The real enemy in this war is ourselves

Mark Steyn- National Post –August 2002

George W. Bush, as you may recall, campaigned in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative." "I'm proud to be a compassionate conservative," he declared, proudly but compassionately. "And on this ground I will make my stand!" Those of us who ventured on to the ground to stand alongside him found it pretty mushy and squelchy, but figured the bog of clichés was merely a wily tactic, a means of co-opting all the Democrats' touchy-feely words and thereby neutralizing their linguistic advantage. My colleague Barbara Amiel felt differently. As she put it two years ago, "Those of us who give a tinker's farthing about ideas knew we were in merde up to the waist. Conservatism is by definition 'compassionate'. It has a full understanding and tender spot for the human condition and the ways of our world. A need to qualify conservatism by rebranding it as a product now found in a sweet-smelling pink 'compassionate' version is hideous and a concession to your enemies right at the beginning."

I was wrong and Barbara was right. It didn't seem important at the time, but it is now. I thought the clumsy multicultural pandering of the Bush campaign was a superb joke, but with hindsight it foreshadowed the rhetorical faintheartedness of the last year. Bush, we right-wing types were assured in 2000, would do the right thing, even if he talked a lot of guff. Many of us stuck to this line after September 11th: OK, the Muslim photo-ops with shifty representatives of groups who believe Jews are apes got a bit tedious, but for all the Islamic outreach you could at least rely on the guy to take out the Taliban, and, when the moment comes, Saddam as well.

But words matter, too. As noted here previously, Churchill wasn't just down in the ops room sticking pins in maps but all over the airwaves explaining why the Nazis were evil and why they needed to be wiped from the earth. Lose the rhetorical ground at home and you lose the war overseas -- Vietnam being the most obvious example. This time round, the very name of the conflict was the first evasion. It's not a "war on terror," it's a war on radical Islamism, a worldwide scourge operating on five continents. But the President couldn't say so.

And so because of his compassionate warmongering, in the days after September 11th it was business as usual: My friend's daughter Rachel went to school and was told by her teacher that, as terrible as the "tragedy" was, the Allies had killed far more people in Dresden. Lehigh University in Pennsylvania banned the American flag from its campus "so non-American students would not feel uncomfortable." At the University of North Carolina, students dressed in Muslim garb to express solidarity.

America's had a year to wise up -- to learn the truth about the Saudi Royal Family's funding of Islamic terror groups and the poison spewing from every Arab state TV network at Friday prayers from the A-list imams in the big-time mosques: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." That's Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi live from the Umar Bin-Al-Khattab Mosque in Doha on Qatar Television, August 9th.

But it's too much, so we retreat to our illusions. And so the other day, the U.S. National Education Association -- i.e., the teachers' union -- announced their plans for the anniversary of September 11th: an attractive series of lessons and projects augmented by public TV documentaries and sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. The NEA warms up with a little light non-judgmentalism by advising teachers not to "suggest any group is responsible" for the, ah, "tragic events." Just because Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda boasted they did it is no reason to jump to conclusions. "Blaming is especially difficult in terrorist situations because someone is at fault. In this country, we still believe that all people are innocent until solid, reliable evidence from our legal authorities proves otherwise" -- which presumably means we should wait till the trial and, given that what's left of Osama is currently doing a good impression of a few specks of Johnson's Baby Powder, that's likely to be a long time coming.

Instead, the NEA thinks children should "explore the problems inherent in assigning blame to populations or nations of people by looking at contemporary examples of ethnic conflict, discrimination, and stereotyping at home and abroad."

And by that you mean ...?

"Internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor and the backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War are obvious examples."

Not that obvious: For one thing, the "backlash against Arab Americans during the Gulf War" is entirely mythical. But you get the gist. Don't blame anyone. But, if you have to, blame America.

And so this September 11th, across the continent, millions of pupils, from kindergarten to high school, will be studying such central questions as whether the stereotyped images on 1942 War Bonds posters made German-Americans feel uncomfortable. Evidently, they made German-American Dwight D. Eisenhower so uncomfortable he went off and liberated Europe. But I don't suppose that's what the NEA had in mind.

I don't think the teachers' union are "Hate America" types. Very few Americans are. But, rather, they're in thrall to something far craftier than straightforward anti-Americanism, a kind of enervating cult of tolerance in which you demonstrate your sensitivity to other cultures by being almost totally insensitive to your own.

President Bush has won the first battle (Afghanistan) but he's in danger of losing the war. The war isn't with al-Qaeda, or Saddam, or the House of Saud. They're all a bunch of losers. True, insignificant loser states have caused their share of trouble. But that was because, from Vietnam to Grenada, they were used for proxy wars between the great opposing forces of Communism and the Free World. In a unipolar world, it's clear that the real enemy in this war is ourselves, and our lemming-like rush to cultural suicide. By "our," I don't mean the American people or the Canadian people or even the French people. I don't even mean the Democrats: American politics is more responsive and populist than Europe's, and when war with Iraq starts, Hillary will be cheerleading along with the rest of them. But against that are all the people who shape Western culture, who teach our children, who run our colleges and churches, who make the TV shows we watch -- and they haven't got a clue. Bruce Springsteen's inert, equivalist wallow of an 9/11 album, The Rising, is a classic example of how even a supposed "blue-collar" icon can't bring himself to want America to win. Oprah's post-9/11 message is that it's all about "who you love and how you love." On the radio, John McCain pops up on behalf of the Federal Office of Civil Rights every 10 minutes sternly reminding excitable Christians not to beat up Muslims.

George W. Bush must bear much of the responsibility for this. He had a rare opportunity after September 11th. He could have attempted to reverse the most toxic tide in the Western world. He could have argued that Western self-loathing is a psychosis we can no longer afford. He could have told the teachers' unions that there was more to the Second World War than the internment of Japanese-Americans and it's time they started teaching it to our children. A couple of days after September 11th, I wrote, "Those Western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world's future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces." But a year later, after a brief hiccup, the Western elites have resumed finessing and nuancing evil all the more enthusiastically, and the "compassionate conservative" lui-même shows no stomach for a fight at least as important as any on the battlefield. The Islamists are militarily weak but culturally secure. The West is just the opposite. There's more than one way to lose a war.