Should America’s war aims be big and bold, or small and soft? Should we go in forcefully to make sure that Osama bin Laden is killed and the Taliban overthrown, or hold back for fear of inflaming the "Death-to-America" mobs and destabilizing nuclear-armed Pakistan? Should we hunt down Al Qaeda terrorists hiding in unfriendly countries, or plead impotently for their extradition? Should we stand proudly by Israel, or distance ourselves? Should we vow to invade Iraq and decapitate Saddam Hussein’s regime if he threatens us with weapons of mass destruction, or sit back, hoard antibiotics, move out of our endangered cities, and hope for the best?
Advocates of the small, soft approach are fixated on the fear of stoking Arab rage and thus risking the dreaded "War with Islam." And some of them-notably leftists and Islamic groups-would have us change our whole approach to the Middle East with apologies for having offended the Arab world.
Here’s a vote for big, bold, ruthless military attacks on all who would kill us. Yes, there would be grave risks. But the small, soft approach seems more likely to expose us to unending massacres-and, eventually, to weapons of mass destruction. This conclusion rests on four premises:
1. Nightmarish attacks can be stopped only at the source. We know that some of our enemies hope to use biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons to kill us by the millions, vaporize Washington and New York, and reduce us to chaos. It will be only a matter of time until they succeed, unless we keep them from obtaining such weapons. Careful diplomacy has a critical role to play. So does avoiding unnecessarily offending the Islamic world. But the risk of catastrophe looms large unless we credibly threaten to use-and are prepared to use-devastating military force to pre-empt any attack.
2. Our enemies will meet appeasement with more mass murders. Fanatics bent on genocide see concessions as signs of weakness, so they step up their demands and attacks. Ariel Sharon was wrong to liken U.S. policy to the appeasement of Hitler at Munich. But the Hitler-Osama bin Laden analogy is apt. No concession can satisfy such barbarians. Bin Laden’s demands only begin with the United States withdrawing from Saudi Arabia and leaving Israel to face a terrible fate. And his trained terrorists seem at least as committed as Hitler’s willing executioners.
Any concessions also seem more likely to further inflame than to mollify the blood lust of the millions of fanatics, sympathizers, and potential terrorists who lionize this all-but-confessed sponsor of the September 11 slaughter. "Terrorists evidently control large segments of Arab opinion the way the Nazis once controlled Germany-by swagger and lies, by dispensing a dangerous hallucinogenic ideology for losers, and by murdering opponents," as Yale professor David Gelernter wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
The mobs screaming "Death to Israel" and "Death to America" mean it. Arab conquest of Israel might well lead to another Holocaust. As for America, many of these people hate everything about us-our emancipation of women, our freedom, our wealth, our power, our culture. And they want to kill us.
What effect would concessions have on such people? Consider President Bush’s atrociously timed October 2 endorsement of creating a Palestinian state. "To the Arabs and Palestinians who danced and cheered as the twin towers fell," in the words of a Weekly Standard editorial, "Bush’s statement told them that they were right to celebrate. Kill enough Americans, and the Americans give ground." This should not be our message. It should be: If you kill Americans, or try to do it, or train to do it, or threaten to do it, or conspire to do it, or give aid or comfort to those who do it, we will hunt you down and kill you.
3. Only the fearsome exercise of power can influence these people. There is little prospect of getting the America-haters to like us until they first learn to fear us. The destruction of bin Laden, his cohorts, and the Taliban regime would be a start. Kamikaze hijackers aside, most of bin Laden’s sympathizers would not relish the prospect of sudden death at the hands of U.S. commandos, agents, or bombs.
Already, observes Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, "As exhortations and promises never could, the exercise of raw American power moved others to act or speak in ways that undermined previous complicity with terrorism." The commitment of fanatics tends to melt away when they see their cause losing. The millions of America-haters now see their heroes winning. We must change that. It took a crushing military defeat, followed by massive American-backed rebuilding programs, to bring about the almost miraculous conversion of Germany and Japan from genocidal dictatorships into civilized democracies.
Most people in the nations that export anti-American terrorism are not fanatics, and many America-haters know not what they hate. They have been fed a lifelong diet of vicious lies. But the truth cannot gain a foothold in these societies until the mass-murder squads are defeated. Both morality and self-interest call upon us to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. But military force is rarely applied with surgical precision. The infliction of unavoidable casualties in self-defense is justified when a passive posture would only invite more massacres of Americans.
4. We should take pride in our Middle East policies. America-haters ranging from bin Laden to Susan Sontag see U.S. foreign policies as underlying causes of the September 11 attacks. But most of the policies under attack are sound, even noble. And any flaws are not the issues motivating our enemies.
Bin Laden noted America’s support for Israel twice in his hate-filled videotape. His vow that "we cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish" was an unmistakable demand for Israel’s destruction-a rallying cry that resonates in the Arab world. Our answer must be a clear declaration that the United States will never abandon Israel-a bastion of freedom and democracy surrounded by hostile autocracies-no matter how many Arabs hate us for it.
This is not to justify Israel’s eviction of Palestinians from their lands in the 1940s or Israel’s subsequent land-grabbing settlement policies. But it was not the United States that displaced the Palestinians. It is not America that consigned them to refugee camps for more than 50 years, but rather Israel’s neighbors. The United States has opposed Israel’s settlement policy, albeit not firmly enough, and has long pressed Israel to make a fair peace with the Palestinians. This led to a strikingly generous peace offer at Camp David last year by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Yasser Arafat spurned it, and Palestinians stepped up their attacks on Israelis. True, perhaps Israel has responded with more violence than necessary. But murderers and their champions have no standing to complain that the people they would kill are trying too hard to stay alive.
Critics also complain of "the ongoing bombing of Iraq" (in Sontag’s words) and the economic sanctions that bin Laden blamed for "civilians, innocent children being killed every day in Iraq." These complaints are bogus. Both the bombings-of military targets-and the U.N.-supported sanctions grew out of the unprecedented invasion and annexation of one United Nations member (Kuwait) by another (Iraq). Both have been necessary to prevent the defeated but unrepentant Saddam Hussein from violating the terms of his surrender and accumulating enough oil wealth to menace the world again. Iraq has more than enough money for all the food and medicine it needs. Saddam has chosen to spend it on weapons.
Far from wronging the Islamic world, the United States has for years supplied most of the food reaching Afghan refugees and has waged its last three major military campaigns in defense of Muslim victims of aggression (in Kuwait) and oppression (in Kosovo and Bosnia, where America and its allies stopped the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims by Christians). And far from being the fault of America, the poverty and economic stagnation that plague the Arab world are attributable to the "ruinously incompetent economic policies" of corrupt regimes, as Clive Crook detailed in his October 6 column.
The one major criticism with a tincture of truth is that the United States has propped up these corrupt regimes instead of pushing them to embrace the democratic message that we usually preach. Perhaps we should have pushed our Arab friends to hold free elections. Perhaps we should do so in the future. But popular votes might be more likely to empower the America-haters than mollify them.
They do not hate us for our flaws. They hate us for our virtues. They do not respect appeasement. They respect power.