re: michael moore for bligh
CAPTURE STRENGTHENS U.S. WILLPOWER David Frum National Post, December 15, 2003
Who says the United States does not learn from experience?
At the end of the last Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf made a portentous error. At the tent where the instrument of surrender was to be signed, Saddam’s generals were searched by U.S. soldiers and their guns removed. Schwarzkopf then removed his own gun, as a gesture of respect from one soldier to another. It was a chivalrous act—but that was not how it was interpreted in the Middle East. There is was seen as a confession of weakness—one of a series of acts of weakness that helped to convince Osama bin Laden that one hard terrorist shock could drive the United States out of the Middle East altogether.
No such mistake this time. Within an hour of announcing Saddam’s capture, U.S. forces distributed photographs of Saddam looking utterly defeated—his hair wild, his beard white, and an American doctor’s fingers in his mouth. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez went on to point out that the troops that took Saddam did not have to fire a single shot and that Saddam himself was uninjured, despite having weapons nearby with which to defend or kill himself. Weak, pathetic, possibly cowardly and utterly defeated: that is the image of Saddam that has now been broadcast to the world.
There will be further images to come. Soon, coalition forces will be acting on the information they obtain from Saddam. Perhaps they will sequester bank accounts; perhaps they will locate and destroy Saddam’s remaining loyalists; perhaps they will solve at last the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction. Whatever the precise use of the information, Middle Eastern people will know that under pressure, Saddam broke and gave away his secrets.
Sometime after that, there will be a trial. After 30 years of denial and misplaced hero worship, the people of the Middle East will hear from the mouths of the victims the full story of Saddam’s tortures and murders—and for the first time in the history of the region, a tyrant will face justice, not in the hereafter, but the here and now.
Then, finally, there will be a sentence: a final settling of accounts, a settlement made possible only by American power, deployed in the cause of freedom.
These images are rich with lessons and implications, for the region and for us all. They have to be mightily disheartening to the Middle East’s terrorists. One of their mightiest and richest patrons has been overthrown without hope of return. Not only have they lost Saddam’s support, but they now have to worry what Saddam will reveal to the Americans. Saddam knows a very great deal about Abu Nidal’s ring—which is now reported to have trained Mohammed Atta—and also about the terrorist operations of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.
Beyond that, though, Saddam’s capture discredits both terrorist tactics and terrorist ideology. For eight months, Iraqi insurgents have used terror tactics to try to demoralize U.S. forces. But what worked in Beirut in 1983 and in Somalia in 1993 did not work in Iraq in 2003. Iraqi terrorists succeeded in killing American soldiers—but they failed to break America’s will. The capture only reinforces that willpower: This event is to the 2004 presidential election what the fall of Atlanta was to 1864—the just-at-the-right-time victory that doomed the hopes of the defeatists in the Democratic party and propelled a war-winning Republic to re-election.
The tactical failure of Iraqi terrorism underscores a greater strategic failure for Middle Eastern terrorism in general. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda took up terrorist tactics because they hoped spectacular attacks on American targets would rally Middle Eastern people to jihad against the United States. As he said on one of those videos he used to release, it is human nature to prefer the stronger horse to the weaker horse. Well, who looks like the stronger horse now?
For Iraqis, Saddam’s capture means that their freedom is secure. For Americans, it means that the war against terror is proceeding from victory to victory. For the government of France and its anti-American allies in Germany and Russia, the capture signals that the time has come for an abrupt about-face. A spokeswoman for Saddam’s most important ally and supporter, French President Jacques Chirac, a man who once described Saddam as a personal friend, said yesterday: “President [Chirac] is delighted at the arrest of Saddam Hussein. This is a major event which should strongly contribute to the democratization and the stabilization of Iraq and allow the Iraqis to once more be masters of their destiny in a sovereign Iraq.” We can expect similar cooings and trillings to be heard soon from the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa as well.
For Middle Eastern radicals, Islamist and otherwise, Saddam’s capture ominously foreshadows their ultimate defeat. Every time the United Sates scores a victory in this war, it disproves Osama’s promise that the attack on the World Trade Center would somehow weaken America. And as America looks stronger and stronger, Osama bin Laden’s terrorism looks more and more futile. The terrorists may be fanatical, but they are not irrational—and just as it became harder to recruit kamikaze pilots after Hiroshima, one guesses that it will not be so easy to recruit Middle Eastern killers after the ignominious end of Saddam.
It was not the United States that was destroyed by terrorism: It was Saddam, first, and the remaining terror regimes in due course. It was President Bush’s predictions, not Osama’s that have now come true. And this is the last and maybe the most important of the lessons of this triumph: The guiding power of this President’s words. And just as he has kept his commitment to rid Iraq of its dictator, he means to keep the other commitments he made after 9/11: to treat every terror-sponsoring state as a hostile regime.
So maybe the most attentive audience for yesterday’s broadcasts was not the Iraqi people, not Americans, not President Chirac, not the Islamic radicals, not even President Bush—but the increasingly isolated and frightened dictators in Tehran, Damascus and Pyongyang.
If the remainder of the axis of evil heard America’s churchbells ringing yesterday on CNN or the BBC World Service, we can be sure they did not ask why, They must have instantly sense that it was for them too that this bell tolls.
(David Frum, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former special assistant to President Bush, is co-author with Richard Perle of the forthcoming “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror” [Random House].) ________________________________
