www.amconmag.com/3_1_04/cover.html
If our Muslim adversaries are not to destroy Western civilization, we must gird for more battles. To suggest Frum and Perle are over the top is not to imply we not take seriously the threat of terror attacks on airliners, in malls, from dirty bombs, or, God forbid, a crude atomic device smuggled in by Ryder truck or container ship. But at Antietam Creek, we lost 7,000 in a days battle in a nation that was one-ninth as populous. Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of that Civil War. Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Is al-Qaeda capable of this sort of devastation when they are recruiting such scrub stock as Jose Padilla and the shoe bomber? In 25 years, militant Islam has seized three countries: Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. In Iran, a generation has grown up that knows nothing of Savak or the Great Satan but enough about the mullahs to have rejected them in back-to-back landslides. Not one Arab nation can stand up to Israel, let alone the United States. If death comes to the West it will be because we embraced a culture of deathbirth control, abortion, sterilization, euthanasia. Western man is dying as Islamic man migrates north to await his passing and inherit his estate. Said young Lincoln in his Lyceum address, If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. In his first inaugural address, FDR admonished, The only thing we have to fear is fear itselfnameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Fear is what Perle and his co-author David Frum are peddling to stampede America into serial wars. Just such fear-mongering got us into Iraq, though, we have since discovered, Iraq had no hand in 9/11, no ties to al-Qaeda, no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear program, and no plans to attack us. Iraq was never the clear and present danger the authors insist she was. Calling their book a manual for victory, they declaim: For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generations great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to winto end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. Evil has existed since Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. And if God accepts the existence of evil, how do Frum and Perle propose to end it? Terrorism is simply a term for the murder of non-combatants for political ends. Revolutionary terror has been around for as long as this Republic. It was used by Robespierres Committee on Public Safety and by Peoples Will in Romanov Russia.
They call for a cut-off of Syrias oil and an ultimatum to Assad: Get Syrian troops out of Lebanon, hand over all terrorist suspects, end support for Hezbollah, stop agitating against Israel, and adopt a Western orientationor you, too, get the Saddam treatment. Colonel Khaddafi is now paying billions in reparations for Pan Am 103, giving up his weapons of mass destruction, and inviting United States inspectors in to verify his disarmament. While the Saudis have been diffident allies in the War on Terror, they are not Americas enemies. They looked the other way as United States fighter-bombers flew out of Prince Sultan Air Base in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the Saudis are directed to provide us with the utmost cooperation in the war on terror, or we will invade, detach their oil-rich eastern province, and occupy it. If the monarchy falls and bin Ladens acolytes replace it, how would that make us more secure in our own country? According to Perle and Frum, Iran defied the Monroe Doctrine and sponsored murder in our own hemisphere, killing eighty-six people and wounding some three hundred at the Jewish community center in Buenos Airesand our government did worse than nothing: It opened negotiations with the murderers. But that atrocity occurred a dozen years ago, long before the reform government of President Mohammad Khatami was elected. And if Iran was behind an attack on a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, why did Argentina and Israel not avenge these deaths? It was not Americans who were the victims, and the attack occurred 5,000 miles from the United States. The Frum-Perle invocation of the Monroe Doctrine is both cynical and comical. If they were genuinely concerned about violations of the Monroe Doctrine, why did they not include Cuba on their target list, a state sponsor of terror 90 miles from our shores that has hosted Soviet missiles and, according to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, is developing chemical and biological weapons?
Iran than any other criminal has to seize control of the persons and property of others. Its not always in our power to do something about such criminals, nor is it always in our interest, but when it is in our power and interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker. But where in the Constitution is the president empowered to toss dictators aside? And if it took 150,000 United States soldiers to toss Saddam aside, how many troops do Frum and Perle think it will take to occupy the capital of a nation three times as large and populous and toss the ayatollah aside? How many dead and wounded would our war hawks consider an acceptable price for being rid of the mullahs? As South Korea favors appeasement, they write, we must take the lead, demand that North Korea surrender all nuclear materials and shut down all missile sites. If Kim Jong Il balks, we should move United States troops back to safety beyond artillery and rocket range of the DMZ and launch preemptive strikes on known North Korean nuclear sites and impose a naval and air blockade. Is the Perle-Frum vision for the suffering people of North Korea a future of freedom and democracy? Not exactly: It may be that the only way out of the decade-long crisis on the Korean peninsula is the toppling of Kim Jong Il and his replacement by a North Korean communist who is more subservient to China. America is to fight a second Korean War that could entail a nuclear strike on our troops, but, when we have won, we should accept a communist North Korea that is a vassal of Beijing. How many dead and wounded are our AEI warlords willing to accept to make Pyongyang a puppet of Beijing? From every page of this book there oozes a sense of urgency that borders on the desperate for action this day: We can feel the will to win ebbing in Washington, we sense the reversion to the bad old habits of complacency and denial. With the cost of war at $200 billion and rising, with deaths mounting, and with the possibility growing that Iraq could collapse in chaos and civil war, President Bush appears to be experiencing buyers remorse about the lemon he was sold by Perle and friends. They promised him a cakewalk, that we would be hailed as liberators, that democracy would take root in Iraq and flourish in the Middle East, that Palestinians and Israelis would break bread and make peace. With Lord Melbourne, Bush must be muttering, What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damn fools said would happen has come to pass. But of all our mistakes, probably the most serious was our unwillingness to allow the Iraqi National Congress, Iraqs leading anti-Saddam resistance movement, to form a provisional government after the fall of Baghdad. In 1944, we took care to let French troops enter Paris before United States or British forces. Thus, we are in trouble because Ahmad Chalabi was not allowed to play de Gaulle leading his war-weary, battle-hardened Free Iraqis into Baghdad. Because the INC terrified the Saudis and therefore terrified those in our government who wished to placate the Saudis. Hastily written, replete with errors, with no index, An End to Evil is a brief in defense of neoconservatives against their impending indictment on charges they lied us into a war that may pr...
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