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Where are we four years later ? - -

By Victor Davis Hanson

Our Rock of Sisyphus
How goes our hard labor in Iraq?

Where does the United States stand in its so-called global war against terror, four years after the September 11 attack? The news is both encouraging and depressing all at once.

The Home Front


On the plus side, we have not seen another attack on our shores. No one is quite sure why, but there has at least been a radical change in Americans' attitude about tolerance for Islamic extremism. It is generally felt that the populace has become a collective powder keg ready to go off at the next attack. And perhaps that fear has awed and silenced radical imams and their hate-filled madrassas — for a while at least.



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Hundreds of terrorists and their sympathizers, from Lodi and Portland to New Jersey and Florida, have been arrested or deported for either planning attacks or seeking to spread their venom. Nevertheless, our borders, especially with Mexico, are porous. It is a parlor game now among pundits to speculate how easily a Middle Eastern terrorist could come northward without much worry of interdiction.

American immigration policy is nebulous: why do we still let in almost anyone from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia. or any of the other Middle Eastern autocracies that are known for laxity toward their anti-American terrorists? If we really were in either a hot or even a cold war, then we should have adopted a policy similar to the past restrictions on German nationals entering in 1941-5 or on those from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the 1950s through the 1970s.

A more serious lapse is the absence of a radical energy policy that forces greater production and conservation. Our present dependence is analogous to America needing German coal in 1936 or counting on the Ploesti oilfields of Romania of 1933 to run our Model As.

True, the administration has good grounds to be wary: earlier expensive efforts to subsidize alternative fuels proved boondoggles when OPEC turned on the spigots and recessions cut demand. And it is not clear that the Left would tolerate new drilling off our coasts and in Alaska, or more nuclear power as a trade-off for stepped-up mandatory conservation.

But three points are missed here, aside from the entrance of oil-hungry India and China into the world market and the steady depletion of known reserves, that have made things far different from 30 years ago.

First, enemies like Iran and triangulators such as Saudi Arabia are increasingly immune from American political pressure, not just because we are dependent on imported petroleum, but also because an energy-sensitive world will blame the United States for any action that endangers a now-fragile global market.

Second, in the past 24 months hundreds of billions of dollars in windfall profits have been propping up the Iranian theocracy and have bailed out Saudi Arabia, which by 2000 was facing a real need for structural and political reforms.

Third, some of that new petro-money will find its way to al Qaeda and Hezbollah to hire ever more mercenaries to attack us in Iraq or at home. We are fighting a culture in radical Islam that cannot make or earn anything. It is entirely parasitic, counting only on stealthy petro-handouts from terrified regimes, which themselves create no capital of their own other than by maintaining oil production that others crafted and, for a price, mostly still operate and maintain.

Abroad

A majority of Americans have tired of Iraq. Reasoned reflection would suggest that the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and their replacement by constitutional governments — at a tragic cost of two-thirds of those civilians lost on the first day of the war — might instead have come as mostly positive news, especially given antebellum warnings of thousands of our dead and millions of refugees to come in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Two-thirds of Al Qaeda are scattered. Bin Laden's popularity is waning, as it always does in the Middle East when former romantic killers remain incognito, cannot come out of hiding, and resort to issuing stale videos. It is hard to account for the end of Libyan and Pakistani nuclear trafficking, of Syrians in Lebanon, or of unquestioned dictatorship in Egypt, without the prior American resolve to remove Saddam.

Whether we like it or not, consistency with the democraticizing efforts in Iraq has gained a life of its own and will force us gradually to distance ourselves even more from autocracies throughout the Middle East. That in turn will both rekindle their establishment's short-term hatred and yet at the same time weaken Arab strongmen's long-term efforts to deflect popular anguish against us via terrorist intermediaries.

Oddly, the successful prevention of another 9/11, coupled with the amazing military victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, may have prompted a sense of laxity in the public, which apparently detects no evidence of a dangerous war that still threatens our very existence at home.

Mistakes, some fundamental, were made in Iraq; but given earlier long (and still ongoing) postwar presences in Germany, Japan, Italy, the Balkans, and Korea, Americans might have been able to appreciate that we have been in Iraq for far less time, and had lost far fewer troops than in past conflicts (except, of course, in the air campaign against Milosevic). Instead, World War II is ineptly raised as the benchmark of our "quagmire," since from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki is no longer a span than September 11 to the present — as if 2,000 lost is comparable to 400,000 Americans or 50 million worldwide and the near destruction of the European continent.

Hysteria surrounding non-news (like flushed Korans and the Cindy Sheehan carnival) seems to suggest that a n



    
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