House of Eratosthenes

Newsmax is reporting that President Bush has made some recent comments reflecting not too well on the previous administration’s handling of terrorism. The article notes the comments were “quotes picked up by United Press International” but I can’t find them.

President Bush fired back at ex-president Clinton on Thursday, saying the weak U.S. response to terrorist attacks that took place mostly during the Clinton administration encouraged al Qaida to launch the 9/11 attacks.

“The terrorists saw our response to the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings in the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole,” Bush noted, after getting an update on the war on terror at the Pentagon.

“The terrorists concluded that we lacked the courage and character to defend ourselves and so they attacked us,” the president added.

This is really just stating the obvious, and it’s not the first time the President has spent some of that closely-guarded political capital to attack his predecessor. Eleven months ago, he made an appearance in New Jersey and made some comments about Homeland Security on October 18.

During the decade of the 1990s, our times often seemed peaceful on the surface. Yet, beneath that surface were currents of danger. Terrorists were training and planning in distant camps. In 1993, terrorists made their first attack on the World Trade Center. In 1998, terrorists bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. And then came the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, which cost the lives of 17 American sailors. In this period, America’s response to terrorism was generally piecemeal and symbolic. The terrorists concluded this was a sign of weakness, and their plans became more ambitions [sic], and their attacks became more deadly.

Vice President Cheney repeated the talking point while visiting nine hundred graduating cadets at an Air Force academy in Colorado Springs this summer. Almost word-for-word.

“During the ’80s and ’90s, as terror networks began to wage attacks against Americans, there was a tendency to treat those attacks as isolated incidents,” he said. “And those acts were answered, if at all, on an ad hoc basis with subpoenas, criminal indictments and the occasional cruise missile. As time passed, the terrorists concluded that they could hit America with very little consequence.”

It’s clear the White House has been polishing, and synchronizing on, this talking-point. Now, talking points are undignified by nature. Just because something’s been published or disseminated as a talking point, doesn’t make it correct. But it doesn’t make it wrong, either.

Charles Krauthammer has been writing about this for quite some time. In one of my favorite columns, “Bracing for the Apocalypse” published February 13, 2003 on the Townhall.com web site, he spells it out in terms everyone can understand.

The domestic terror alert jumps to 9/11 levels. Heathrow Airport is ringed by tanks. Duct tape and plastic sheeting disappear from Washington store shelves. Osama resurfaces. North Korea reopens its plutonium processing plant and threatens pre-emptive attack. The Second Gulf War is about to begin. This is not the Apocalypse. But it is excellent preparation for it.

You don’t get to a place like this overnight. It takes at least, oh, a decade. We are now paying the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. During that decade, every major challenge to America was deferred. The chief aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road.

This is exceptionally dangerous speech. Not only does it make Clinton look bad, but there is at least a grain of truth to it.

It’s even more dangerous than that, because it makes a certain amount of sense. We’ve been struggling to understand “what makes the terrorists so mad at us” for four years now, trying to figure out what language they speak. The answer to that has been in front of our faces the whole time. Terrorists understand the language of horse heads left in beds. It’s just that simple. Bill slaps Bob in the face, and what happens next is a meter-reading of the strength of Bob. If nothing is done, Bob is weak. If Bob slaps Bill in the face, Bob is strong. If Bill’s face is bashed in repeatedly with a fire extinguisher until its skull loses all structural integrity, the crunching of his sinus cavity fills the room, and his brains see the light of day, why, then Bob is The Man. Do not fuck with Bob.

The wise, enlightened, oh-so-much-smarter-than-me Blue Staters tell me I’m demonstrating my stupidity by “staying the course”. They tell me no benefits have been forthcoming in our pursuit, thus far, of this “course.” We are now four years into speaking the language of horse heads, and the benefits have far surpassed whatever we saw during all those years of speaking the language of diplomacy and political correctness. Back in those days, “benefits” were kind of like what we see in North Korea today: “So and so says he’s going to be good. We must believe him. We have no choice.” The benefits of goo-goo, there-there, Jean-Luc Picard foreign policy never once rose above that.

Leftists protest that Saddam Hussein, that guy “we all agree was a bad guy,” and his half-and-half, kind-of-complied, kind-of-didn’t adherence to the United Nations mandate to disarm, is evidence that diplomacy worked. Except they won’t stick their neck out and come out & say so…unless it’s an anonymous lefty guy on a thread or a blog somewhere. Meanwhile, the stronger language has proven Iraq is clean. It has firmly established this. That’s what you need for national security; you turn unknowns into knowns. Mission accomplished. It has disarmed Libya. That’s after four years of speaking horse-head, versus twenty years of speaking diplomacy, we-abhore-your-actions-yet-again, and please-please-oh-pretty-please. The positive results of which were — and I don’t see ANYONE with a good name & reputation to defend, sticking their neck out and contradicting this — zip, zero, nada, zilch, butkus.

So when all’s said and done, I guess I really am pretty stupid. Not only do the results netted from talking-horse-head look superior from where I sit, but they also seem to look superior to the bad guys. And isn’t that what the process of communication is all about?

And the peaceniks say we should go back to the days of “answer[ing], if at all, on an ad hoc basis with subpoenas, criminal indictments and the occasional cruise missile.” Because when we bash skulls, people don’t feel good about us.

But isn’t that the point of leaving a message in that language?

The language of horse heads is not a panacea for everything. It is just one tool in the chest of the well-equipped foreign policy mechanic. And it is to be used sparingly, because when you use it successfully, the price to be paid is that your popularity goes down. If & when the time has arrived for this tool to be used, that diminished popularity is a sign of success, not of failure. If I were Vito Corleone, and I told a bandleader his signature or his brains were going to be on a contract on a Monday, and found I was still Mister Nice Guy, Life of the Party, Mister Popular, by Friday — that would be wrong. I’d be seriously brushing up on my threatening-skills.

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Horse HeadsFriday, September 23rd, 2005

Horse Heads
Friday, September 23rd, 2005