Posted by NEWS on 10/9/2004, 19:21:35 The failed American approach to Islamic militancy in the 1990s can succinctly be summed up in one sentence: We didn't understand we were at war. We didn't understand for a simple reason: We didn't listen to our enemies. They told us time and again that they considered themselves at war with us. They were not nuanced about it. They did not send Delphic clues, or simply leave it for us to deduce from several monstrous attacks. No, the jihadists coupled the deeds with words. They didn't just bomb the World Trade Center, our embassies, and the U.S.S. Cole. They told us again and again, fatwa after fatwa, that this was a war and that they were committed to doing whatever it took to win including the annihilation of civilians. We didn't listen. It took 9/11, finally, for dawn to break on our slumber. It was a war and we needed to fight it like soldiers fight a war, not like the FBI disrupts a stock-fraud ring. Now, although we inhabit a post-9/11 world, exactly the same mistakes are being repeated by the same redoubtable axis of denial: the media, academia, and the hard Left of the Democratic party. Yes, if you have the endurance to press them long enough and hard enough, you may actually get them to admit, kicking and screaming, that we are in some sort of war. But beyond that it's the same old song: an ostrich-like refusal to acknowledge the nature of the hostilities and an incorrigible deafness to the very plain words of our enemies. The latest twist, or flip, in the bizarre campaign of Senator John Kerry is a case in point. Once again this week, the candidate turned the kaleidoscope that passes for his "position" on American military operations in Iraq. Echoing that notorious fount of wisdom and judgment Howard Dean, Kerry said that President Bush had embarked on "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" a contention that, as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol tartly observed, Kerry himself had sharply rebuked when Dean made it only a few months ago. Let's leave aside for the moment the dizzying inconsistency. After all, it is only midweek, and America's Sybil could easily contort himself yet again by Sunday. More incongruous is that Kerry would render this judgment at the very moment the horror of Beslan militant Islam's latest stunning atrocity publicly emerges in the form of climbing death tolls (now over 340) and harrowing pre-massacre images of barbarians stringing their explosives amid petrified children. In his congressional testimony three decades ago, Kerry libelously tagged the American military as the army of Ghenghis Kahn. It looks, however, like he doesn't recognize the real thing when he sees it. It has been ruthlessly plaguing civilization for decades, and it's not just in Beslan. It's in Fallujah, too. Not for Kerry, though. He has decided, at least for now, that Iraq is the "wrong war." If he'd listen to our enemies, and watch what they do everywhere they go, he might think differently. But he won't. That makes him the wrong man, in this place and at this time. Of course it's hard to listen to the enemy when you resist identifying him. To be sure, our national obsession to obscure militant Islam and remain willfully ignorant of its tenets is not Kerry's fault. He is far from alone in maintaining that we are fighting a war on "terror" rather than on jihadists. But for Kerry and his backers, things become even more attenuated. Whatever this "war on terror" may be, they insist Iraq is not a part of it. But they are wrong. The war we must fight and win is in Iraq. It is also in Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Madrid, Instanbul, Bali, and elsewhere. That's the way the enemy sees it. The jihadists do not split their ambitions into discreet theaters to suit the rhetorical demands of American electoral campaigns. They don't care about Iraq qua Iraq, or Chechnya qua Chechnya. They don't recognize such political arrangements. They care about Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb: the domain of the Muslims and, tellingly, the domain of war which is how they see the rest of the world. They care about infidels. Most especially, they care about the United States not as a nation-state but as the agglomeration of infidels constituting the greatest obstacle to their vision of a pan-caliphate. They go, irrespective of national borders, to the places where they believe they can do us the most harm, whether by fighting, or training, or acquiring weapons and recruits. If the United States is to win this war, it is to those places we must go, with constancy of purpose, to hunt them down and kill them. If we do not, they will grow stronger. Because toppling the United States is their highest aim, they will advance, rather than retreat. They will come here and they will kill us. And when history is written, 9/11 will be their opening salvo rather than our clarion call.
The Wrong Man at the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time
Kerry doesnt understand the war.
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