My local network affiliates chose to ignore or quickly cut away from the president's major speech this morning. What I saw was OK but not great. I missed some of the highlights, though, and the transcript reveals that Bush said some of what must be said again and again:
"[T]hese extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace and stand in the way of their ambitions. ...
"Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter century: They hit us and expect us to run.
"They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993, only this time on a larger scale with greater consequences.
"[T]he militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments."
Of course, with me, he's preaching to the choir. It is the left that needs to see these truths, and they refuse. That is why this piece by Sasha Abramsky, whose work has appeared in such far-left journals as Mother Jones and the Nation, was so heartening. Abramsky was in his native England shortly after the terrorist bombings:
"Yet reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed `left' in the London papers in the aftermath of the bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the Cold War have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that `twilight conflict.' While on the one hand I agreed with their well-reasoned arguments pointing to a certain degree of western culpability for spawning groups like al-Qaeda, on the other hand I was saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time.
"British journalists Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali, along with British MP George Galloway, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the United States for bringing the attacks upon themselves. While being careful to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations on the same theme: get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points east, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind."
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