Excerpt from Mark Steyn’s entry in the Chicago Sun-Times today:
The administration, in trying to see its way through both the phony crossfire and the real one, has been rattled by the fake war. Someone in the White House needs seriously to stiffen the Bush rhetoric. When the president talks about ”staying the course” and ”bringing to justice” the killers, he sounds like Bill Clinton, who pledged to stay the course in Somalia and bring to justice the terrorists, and did neither. Bush has to go back to speaking Rumsfeldian, not Powellite: He has to talk about winning total victory, hunting down the enemy and killing them.
He also needs to promise himself that he’ll never again apologize to some Arab despot — even relatively benign ones, like the king of Jordan — for events in Iraq. If he feels the need to apologize, he should apologize to the American people for apologizing to the Arab world. This isn’t just because what went on in Abu Ghraib is a picnic — well, a Paris Hilton video picnic — compared to what goes on every day in the prisons of our Arab ”allies.” More important than that, the Bush apology buys into one of the most fetid props of the region’s so-called stability — ”pan-Arabism.” If U.S. troops ”humiliated” some Portuguese prisoners, the president wouldn’t apologize to the king of Norway or the prime minister of Slovenia. So why, when U.S. troops humiliate Iraqi prisoners, would he apologize to Jordan’s King Abdullah or Egypt’s thug-for-life? ”Pan-Arabism” is one reason why the region’s a sewer. If Iraq succeeds, it will be by breaking with regional solidarity.
By the way, you might be wondering by now where the great procession of Arab leaders lining up to apologize to America for Nick Berg’s murder has gotten to. Only a few Middle Eastern men want to saw the heads of Jews and infidels. But an awful lot more — the majority in some states — are either noisily approving or silently accepting of such an act. Winston Churchill wrote of two ”curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries” — not only the ”fanatical frenzy,” which you can see in the orgiastic pleasure Berg’s killers take in their clumsy work, but also the ”fearful fatalistic apathy,” to which many more Arabs are prone. It’s the latter that makes them such easy waters for the sharks to swim among.
We always come back to that strong horse/weak horse thing. But the point to remember is that Osama bin Laden talked about who was seen as the strong horse: It’s a perception issue. America may be, technically, the strong horse but, thanks to its press and its political class, the administration is showing dangerous signs of climbing into the rear end of the weak-horse burlesque suit. If America retreats into its own fatalistic apathy, there will be many more Nick Bergs in the years ahead.
I said I wouldn’t comment. I won’t, except to say, “amen”.