Commentary –

The War And Our Imperfect Allies

By Chris Powell

Strangest of the reactions to the September 11 terrorist attacks is the complaint that the United States shouldn’t get into a war.

With more than 5,000 casualties already inflicted, with billions of dollars in property damage already done, and with one person in the news media dead from anthrax and several others infected, evidence of a biological attack, it is hard to understand how anyone could fail to see that the United States was already at war before it launched air raids against Afghanistan, whose gangster regime has been hosting terrorists who, even if they didn’t mastermind the September 11 attacks, exult in them and advocate more.

Since those who exult in the attacks wrap themselves in Islam, and since the evidence is that the attacks were perpetrated by the same sort of people, some Americans are calling for greater sympathy for the grievances of the Islamic world against US foreign policy, and particularly for reconsideration of US support for Israel.

This is futile and dangerous. For it is impossible to compromise with the Islamic fascism and imperialism proclaimed by Osama bin Laden and his adherents and others throughout the Islamic world. They proclaim that government must be religious and authoritarian, not secular and democratic; that there is no right to private judgment in matters of conscience; and that there can be no cooperation between the theocracies of the true faith and other nations. (The basing of a few thousand “infidel” US soldiers in Saudi Arabia, the home of the Prophet Mohammed, to help defend that country against foreign attack was, until recently, bin Laden’s foremost grievance.)

Thus it is crazy to suggest, as some Americans do, that the terror attacks might stop or be substantially reduced if only Israel withdrew to its 1967 borders, or if only the United States retreated from free trade, or if the United States didn’t defend undemocratic nations as well as democratic ones. _For even an inch of room for the “infidel” Jew would be too much for the Islamic imperialists; any cooperation between “infidel” Westerners and Islamic states would be unholy; and the undemocratic nations the United States has defended are less oppressive than the perpetrators and advocates of terrorism would be if they took power.

That excuses for Islamic fascism are offered by the very Americans who celebrate “diversity” on these shores would be comic if the world was not at stake.

Even Americans who are more realistic may feel uncomfortable about the antiterrorism coalition the United States has been trying to assemble, on account of its including undemocratic governments and even governments themselves suspected of sponsoring terrorism against the United States.

Certainly, if the war against terrorism is to be won, the governments that sponsor terrorism will have to be overthrown and their military capacity destroyed, and there is no point for the United States to pretend that nations like Syria, or the Palestinian Authority, both masters of terror, can be part of this war. But, as with all wars, winning this one will require the United States to cooperate with undemocratic governments to some extent and for some time.

The terror-sponsoring regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, and elsewhere can be knocked over, one by one, by various means, military, economic, and political. But knocking them over all at once would be difficult and would risk uniting them and winning them support from nations that otherwise might stay neutral in the war against terrorism.

This is simply the necessity of strategy. Nazi Germany lost World War II when it abandoned strategy and declared war on all its enemies at once. The United States and Britain won World War II by making alliance with a power, the Soviet Union, that, like Nazi Germany, was repugnant but less expansionist. Then the United States and Britain won the Cold War against the Soviet Union as well. For _as Winston Churchill, who almost single-handedly saved Western civilization, joked famously, if the Nazis invaded Hell, he would go into the House of Commons and make a favorable reference to the Devil.

That is, one evil at a time.

For even nations with undemocratic governments can be firewalls against worse things, things that threaten the international order and the United States, and while the United States is not obliged to right every wrong around the world, it is obliged to protect itself. Insisting on perfection in its allies won’t achieve that.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)