Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses George W. Bush is doing, and what he should be doing:
On May 27 George W. Bush gave a half-hour speech at West Point’s Commencement. He spoke of Truman, and Truman’s acting against the “fanatic faith” of Communism. But Communism was seldom as “fanatic” a faith as Islam so often has been, and Truman, unlike Bush, knew the importance of using all the instruments of warfare, and not merely combat, in the initial years of the Cold War.
And the other thing that Truman, and successive governments did, was to use propaganda to undercut the appeal of Communism, both to those in the West (in the late 1940s, the largest political parties in Western Europe were the Communist parties of Italy and France) and to those in the Communist bloc nations. Truman and others knew that defectors from Communism would be the surest guides as to what the Soviet government was up to, and also how to counter its appeal, its schemes, its plans. What use does the Bush Administration make of defectors from Islam — that is, ex-Muslims, who know exactly the tricks and wiles of taqiyya, know exactly what Muslims say behind the backs of Infidels, or what appeals can be made to encourage division within the camp of Jihad?
None of this has come from Bush, whose only response appears to be to hallucinate about the nature of Islam, to insist as a matter of belief, unfounded, that Islam is merely being “perverted” by those who are using terror as an instrument of Jihad, and that the Infidel world will be roused to do all the things it must by being told, endlessly, that this is a “war on terror” — a confusing, vague, and misleading phrase, for it leaves out, with criminal negligence, all the most important instruments of Jihad.
And Truman and those who followed him were not Messianic. They were not out to bring Paradise on Earth to everyone. They were determined to protect, in the first place, the United States, and then those countries in Western Europe that with the United States formed the West. They were not about to invade Russia, or China, or anywhere else. They were out to contain Communism.
What does Bush want? Bush tells us that this is what he wants:
“The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation.”
Look at those lines above. Think about the quality of mind of someone who could utter such lines. He wants, this would-be Truman, to bring the “promise of liberty” to “every people in every nation.” Good God. I don’t. I want to rescue my own country, and Western Europe, and Israel, Australia and a few other places. And if the rest of the Infidel world can also be saved, fine. Did Churchill and FDR stop, during World War II, to bring the “promise of liberty” to “every people in every nation” — or were they perfectly willing to aid, to the hilt, the Red Army, in order to stop Hitler? During the Cold War, were we determined to bring the “promise of liberty” to “every people in every nation,” or were we simply trying to prevent the further spread of Communism and the power of the Soviet Union?
Bush here again demonstrates his naivete, his obstinate inability to admit that he has been wrong all along about Islam, and thus wrong about the usefulness of propping up a nation-state in Iraq (or Afghanistan) at such great cost to Infidels, rather than doing what he should be doing: using the sectarian and ethnic fissures in Iraq, and Afghanistan, to divide and demoralize the camp of Jihad. He can’t even think in those terms. They would disturb him. They are cruel. They imply a willingness not to bring toys and good things to eat to all the children on the other side of the mountain.
But I think we can’t, I think we can’t, I think we can’t. Not when Europeans are cowed in Malmo and Rotterdam, threatened in Paris and London and Berlin, unable to stop the mosques and madrasas from being built, unable to deal with the exploitation of Western technology, especially the Internet, to spread hatred of Infidels among all the Believers, unable to keep their own psychically and economically marginal populations, including prisoners, from taking up Islam as a belief-system that justifies sociopathic behavior, as long as the victims of that behavior are Infidels.
And here is Bush, claiming that we Americans have a duty to bring “the promise of liberty” to “every people in every nation.”
He is Captain Queeg at the Ship of State. But that Ship of State has turned out to be a Ship of Fools. No one is able to correctly identify what is so crazy about this (so far, all the criticisms have been for the wrong, not the right, reasons) or to force him to change his catastrophic course. We need cunning, high and low, and clever policies that will husband, not squander, the lives of those West Point graduates who received him with such unthinking hurrahs, the money, the materiel, the morale of military and civilians alike.
We all know now what a mistake has been made in Iraq — or should. Why can’t those in Washington state, simply, what has been stated here for more than two years — and which, as the evidence piles up, appears more and more to have been exactly the correct view of the situation?
What are they waiting for?