedged into the banquette. Instead, he said wistfully, 'You know when I first started reading your stuff? Impeachment. You did the best Clinton blowjob jokes.' He signalled the waiter. 'Check, please.' I got the impression he was feeling like the great pop guru Don Kirshner when the Monkees came to him and said they were sick of this bubblegum stuff and they needed to grow as artists.

So, when the news broke that John Kerry may have an 'intern scandal', my heart sank. I like 'the politics of personal destruction' as much as the next chap, but it somehow represented the reductio ad absurdum of this perversely trivial election season: interns were back! Five years ago, I used to wake up to a flurry of interesting emails from shadowy corners of the vast right-wing conspiracy about who killed Kathleen Willey's cat. Mrs Willey, you'll recall, was the fragile beauty who claimed Clinton grabbed her breasts on the day her husband was found dead. The President, you might also recall, indignantly denied the incident to an aggrieved Monica Lewinsky on the grounds that 'I'd never hit on a woman with such small breasts.'

Anyway, Mrs Willey's cat disappeared in mysterious circumstances, and for a long time I used to get intriguing tips as to his whereabouts. Now, I wake up to a flurry of interesting emails about possible yellowcake shipments from the Horn of Africa. Long-trousered stuff, not no-trousers stuff. Towards the end of the impeachment trial, I was standing by the elevators when Senator John Chaffee, weary of the proceedings and disinclined to hear any new evidence, announced impatiently, 'It's too late now to get into Kathleen Willey' - which, oddly enough, was probably how Clinton felt in his more ruefully reflective moments. That's how I feel. It's too late now to get back into Kathleen Willey. I'm like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca: 'I put that dress away. When the Germans march out, I'll wear it again.' I put my Clinton sex jokes away. When the Islamofascist nutters are history, I'll do them again.

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America, it's said, is divided into September 11th people and September 10th people. I'm in the former category. I'm a single-issue guy. All the other stuff can wait. Not all of us single-issue guys are Republicans. There's a category called '9/11 Democrats', though nobody's quite sure how many there are. They include, up to a point, the Blues Brother Dan Aykroyd, who's campaigning for his dream ticket of Bush '04/Hillary '08. 'Let this administration finish this war and this fight against terrorism,' he says. 'If Bush is re-elected, then Hillary is set up to run for President in 2008. I'll be there with my band to help her. Then we'll have the glory days back for the Democrats.'

Sounds good to me, at least the first part. But most Democrats see no need to wait, and the most salient feature of the party's primary season is the marginalisation of the war. The stump speech of pretty-boy Senator John Edwards, which I've heard often enough to be able to mouth along with him, has room for everything, including vivid, wrenching portraits of despair: 'Tonight somewhere in America a ten-year-old little girl will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm.' You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be doubled up in laughter at that line. Thanks to the cheap textile imports Edwards and Kerry have pledged to crack down on, girls' coats have never been cheaper. At JC Penney, Edwards' shivering ten-year-old can get a brand-new quilted winter coat with faux-fur collar and cuffs for $9.99. At my local thrift shop, you can get a nice second-hand girl's coat for three bucks. If John Edwards can produce, anywhere in the United States, a ten-year-old coatless girl I will personally send her a brand-new one with the Spectator logo attractively stitched on the left-hand side in return for one substantive passage on foreign policy in his stump speech.

As it is, the only reference he makes to the post-9/11 unpleasantness is a pledge to 'put a stop to this war profiteering that's going on in Iraq'. For Edwards, the only enemy in the Middle East is Halliburton, which is code (barely) for Bush and Cheney. Unless, of course, he's implying that German and French firms aren't getting a fair shot at the reconstruction contracts, which is certainly a tenable position, though not one that a guy campaigning against the rampant 'outsourcing' of American jobs can logically make. Edwards has nothing to say about the war, and nobody seems to mind.

That's because, to many Democrats, there is no war. It's a fraud got up by Bush because Halliburton were itching to get the exploitation rights to Afghanistan's supply of premium rubble. Or something like that. It's hard to follow. But Al Gore popped up the other day and summed up what Dems feel about Bush: 'He betrayed us!' Or, rather, 'He-aaah be-uh-tray-uhd uyyuusssss!' He was trying out a new accent. A bit like the one he used in 2000, when he was addressing the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and trying to sound like Aretha Franklin but it came out like Pat Boone doing Al Jolson. This one was more like televangelist Jim Bakker leading his first pledge drive after being caught with the hooker. He endeavoured to drop an octave on the 'tray' of 'betrayed', which was a nice touch.

This is, when you think about it, a very odd situation. Generally speaking, when a nation's at war, its citizens recognise it as such. In, say, 1944, even the conscientious objectors did not attempt to argue that there was, in fact, no war. But in 2004 America is divided between those who want to fight the war and those who want to fight the guy who invented the war as a means of distracting us from the tax cuts for his cronies and his plan to destroy the environment.

At which point enter John Kerry. Unlike Edwards, he does have something to say about the war. It's the same thing he says in answer to everything: 'I served in Vietnam' - as in, 'I served in Vietnam, so I know something about aircraft carriers for real.' If you asked him about John Edwards's hairdo and its striking bangs, he'd drone, 'I served in Vietnam, so I know something about scary bangs for real.' Last weekend, Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican, of Georgia, attacked Kerry's '32-year history of voting to cut defence programmes and cut defence systems'. True enough. Pretty much everything used in Afghanistan and Iraq - B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, Apache helicopters, etc. - is something the Massachusetts Senator wanted to cancel. But Kerry responded, 'I don't know what it is about what these Republicans who didn't serve in any war have against those of us who are Democrats who did.'

Got that? Question: Why did you vote to cancel the Patriot missile?

Answer: 'How dare you! I served in Vietnam.'

Question: Why did you vote to cancel the B-2 stealth bomber?

Answer: 'Don't you know who I am, you impertinent jackanapes? I served in Vietnam.'

Question: Why aren't you in favour of gay marriage?

Answer: 'I deplore the low politics of these attacks on my patriotism. I served in Vietnam.'

And, just in case you miss it from him, he's got campaign sidekick Max Cleland, defeated by Chambliss in the 2002 elections, to reprise the point in his own distinctive way: 'For Saxby Chambliss, who got out of going to Vietnam because of a trick knee, to attack John Kerry as weak on the defence of our nation is like a mackerel in the moonlight that both shines and stinks.' 'Like A Mackerel In The Moonlight'? Wasn't that Dorothy Lamour in Jungle Princess (1936)? Lovely ballad: 'Like a mackerel in the moonlight,

Sometimes you shine,
Sometimes you stink,
I've got you on my line,
And I'm going to make you mine,
Then drop you back in the drink.'

By now Kerry had decided to go for the big fish: the President. Having attacked Chambliss for not serving in Vietnam, Kerry then attacked Bush for siccing Chambliss on him to 'reopen the wounds' of Vietnam. 'As you well know, Vietnam was a very difficult and painful period in our nation's history,' he wrote to the President. 'So, it has been hard to believe that you would choose to reopen these wounds for your personal political gain. But that is what you have chosen to do.'

Huh? Kerry's been talking Vietnam non-stop for a year and a half. When he's up on stage flanked by veterans, it's all you can do to stop him literally reopening his wounds and showing them to the cameras. Chambliss wasn't attacking Kerry for the four months he spent in Vietnam, but for the three-and-a-half decades since he got back. The Dems' frontrunner is betting that his stint in uniform inoculates him from the fact that he's got every major foreign policy question of the last 30 years wrong, from the Viet Cong to Saddam.

In a field that ranged from happy warriors like Joe Lieberman to goofy peaceniks like Dennis Kucinich, the party's primary voters seem to have gone for the most cynical option: a man who's weak on defence when it counts but can be passed off as the exact opposite for the purposes of the campaign. Either that or they find him a subtly reassuring presence: as an anti-war campaigner in the early Seventies, he talked America into abandoning a war it was tired of. Who knows? Maybe he can do it again.

The other day Kerry drew a distinction between himself and Bush in the war on terror. 'I think there has been an exaggeration,' he said. 'It's primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement operation.' But fighting terror through intelligence and law enforcement means not fighting it at all. As the Clinton administration demonstrated, there are always more reasons not to do something. Intelligence is unreliable and not always actionable, and, when it is, it's highly perishable: in a risk-averse, legalistic environment, by the time you've run what you'd like to do past the lawyers it's too late to do it. As for fighting terror through law enforcement, nobody's interested. The Saudis don't mind if Washington sends in commandos to kill the guys. But they've no desire to see them on the witness stand talking about which princes they met when. So a legalistic approach means it's over: it's not possible to fight it that way.

If Gore or Kerry had been in the White House on September 11, I'm certain the Taleban would still be in power, and Afghanistan would still be a playground of terror camps. Oh, to be sure, there'd have been sanctions and Security Council resolutions and some arrests of associates in the US, but the broad context of 9/11 would have been different: it would have been a 'tragedy', not an act of war; mounds of teddy bears, not regime change. For that critical, liberating distinction we have to thank Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. According to Rowan Scarborough's new book Rumsfeld's War, at one o'clock that afternoon, as the Pentagon still burned and after he'd helped with the injured, the Defence Secretary told the President, 'This is not a criminal action. This is war.'

November's election is a referendum on Rumsfeld's judgment that day. After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said that he feared all he'd done was wake a sleeping giant. But it's been two years now. If you figure it's time the sleeping giant resumed his slumbers, Kerry's your man.

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JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator and the author, most recently, of "The Face of the Tiger," a new book on the world post-Sept. 11. (Sales help fund JWR). Comment by clicking here.

02/23/04: So which would America rather have: Pretty Boy or Long Face?
02/17/04: The Default Democrat from another world
02/10/04: Kerry won't scare any of the big beasts
02/02/04: The Kerry biography: He's risen without trace
01/26/04: Mad Dr. Dean jolts Kerry campaign to life
01/21/04: Undoing the party herd
01/13/04: llIegals the political 'untouchables'
01/05/04: Don't leave Saddam trial to the 'jet set'
12/30/03: Doers and disparagers
12/23/03: Spates of denial
12/16/03: Defiant? He's a Ba'athist who won't bath
12/10/03: Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook
12/02/03: War on terror can't stop with Iraq
11/24/03: It's not Vietnam and Bush is no Kennedy
11/12/03: There is a Cold War between the US and the EU
10/28/03: Muslim paranoia: Enemies made us impotent!

10/28/03:The CIA scandal is important not because it put an agent's life at risk — it didn't — but because it shows that US Intelligence is either obstructive or inept
10/08/03: Palestinian death cult
09/29/03: Bring on the capitalists
09/22/03: Here comes General Clark, his policies will follow shortly
09/17/03: Don't wait for government protection
09/11/03: Predators aren't looking for peace
09/02/03: This is Hillary's moment — You go, girl!
08/29/03: There are now calls for greater UN involvement in Iraq. That’s the last thing the country needs
08/26/03: There's only one hyperpower — so everything is our fault
08/04/03: The White Man's Burden
07/29/03: Bill Clinton got this right
06/25/03: It's Mullah time!
05/07/03: What counts is what a guy does when he's not talking
04/30/03: It's named UNSCAM for a very good reason!
04/14/03: Movers and shakers have moved on to the next 'disaster'
03/25/03: Give Saddam credit
03/18/03: 'Eurabia' will have to look after herself
02/27/03: Death wish
02/19/03: The curtain will come down on the peaceniks
02/10/03: Let's quit the UN
02/03/03: Columbia reality-check
01/29/03: Go forth and multiply
01/09/03: America's fake identity crisis
12/31/02: GOP underperforms, but Dems are laughable
11/26/02: A bombing pause --- for 12 months!?
10/30/02: Stop making excuses for Muslim extremists
09/27/02: The more inventively you try to ''explain'' the Islamist psychosis as a rational phenomenon to be accommodated, the more you risk sounding just as nutty as them
08/23/02: Battered Westerner Syndrome inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders
08/09/02: Friends in low places
08/02/02: Armageddon out of here
07/26/02: Enjoy the ''scandal'' while you can, lads
07/16/02: Arafat is toast; Bush knows it --- so why doesn't the rest of the world?
07/10/02: Hey, FBI: So, denial really is a river in Egypt!
06/20/02: A fight to the finish
06/11/02: Rock, royalty a good match
05/31/02: Unless we change our ways ... the world faces a future where things look pretty darn good
05/24/02: Sweet land of liberty: Britain and Europe have free governments, but only in the US are the people truly free
05/14/02: Extreme hypocrisy in the pursuit of 'peace' is ...
05/10/02: The home office of extremism
05/01/02 Slipping down the Eurinal of history: France, the joke is on you
04/23/02 It's time to snap out of Arab fantasy land
04/16/02 Mideast war exposes 'ugly Europeans'
04/09/02 Arafat has begun his countdown to oblivion. Now it's time to crush the Palestinian uprising
03/27/02 The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug
03/20/02 Grand convocation of the weird

© 2004, Mark Steyn