American are wimps

Mark Steyn:

It's in the broader political engagement in Iraq that the coalition needs to metaphorically fix bayonets and go hand-to-hand with its opponents. The Sunni big shots and Sadr militias, the Baathist dead-enders and foreign terrorists, the freaks and losers have made a bet: that the infidels could handle the long-range antiseptic bombing but don't have the stomach for the messy mano-a-mano stuff that follows.

And they have a point. From Baghdad press conferences to Colin Powell, too much of the tone is half-hearted and implicitly apologetic: On bad days, the president himself is beginning to sound like an unmanned drone. The coalition needs to regain the offensive, to demonstrate not just weary stoicism but fierce will -- the same will those Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders showed. Bush has to be bold and imaginative, and to end the impression that he, his administration and America itself are mere hostages to events.

I'm all for staying around while the Iraqis figure out how to make a democracy, but not for reverting to the "Kick Me" style of foreign policy that emboldened bin Laden.

He's right. It was the horrifying TV footage from Vietnam and the way the Tet Offensive was presented as a catastrophic setback to the folks back home that won the war for the North Vietnamese. A lot of WWII vets had seen a lot worse, but their wives and kids hadn't, and the government thought that it could fight a sort of war without going into enemy territory, without taking and holding ground, and with an aim of making the North give up its designs on the South without punishing it for them. We allowed the Soviets and Chinese to supply the North by refusing to mine Haiphong harbor or bomb Hanoi or the supply routes through Cambodia. The press portrayed the North and the Viet Cong as unbeatable, because we weren't beating them with our "humane" model of war, which was just stacking up American and many more Vietnamese dead without any point.

A lot of Americans either concluded back then that all war is evil and that we should never participate in one again, or they've grown up being told that. In fact, war is probably less horrible today when waged by the West that it has ever been, because of the use of pinpoint-accurate bombs, but the TV camera doesn't show it. When the bombing in Baghdad started in March of 2003, most of the city was unaffected, but you'd have thought from the video and commentary coming back that it was another Dresden. Even now, in a nation of 25 million, most normal civil life goes on unhindered.

That's progress, but it's also a problem. The Iraqi people haven't been reduced to scrounging for potato peels in American camp dumps, and had their cities reduced to rubble the way the Germans and Japanese were. Most of the damage to their power grid and oil industry were inflicted by the outgoing regime, which also released thousands of violent criminals. Because we followed up the destruction of Europe and Japan with food and supplies and the Marshall Plan, it was clear to the people that it was their own governments which had brought calamity on them and that we didn't hate them. The Iraqis probably already know that Saddam was not their big brother, but we can't count on that earning us any good will.

War is still bloody and there are still heartrending shots available for TV cameras of mourners wailing and wounded children. What we have to remember is that Arabs murdered the crews of three airliners and flew them with their passengers, including women and children into buildings with upwards of 20,000 people. It's not a question of whether Saddam was involved in 9/11. We need to bring it home to all Arabs that Fascism, Taliban and terror will not bring about the triumph of Islam over the West. There may be one billion Muslims in the world, but there are a third of a billion in the Coalition countries, and we are perfectly capable of killing enemies in large multiples of our losses.

I think that Sistani and most others know that. Muqtada al-Sadr may be figuring out that his Iranian backers can't help him, even if he can't quite bring himself to submit, because there's an arrest warrant out for him on a charge of murder. But the Iraqis are only a part of the audience for our little play. There are the Palestinians, the Egyptians and everywhere there are Arabs being given Jenin while their leaders are living in Hollywood. We want those people to see that the military and terrorist route is a dead end, but that we are amenable to helping them build something better.

We won't do that by dithering and indecision. We want this to resemble Bambi v. Godzilla. Our enemies think they know us because they watch a lot of our TV. We need to disabuse them of the notion that they can beat us with P.R. That means we, the People, must suck it up and resolve to ride this horse 'til it's broke, whether we are uncomfortable with the idea of children firing AK-47s at our soldiers or the enemy using women and children as shields. We must acknowledge that war is nasty, as General Sherman did, and either decide that we will not prolong it with half-measures or tying the hands of our soldiers, or that it's not worth it and hunkering down for the next 9/11 under President Kerry.

Think about this:

Muslims are angrily at war with Buddhists in East Asia. Muslims are at enraged with Animists in Africa. Of course, none of this approaches the sheer hatred that Muslims bear towards Hindus in the South Asia peninsula. And this foaming hatred blanches compared to the white-hot fury Muslims feel to the Christian American Crusaders. And this fury is but a candle to the incandescent, boiling, supernova of murder they feel toward the Jews.

Does anyone beside me detect a pattern here?