but everyone else in his country was with the terrorists, including his armed forces, his intelligence services, the media, and a gazillion and one crazy imams. Nonetheless, with U.S. action against Afghanistan on the horizon, he went on TV that night and told the Pakistani people this was the gravest threat to the country's existence in more than 30 years. He added he was doing everything to ensure his brothers in the Taliban didn't "suffer," and that he had asked Washington to provide some evidence this bin Laden chap had anything to do with the attacks but so far they had declined to show him any.
Then he cited the Charter of Medina (which the Prophet Muhammad signed after an earlier spot of bother) as an attempt to justify assisting the infidel and said he had no choice but to offer the Americans use of Pakistan's airspace, intelligence networks and other logistical support. He paused for applause and after theworld's all-time record volume of crickets chirping and said thank you and goodnight.
That must have been quite the phone call he got from Washington . . . .
Indeed. And another such call went to Putin. Steyn also makes me love Australia all over again, noting that in a recent debate in Oz's Parliament, the Foreign Minister remarked:
The Leader of the Opposition's constant companion is the white flag.
Steyn rightly points out that Bush couldn't say such a thing about Kerry, Kennedy Boxer or Lamont --lest he be accused of questioning their patriotism.
But, if you can't question their patriotism when they want to lose a war, when can you?
Actually, I have an answer for that. Much has been made on the right of the Administration not sending enough troops to Iraq in the first place. Events seem to bear that out at present, but military situations are fluid, and I'm not qualified to make such a judgment (and suspect many others making the assertion aren't either). But in hindsight I do think it was a mistake for Bush not to seek a declaration of war. Even if it would have been tough to name the entity we were declaring war on, all of the leaking & publishing of secrets and judicial undermining of the war would not be going on because they'd be legal, rather than mere moral, treason. You tend not to sell out your country when you can be hanged for it; being elected for it's another matter. So the answer to Steyn's question is, for Democrats, you can only question their patriotism if there's a formal declaration of war.
Furthermore, a declaration of war would have empowered the President to ask for some sacrifices of the American people --without which, we tend to forget we are at war. (Even my kids understand this point, since we listened to The Horse & His Boy on the way home from Michigan, and the kids noticed that the hedgehogs and rabbits, fat and happy in the peace and wealth of Narnia, don't take it seriously when a warning comes of imminent terrorist attack. Indeed there's much food for thought about present circumstances in the sequel to The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe --especially what Lewis takes for granted about how the world will view terrorism. But I digress).
Mr. W. was just saying at dinner the other night that he's become convinced that all of the rationing of sugar and rubber and such during WWII was more necessary for the psychological effect of marshalling the country behind the war --making everyone feel he had a stake and a part to play in the outcome --rather than actually necessary. Here's Ben Stein with a spin on that idea in Looking For Will Beyond The Battlefield. A taste:
I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.
We’re in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our civilization. They’re taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.
We’re worrying whether Hollywood will forgive Mel Gibson and what the next move is for big homes in East Hampton.snip
WHAT stands between us and the iceberg are the miraculously brave men and women of the armed forces. They’re heroes and saints as far as I’m concerned. But can they do it without the rest of us? Can they do it while we’re all working on our tans and trying to have our taxes lowered again? How can we leave them out there all alone to die for us when we treat the war to save civilization as something we can just wish away?
The President should ask Congress for a declaration of war on Islamofascism and ask some modest sacrifice from Americans. A friend recalls that during the Korean War, he and other kids brought in a little money each week to earn coupons toward war bonds. Something like that.
As long as we're being gloomy, let's go whole-hog and look at Mark Steyn's address before the Australian Institute of Public Affairs last week. He tackles the demographic question once again, albeit from a different angle, so it's worth it to RTWT again.
The question posed here tonight is very direct: “Does Western Civilization Have A Future?” One answer’s easy: if western civilization doesn’t have a past, it certainly won’t have a future. No society can survive when it consciouunmoors itself from its own inheritance. But let me answer it in a less philosophical way:
Yes, please, do. Give us the rosy scenario first, howzabout?
Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility – 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you’re so far down the death spiral you can’t pull out. In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 35 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room.
So large parts of the western world are literally dying – and, in Europe, the successor population to those aging French and Dutch and Belgians is already in place. Perhaps the differences will be minimal. In France, the Catholic churches will become mosques; in England, the village pubs will cease serving alcohol; in the Netherlands, the gay nightclubs will close up shop and relocate to San Francisco. But otherwise life will go on much as before. The new Europeans will be observant Muslims instead of post-Christian secularists but they will still be recognizably European: It will be like Cats after a cast change: same long-running show, new actors, but the plot, the music, the sets are all the same. The animating principles of advanced societies are so strong that they will thrive whoever’s at the switch.
That's the Leftist assumption in a nutshell. No matter what we do or who is here, society will remain more or less as it is no matter what. But what if that's not true? Steyn points out that of the 46 majority Muslim nations, Freedom House ranks only 3 as free. 5 of the 8 least free nations are Muslim. Well, at least if we're going down, we're going out in a blaze of fun, right? My candle burns at both ends but gives a lovely light and whatnot? Steyn argues not and offers a pithy description of the culture of death.
One would assume a demographic disaster is the sort of thing that sneaks up on you because you’re having a grand old time: You stayed in university till you were 38, you took early retirement at 45, you had two months a year on the Cote d’Azur, you drank wine, you ate foie gras and truffles, you marched in the street for a 28-hour work week… It was all such great fun there was no time to have children. You thought the couple in the next street would, or the next town, or in all those bucolic villages you pass through on the way to your weekend home.
But the strange thing is that Europeans aren’t happy.
They're not? But doing and caring about nothing is so chic!
The European Union got rid of all the supposed obstacles to happiness – war, politics, the burden of work, insufficient leisure time, tiresome dependents – and yet their people are strikingly unhappy. Consider this poll taken in 2002 for the first anniversary of 9/11: 61 per cent of Americans said they were optimistic about the future, as opposed to 43 per cent of Canadians, 42 per cent of Britons, 29 per cent of the French, 23 per cent of Russians and 15 per cent of Germans. I wouldn’t reckon those numbers will get any cheerier over the years.
snip
As for all that extra time, what happened? Europeans work fewer hours than Americans, they don’t have to pay for their own health care, they don’t go to church and they don’t contribute to other civic groups, they don’t marry and they don’t have kids to take to school and basketball and the county fair.
So what do they do with all the time?
Yes, I've often wondered as much.
With so much free time, where is the great European art? Assuredly Gershwin and Bernstein aren’t Bach and Mozart, but what have the Continentals got? Their pop
culture is more American than it’s ever been. Fifty years ago, before European welfarism had them in its vise-like death grip, the French had better pop songs and the Italians made better movies. Where are Europe’s men of science? At American universities. Meanwhile, Continental governments pour fortunes into prestigious white elephants of Euro-identity, like the Airbus 380, the QE2 of the skies, capable of carrying 500, 800, a thousand passengers at a time, if only somebody somewhere would order the damn thing, which they might consider doing once all the airports have built new runways to handle it.
Hah! So, Mark, sum it all up for us with a pithy quotation.
“When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do,” writes Charles Murray in In Our Hands, “ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.”
There is precisely the difference between American and Continental foreign policy. America's not always right, but she still has the moral energy to try things. They dismiss George Bush as a cowboy --but who is a cowboy? A grown-up, for one thing. A person willing to shoulder his own burdens, take on responsibility for the safety of others, to talk straight, someone who prefers to mind his own business in general, but is unafraid to stand up to wrongdoers when pressed.
Ah, well. Not to worry. There are still children in Europe, you know.
In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population.
The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, thousands of movies at the video store, and millions of porn sites on the Internet, yet think it perfectly reasonable to demand that the state take care of their elderly parents and their young children while they’re working – to, in effect, surrender what most previous societies would have regarded as all the responsibilities of adulthood.
It’s a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government.
I'll say. It's to have a slave mentality, frankly. As they say, RTWT --Steyn says we're already watching the gradual disappearance of Japan, so we can see what it's going to look like. And don't forget the weapon of choice in grand cultural crises has always been the rosary. Mumble a few beads and pray for the success of B-16's campaign to talk the Europeans off the ledge.
UPDATE: Do click on comments for this post and read Brett McS's remark. He makes an important point that softens Steyn's prognosis somewhat, plus offers a link to a Steyn lecture and Owen Harries response that he (Brett) attended. Good stuff).
