SwiftVets.com

[AF]

Gentlemen,

If I may, I would like to post an article by Andrew Coyne of the National Post (a Canadian newspaper) on why George Bush must be returned to the Whitehouse. Don't be put off by the beginning, it's well worth a read.

Hope I didn't break any copyright laws.

This President deserves re-election

Andrew Coyne
National Post

Saturday, September 04, 2004

I can see why many people despise George Bush. The smirk, the swagger, the mangled syntax, the cowboy posing: he is no one's idea of a philosopher king. His faux populism is all the more condescending, coming as he does from one of America's most privileged families, just as his bellicose rhetoric jars in light of his own undistinguished military career.

But that only goes part of the way to explain Bush hatred, its bile and spittle. Indeed, many of those who loathe him most would insist it had nothing to do with him personally, and they are probably half right. Rather, he has become the proxy for people's feelings, post-Sept. 11, about the threat posed by militant Islamism and how to respond to it.

Listening to many of Mr. Bush's critics -- not all, by any means, but many -- there is a palpable sense that the crisis would have passed by now were it not for that awful man in the White House. If he had not actually invented the threat altogether, certainly he had exacerbated it, exaggerated it and exploited it for political ends. The subtext is clear: Sept. 11 was a one-off. We live in the aftermath of one cataclysm, and not in the shadow of the next. And this I think makes the case for his re-election.

Some will protest that I am drawing a caricature of the opposition. But many people do indeed believe these things, and many more believed them in the days after Sept. 11. Much of the intellectual architecture of the West's response since then was constructed by Mr. Bush, to the extent that his more respectable critics make their case on essentially Bushian grounds.

It is now a commonplace, for example, that Sept. 11 was an act of war. It was not so immediately. It was Mr. Bush who grasped that Sept. 11 was more in the nature of a declaration of future intent than anything else. The terrorists, after all, could hardly have expected that such a shocking attack would fail to provoke some sort of retaliation, probably massive. Yet they obviously also expected to get away with it.

Getting inside the heads of a group with the audacity to declare war on the most powerful nation on earth was the first challenge. Yet Mr. Bush drew the right initial conclusions: first, that there was no sense, moral or strategic, in which this level of bloodlust could be attributed to such convenient causes as Third World poverty or the provocations of American foreign policy; second, that there were no concessions that could appease this new breed of terrorist, no demands that could be met, even if that were otherwise advisable; third, most controversially, that the threat was not one that could be addressed in terms of a criminal investigation, but rather required a military response. For if the terrorists believed they could get away with it, it was in part because they enjoyed the help and support of sponsoring states. Hence the initial invasion of Afghanistan.

Further consideration refined the nature of the threat, and its scope. The same fantastic ideology that inspired the terrorists' war aims -- which included reversing the "tragedy of Andalusia," i.e. the fall of Spain in 1492 -- also led them to interpret recent history in explicitly triumphalist terms, as divinely inevitable. Each previous terrorist outrage, from the 1985 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the assault on the USS Cole in 2000, had elicited little or no response, if not outright retreat. It was not that US actions had provoked the terrorists; it was that US inaction had inspired them, in the belief that the US was a paper tiger, that in fact they were winning.

You will notice that I have not said al Qaeda, or Osama bin Laden. Those who see Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq as a "distraction" from the war on terror fail to grasp the true dimension of the threat. The phenomenon of "macroterrorism" is defined by the willingness and the capacity to inflict mass death, on a scale never before imagined. That willingness and capacity is not restricted to al Qaeda. It is common to militant Islamism, in all its many forms and the several states where it is rooted.

The task of rolling back that triumphalist wave is not limited to one country or one campaign. It will take decades, and even then the threat will never be fully extinguished: with the spread of nuclear technology, all it takes is two men in a rowboat to make the island of Manhattan uninhabitable for a century. In the short term, that illustrates the impossibility of "playing defence." As Mr. Bush grasped, there is no way to permanently insulate the whole of continental America from this sort of existential threat. Rather, you have to take the fight to the source, pre-emptively if necessary.

In the longer term, it points to the necessity of regime change, not only in Iraq but across the Middle East. Many people talked of "root causes" after Sept. 11. Mr. Bush is now criticized for taking this seriously: namely, for realizing that the true root cause of the new terrorism lay in the dictatorships in which it incubated. It is Mr. Bush's most significant insight, not only in the battle against terrorism but more generally: that in matters of war and peace, it is the nature of regimes that counts.

Peace treaties are fine things between democratic states. But democratic states do not need to be so constrained, while dictatorships, which do, are unlikely to obey them. Hence the Bush doctrine, in which the Wilsonian and realist traditions in American foreign policy are synthesized: if you want peace, spread democracy -- in Iraq, in Palestine, perhaps one day even in Saudi Arabia.

As I say, much of this is now familiar, even uncontroversial. But it was not always thus. Perhaps another president would have come to the same realizations, eventually. But Mr. Bush was out in front of most statesmen in this regard. As important, he had the guts to act on this vision -- to bet his presidency on it, in fact. That bet looks about to pay off, and deserves to.

© National Post 2004

[MJB]

Ah, a voice of reason from our cousins to the North.

My family and I visited friends up in Canada this summer. We love visiting, eating in "different" resturants, spending different money, seeing different signage, etc.

But this time upon return we both commented how good it felt to get back to the US - even though we were barely a couple of hours away during our trip.

The times I've been to Canada I've read the local papers with amusement. This last time in Winnipeg there was a story about the lack of military readiness to defend their northern boarders. I had no idea their military was in such bad shape. How handy for them that we live to the South!
_________________
MJB
USAF '85-'92

[AF]

Hi MJB,

You are correct in your views. Unfortunately Canada has been governed by Liberals for the past decade and that rule, in the name of political correctness has manifested itself in the abrogation of our duties to humanity. Canada's Armed Forces are a pale shadow of what they once were and that is a shame, since there is still a very strong tradition of military service up here. The Cadet movement (farm team for the army) is still big in Canada, and it partly explains why Canadian soldiers while thin on the ground are among the world's best. Children from the age of 12 to 18 can join the Army Cadets (or Air and Navy) and there they learn various military skills which prove useful should they decide on a career in the Armed Forces. It's sort of like the boy scouts with assault rifles.

Fortunately, the Cadets are immune form government cutbacks but only because parent sponsoring committees raise all the cash themselves. My children were in the Air Cadets and I've had to sell a lot of chocolates and raffle tickets in order to buy the flight time for the children. Both of my children are pilots, courtesy of the Air Cadets (and parent sponsors) and should they decide on an Air Force career, they are well prepared for it.

Sadly even this venue is under assault by the Liberals in power.

Cheers,
AF

[Hammer2]

AF, The internet is available to all. If you have been following our election, then you know how the internet has liberated our political process.
All you Canadians need to do is get active and start spreading the word and you will be able to re-shape your society too.
Your press and media are, if anything, more leftist than ours - BUT THEY ARE NOT INVINCIBLE!

What works here can work anywhere, just do it!
_________________
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilence" - Thomas Jefferson
"An armed society is a polite society" - Thomas Jefferson
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it won't be needed until someone tries to take it away." -- Thomas Jefferson

[Kimmymac]

Ohhh Canadaaaaa.....YOU HAD TO SELL CHOCOLATES IN ORDER TO GET THEM FLYING TIME???

WHAT??

That is unbelievable. No wonder parts of Western Canada wants to secede to Wyoming and Montana.

Good article (overall) and thank you for sharing it, but I would like to ask the author: What swagger? You mean walking? They don't like how he walks? Shoulders back, chest out, chin up? What should he do? Shlump along like an adolescent introvert, so the intelligentsia are not threatened? Puh-leeze.

Heck, I walk with my shoulders back, my chest out and my chin up. In my family it is called "good posture." I am a confident, athletic individual, and it shows in how I walk. Those who don't like that...well. Wanna arm wrestle over it?

As for the "mangled syntax" I would rather take a truthful person that occassionaly mangles his syntax over a perfectly articulate liar, any day. Clinton was well spoken; he was so erudite he had at least three meanings for the word "is".

He also didn't "swagger". Of course, he was generally suffering the hang-over effects of too many MickeyD's, and it is hard for chubby people to "swagger." Chubby people tend to bump along with the legs of their running shorts wadded up in their crotches. (A picture so harmfully imprinted into my memory I should be allowed to sue for mental distress. Maybe John Edwards will take the case this Winter. Looks like he will have some free time.)

How many magazine subscription sales does it take to purchase Kevlar vests?

America's Motto: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.
Canada's Motto: We treat our Armed Forces like an American high school band, on their way to the Rose Bowl.

Must be that French influence.

Anyway, dear AF, don't despair-- We are the United States, and we've got your back.