A reader emails:
Dear Mr. May,
Eight Marines dead in a day, and the Bush camp is happy – happy – to
see Osama in a video?
“A little gift” is what the Bush campaign folks are saying.
What the heck is going on with the GOP, when the taunts of a terrorist
butcher – one that Bush has so far failed to kill – are seen as good
for Bush’s chances?
Hope all’s well in GOP-land, because it sure looks odd from the outside.
Take care,
[Name withheld]
I’m afraid this is how many Americans think, and from this you can see why this is likely to be a close election.
Saddam Hussein famously (infamously?) said: “Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle.” Saddam was wrong. Many Americans cannot accept 8 dead in one battle.
And they’d have a point – if, by avoiding battles, we could at least have what Neville Chamberlain called “peace in our time.”
But it would not mean that – anymore than sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler meant avoiding World War II.
How can people such as my correspondent not understand that Abu Musab Zarqawi, and those like him, will not be satisfied to defeat Americans only in Iraq. If they prevail there, they will move on to the next battleground. And the next. And the next.
And don’t tell me it is because of the liberation of Iraq that Zarqawi is in Iraq. He was there long before the 101st Airborne arrived at Al Qaqaa. He was orchestrating terrorism against Americans from there.
How can so many people believe there is any way we can make ourselves inoffensive to the Zarqawis and bin Ladens of the world? Or to the Saddam Husseins?
Saddam, we know from the Duelfer report (but not from most of the reporting on it), was experimenting with ways to put sarin into perfume bottles and ricin into aerosol cans.
He intended to reconstitute his WMD programs as soon as the coast was clear – and thanks to his corruption of the UN’s Food for Oil program, the French and others were helping to clear the coast for him.
I don’t know who – if anyone – in the Bush campaign called bin Laden’s videotape “a little gift.” Whoever did, has been in the bubble too long, is too obsessed with the campaign and said something absolutely callous and condemnable.
But the more important point is this: Bin Laden can make videotapes but since 9/11 he has been unable to make terrorism on American soil. His best surviving terrorists (e.g. Zarqawi) are in Iraq – because they know what it will mean if that country, once a training ground and safe haven for terrorists (see the Deulfer report) should become a decent place.
That bin Laden has not been able to slaughter innocent American men and women here in the homeland, that he has lost Afghanistan which has now had its first free election ever, that he now must take on trained and tough U.S. Marines in Fallujah, amounts to a remarkable achievement.
How discouraging that so many American can’t see that. How sad that so many Americans react exactly as bin Laden and Saddam would expect. How pathetic that when Americans are killed in battle other Americans direct their anger not at the killers but at an American president who refuses to surrender.
One more point: We can’t discount the possibility of much worse than a battle in Iraq between tonight and Tuesday night. Bin Laden may have something planned and it could succeed. More innocent Americans may be killed – we hope and pray not, but it’s a real possibility.
If that happens, it won’t be a gift to anyone but I would still make this argument: Vote for whichever candidate you believe will fight back most relentlessly and ruthlessly. Vote for whichever candidate has the will to win. Because the definition of defeat is indeed the loss of the will to fight.