Random Zits
May 20, 2004
Ronald Reagan is a towering conservative icon because he meant what he said...and stood his ground. He “paid for this microphone” and he kept it. That was leadership. When Reagan refused to compromise on SDI and walked out of Reykjavik in 1986, the liberals predicted a nuclear holocaust. Internationally, Reagan was labeled a “Warmonger”. The President stood his ground. Years later, Gorbachev acknowledged that this act by Reagan was the beginning of the end for Soviet Communism.
Despite the intuitive genius of “Mister-Compromised-Himself”, Howell Raines that, “Reagan couldn’t tie his shoes if his life depended on it,” Reagan ended the 44 year old Cold War by 1989. And even former Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, admitted to President Reagan that, “In my 50 years in public life, I've never seen a man more popular than you with the American people.”
And along comes Bush 43. One of President George W. Bush’s most enduring appeals to the electorate is his credibility. Even in the current environment, a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, 56 percent of voters said Bush means what he says. After all...a leader’s job is to lead, not to be led.
With the warm welcome deserved by a case of herpes, enters what should have been the one day story of Abu Ghraib prison abuses. Several degenerate U.S. troops (for whatever reasons) are discovered conducting themselves in a degenerate manner...not nearly as degenerate a manner as the murderers of American Nick Berg.
But given the choice between the thrills of America-bashing over some “insults to the Arab world” or the barbaric undressing of Islam’s dark heart, the world voted to...Bash-America! Long after the American Abu Ghraib guards rightfully have been dealt a harsh justice, Berg’s murderers will still be slopping falafel into their unwashed faces and Abu Ghraib will join the media lexicon with Kent State and My Lai.
With Arabs, Amnesty International, the Red Cross, liberals and just about the entire world in paroxysms over the abuses committed by the Great Satan America, the voice of the whine and cheese crowd (the NYT’s) let the next shoe drop in this Basharama, “The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda....”
The thought of C.I.A. interrogators "water boarding" Khalid Shaikh Mohammed should, if anything, help most commonsense Americans sleep a bit more comfortably. Is it so bad to strap “a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001” to a board and let him be “forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown”? Or is this nation so nonsensical that we would forego any helpful intelligence possessed by this murderer to spare his bronchial tubes a few tears of Allah?
On a minute-by-minute basis, American troops are being murdered; American civilians are being defiled and the terrorist forces, intent upon destroying the U.S., continue to cry “Foul”. All of this is occurring behind the center stage of a few Iraqi prisoners being “abused” by a few abysmally random zits on the face of an otherwise unblemished U.S. military. And “random zits” are America’s great conundrum.
A Muslim suicide bomber detonates himself in a crowded market and it’s business as usual. A Muslim crowd defiles an American body and it’s business as usual. Almost anybody in this world can be a primal transgressor and it’s business as usual. But if, in a random instance, America burps and forgets to excuse itself...there is international hell to pay.
Our enemies have crafted a very clever strategic persona...low civil expectations for themselves and paralyzing expectations for the U.S.. When the Telegraph reported that Daniel Pearl’s murderers, “tried to sedate Pearl” before cutting his throat...the world might think “These aren’t such bad guys”. Who would have ever thought terrorists could be so magnanimous...given the expectations. But America burns some detainee’s shish kabob and it’s an offense against all of Islam...given the expectations.
In an hysterical overreaction to “a few random zits”, “the U.S. Army said Friday that it had overhauled interrogation procedures used for Iraqi detainees....” The LA Times reports, “that even the techniques that are no longer approved did not violate the Geneva Convention.”
Although, “the Pentagon also emphasized that interrogations of witnesses have played a major role in locating roadside bombs, tracking insurgents and capturing key figures,” America is compromised by “a few random zits” into overreaction...given the expectations.
This is not leadership. It’s pathetic ingratiation. And it will not be productive. Overreaction is just an incremental slide down a slippery slope of exaggerated expectations that terminates in an untenable corner of self-immolation.
The U.S. is fighting a real war against terrorism. This is no Vietnam. This is a World War that threatens to permanently end our way of life. The goal is to preserve American lives...not heap our dead on the altar of politically correct kowtowing to insincere expectations, artificially created for us, by those who wish to destroy us.
What Ronald Reagan said of our former enemy, the Soviet Union, equally applies to terrorist criminals...”The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.” This is a time for cool-headed leadership...not panic-driven overreaction.
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