Posted by
JAMES T. KANE on Monday, December 08, 2008 7:11:57 PM
Today's Blog by Jimmy Kane
The New York Times featured an Op-Ed piece today by author Peter French. Mr. French has a current best selling biography in bookstrores. I guess that is why he has the opportunity to write an op-ed piece for the Times. If you read the piece you will remember his conclusion: "America's so-called war on terror has been in many respect, a catsastrophe." Note that he did not say that America's efforts had "come up short," or that the United States had not achiveed all of its goals. The word he selected was "catasastrophe."
Now Mr. French is a professional writer. He knows the meaning of words. According to Dictionary.com, in this context "catasastrophe" means "a sudden and widespread disaster: the catastrophe of war", or "a final event or condlusion, usually an unfortunate one; a disastrous end: the great catastrophe at Appomattox. Of course, since 9/11 there has not been one, not one, Islamic terrorist attack in America. Yet Mr. French sees a catastrophe with what he refers to as the "so-called War on Terror." As I read our Constitution, the first duty of our Federal Government is to provide for the national defence of our country. The Constitution does not call for the United States to insure international tranquility (only domestic tranquility.) The War on Terror has protected Americans from our Islamist enimies; yet that war is "in many respects a catastrophe" according to the learned Mr. French.
Mr. French also says that: "It does the people of Pakistan no favors for Washington to allow their (Pakistan's) leaders to continue with the strategy of perpetual diversion, asking India to be patient while denying the true nature of the immediate terrorist threat.” So, according to Mr. French, the government of the United States allows Pakistan to follow its own policies. If he were not serious, this last statement would be laughable since the number one policy initiative of the United States has been and continues to be, to change Pakistani policies in order to defeat the terrorists. So faced with the difficult facts that nobody can change the way the Islamists think, and that Pakistan is a divided country, at the same time our ally and our enemy, Mr. French has decided the solution to the deadly Islamist/Pakistan/Terrorist connection is for the United States to threaten the pro-American, electrd government of Pakistan rather than to support the elected government in that government's efforts to gain suprimocy over the pro-Islamist Pakistani Secret Service.
Why do I think that Mr. French believes that the world is not right with the US in the top seat? If the world were right, would not the British call the shots in India and Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and Palestine etc. etc.? Is Mr. French no different than the French people who thank that they should be the most powerful in the world because they have a superior culture to that of the United States? Or is he different from the Islamists, who believe that they should be the most powerful because God gave the world to Islam?
Do you think that Mr. French sees the irony in declaring in the same piece a) that the war waged by the US against the Islamists is a catatrospie and b) that the best hope for peace and justice for the Indian victims of terrorism is for the US to threaton (presumably by diplomatic and military means) the government of Pakistan and by implication the governments of the other countries that encourage or support terrorist violence against innocents? What has the United States been fighting for in Afganistan and Iraq if not fulfilling a committment to oppose governments that encorged and supported terrorism? (Remember Saddam giving $25k to the family of each suicide bomber?)