During the 60s and 70s one of the great divides between Liberals and Conservatives involved the question of criminal rights. Although there was broad agreement, and our system of jurisprudence explicitly supported the idea, that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man, great battles took place over where to draw an acceptable demarcation. The far left insisted that any, even the most minimal and non-contributory, infraction by the state was enough to invalidate the entire process. One (probably unintentional) effect of this approach, was to create barriers to the community's ability to defend itself against human predators.
One by-product of such an approach was seen in the 1980s when parts of New York City had become uninhabitable war zones and all of New York City had deteriorated into a terrorized silence through the application of such thinking. For those who are unaware, Rudy Giuliani was vilified specifically for attacking this dysfunctional approach to crime.
The exemplar of such a liberal approach to crime was and is the ACLU, which has taken more and more of an adversarial position against the government since 9/11 and has sought to extend their writ to the Non-American Civil Liberties Union.
Wittingly, or unwittingly, the effort to extend just such an approach to our conduct of the war on terror is part of a larger attempt to delegitimize the concept of the right to self-defense that is being increasingly incorporated into the thinking of the Western cultural elites; the prime targets of such delegitimization are America and our ally, Israel.
This is the subtext of John Kerry's warm reception in Davos.
Victor Davis Hansen describes Kerry's by now familiar remarks:
Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic candidate for president, is at it again with another rude gaffe, this one providing an unintended glimpse of the way many contemporary cosmopolitan elites characterize their homeland when abroad.
In the past, Kerry has said that our soldiers were "terrorizing" Iraqi civilians in their homes. He has also warned that uneducated Americans "get stuck in Iraq" -- a supposedly botched joke. Now, he assures an audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the United States is a "sort of international pariah."
Kerry, who appeared on stage in Davos this past weekend with former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, also proclaimed, "When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy."
Hansen attributes Kerry's remarks to intellectual laziness. It is easy to agree that John Kerry, a man whose linguistic reach far exceeds his intellectual grasp, is intellectually lazy, but there is more to this; his remarks suggesting we are guilty of all sorts of international crimes, are part of a larger trend.
Just days ago we were lectured by an LA Times columnist that our reaction to 9/11 was out of proportion to the attack. Last summer we heard repeatedly that the Israeli invasion in reaction to the overt aggression of their sworn enemies (kidnapping soldiers, firing rockets it civilians) was "disproportionate".
In a court of law, I can still claim self-defense if I am attacked and harm my attacker. This is no longer the law of the land in Great Britain, where a home owner who harms a burglar is subject to jail time for his "disproportionate" response to a home invasion. At the same time, the British police no longer bother to investigate property crimes. (Similar behavior was common in New York during the Mayoralty of Rudy's predecessor, I might add.)
Liberal members of our Supreme Court have stated publicly that they not only use the Constitution to support their opinions but rely on the state of legal argumentation in Europe as well.
The international community (and much of our own elite) clearly do not see the validity of America or Israel vigorously defending itself. Jacques Chirac, the left's favorite non-Communist leader, stated this as explicitly as possible yesterday, when in an unguarded moment he suggested that were Israel to absorb a nuclear attack from Iran it would not be terribly troubling. Captain Ed has it just about right:
Jacques Chirac stunned reporters with his nonchalance over the prospect of a nuclear Iran. One or two little bombs didn't make much of an impression on him, he said in an interview with the New York Times and a French newspaper:
President Jacques Chirac said this week that if Iran had one or two nuclear weapons, it would not pose a big danger, and that if Iran were to launch a nuclear weapon against a country like Israel, it would lead to the immediate destruction of Tehran.
The remarks, made in an interview on Monday with The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune and Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine, were vastly different from stated French policy and what Mr. Chirac has often said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Chirac summoned the same journalists back to Élysée Palace to retract many of his remarks.
Mr. Chirac said repeatedly during the second interview that he had spoken casually and quickly the day before because he believed he had been talking about Iran off the record.
....
This goes a long way towards explaining European hesitancy towards pressing Iran to stop its nuclear program. They seem stuck in the era of mutually-assured destruction, when both sides of the nuclear divide had rational actors at the helm. Neither side figured to win a nuclear exchange, and it only ended when the Reagan administration turned the issue into an economic war that defeated the Soviets without firing a shot. Unfortunately, Iran doesn't have rational actors attached to the fingers on the button; they have a millenial group of theocrats who believe that global chaos will bring the advent of their messiah, and they have paved a road for him to travel to Teheran.
Actually, this probably reflects the cynical belief (hope, really) that Tehran will drop the bomb on Israel or smuggle it into America rather than use their nuclear capacity to threaten Europe. It is of a piece with current efforts to suggest that the Bush administration is once again distorting the intelligence data to create the perception of a threat from Iran. If Iran is merely an interested neighbor to Iraq, then any American response would be illegal and disproportionate. It apparently needs constant repetition that the Mullahs in Iran, since the time of Ayatollah Khomeini have declared themselves to be at war with the Great Satan (America) and the Little Satan (Israel.) Rallies that are capped off with cries of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" along with overt acts of violence against Americans and Israelis, both by Iranian agents and proxies, would seem to be tell tales that Iran still considers themselves at war with the United States and Israel.
There has always been the polite fiction that "good guys" never draw first. The American way was, like Marshal Will Kane, to resort to violence only as a last resort, and to never make the first aggressive move. This has always been more of a fantasy than a reality and even for an individual it is dangerous to allow an opponent to take the first shot; for a nation living in a world with WMD that grow more horrific by the year, it can be suicidal.
In a war, there is no such thing as a disproportionate response. The efforts, not coordinated but certainly in parallel, to depict Islamic fascism as a nuisance rather than an existential threat to our way of life, in effect, are attempts to make America's aggressive response to the attacks of 9/11 into an illegitimate response. Only a suicidal person can stand to ignore a murderously hateful enemy simply because the hater doesn't yet have a gun. Only a suicidal nation could stand to ignore a murderously hateful enemy simply because they do not yet have a bomb.
Recent Comments