UNNECESSARY WARS AND THE NECESSARY NATIONS:

Unnecessary Wars (Midge Decter, June 8, 2002, Hillsdale College)

We are at war. Faced with those terrible Churchillian alternatives, shame or war, the President chose national honor. And those who said you cannot go to war in Afghanistan - it is too hard; the terrain there is impossible; the winter there is impossible; look what happened to the Russians - like those who made equivalently specious arguments about the Nazis, argued in vain. To be sure, we had the advantage--strange word--that Churchill and his circle did not have in the mid-30s: that of tasting the enemy's fire and brimstone on our own soil, in one of our own great cities. And at least one result is that ordinary Afghanis, the centuries-long victims of what the imperial European powers used to refer to as "The Great Game," and latterly victims at the hands of their own terror-driven government, are beginning to smile. They are beginning to smile, to listen to music, to rebuild their houses and to dream of governing themselves. Perhaps they will even accomplish this last. And who but the American Army could have--and even more important, who but the American army would have--made this possible?

This seems a pertinent question. We may decide not to help the countries of the Middle East free themselves and they may prove unableto maintain freedom even should we win them an opportunity at it, but if we don't help (and by "we", I mean Britain, Australia, America, etc.), who will? It's all well and good to say the people have to do it themselves, but we know from the Cold War--when more democratically "advanced" peoples proved unable to win their freedom, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and elsewhere--that this is no easy task.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2002 6:23 PM