9/11 Memorial Sportsbook Special

Today’s date compels us to take a break from our regular programming to briefly explain why we think that we'd do best to vote for John McCain in November. Folks who prefer that we write only about ballgames might excuse us today by remembering that the ballgames were cancelled on 9/11/01.

First, we should note that we're sure the Democratic Party would serve us better than the Republicans on a number of issues, if those issues could be placed in a vacuum. For instance, we think that people should generally be allowed to eat or inhale whatever substance they might get their hands on; marry and/or have consensual sex with whichever adults they want, however they want; and should be free to decide whether they want to grow a fetus into a person. But the average American has a relatively easy time with eating, inhaling, marrying, and consensually sexing what they want. And whether or not abortions will ever be outlawed in this country (they won’t), the government will never be able to stop a woman from being able to kill a fetus that’s growing in her own body (it would be as impossible as outlawing suicide). This is relevant to 9/11/o1 because on that day it was made more clear to us than ever that sexing, inhaling, aborting, and the like are parochial concerns in comparison to decisions regarding America’s role in the world. We've since seen how our leaders' conceptions of that role directly impact our foreign policy and thus our susceptibility to another tragedy like the one that was visited upon us seven years ago today. Ideas about the nature of the responsibility that comes with America’s power are especially important this year, because the candidates' positions on what to do with this power are starkly different.

As Professor Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University writes in today’s Wall Street Journal,

"the Obama candidacy can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama's own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America's claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama's rise. . . . Mr. Obama proceeds from the notion of American guilt: We called up the furies, he believes. Our war on terror and our war in Iraq triggered more animus. He proposes to repair for that, and offers himself as a bridge to the world."

But there’s another way to look at America’s claims and burdens abroad, and this view is far more likely to be seen through by John McCain than by Barack Obama. The reasons behind this view are the ones that caused us, and likely Mr. McCain, to support the Iraq War from the beginning. What America is up against was aptly described in 2006 by Shelby Steele, who explains 9/11 as a result of conditions that made terrorism, or menace, the most viable means to power in the Middle East:

"When the world was clearly divided between the free West and the communist East, Third World countries could play the ingénue by offering their alignment to the most generous suitor. At the center of a market in alignment, they could extract financial support and enjoy a sense of importance.

"But after the Cold War, these countries suddenly became crones without appeal or leverage in the West. And it was out of this sense of invisibility, this feeling of having fallen out of history, that certain Middle Eastern countries found a way to play the ingénue once again. They would not compete with or seduce the West [indeed, such despotic regimes could never compete with the West]; they would menace it.

"Islamic extremism is an ideology of menace. It empowers those who, but for menace, would languish in the world's disregard. The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history. And they are greatly loved for this. If their achievements follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing. Worse than evil is invisibility.

"So, in the Middle East, America has gone to war not against Islam but against menace as a formula for power--menace as the force that brings the First World in tow to the Third, and that makes bargaining between the two inevitable. Whether the issue is an obsession with nuclear weapons or terrorism in London or assaults against Israel, menace is the power that draws the West backwards into engagement with otherwise forgotten parts of the world. Iran cannot produce a digital camera or a Ferrari but, through menace, it can affect the balance of power in the world. We in the West, and especially America, then, are at war with menace--the indulgence of evil for strategic advantage--because today it is the power that most compromises us.

While Mr. Obama could never say that this menace must not be confronted, he would like us to believe that the wars in the Middle East are entirely different -- that the War in Iraq is unrelated to 9/11 and the War in Afghanistan. But this can't be true. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein employed the same basic formula as those directly behind the 9/11 attacks -- menace as a means to power. Saddam's rule of Iraq -- his control over billions of dollars of oil revenue -- locked up a substantial portion of the resources of the entire Middle East which, in addition to Saddam’s frequent terrorism, torture, and murder of hundreds of thousands of his own people, had to contribute to the creation of an environment where menace was the only means to power -- an environment where a life (and death) of Islamic terrorism was a reasonable choice. And this is to say nothing of the sound evidence that Saddam intentionally and directly supported terrorism of the same kind that brought down the Twin Towers.

The seemingly obvious impact of Saddam's misappropriation of so much of the region's resources should be a strong enough connection between Saddam and Islamic terrorism to prove that Obama is dead wrong in his attempt to separate Iraq from 9/11, even aside from Saddam's more direct support for the 9/11 terrorists. But there other details that Obama would seemingly like us to forget; for instance, that, in addition to murdering hundreds of thousands of his own people, and terrorizing countless others, Saddam flagrantly violated UN resolutions, willfully obstructed the mission of UN weapons inspectors, invaded Kuwait and Iran, plotted to kill an American President, retained at least the infrastructure and desire for making WMD, bribed the leaders of France, Russia, and other countries with UN subsidies designated to feed his people, and harbored a grudge against the United States that could have played out in any of a number of disastrous ways. Further, Saddam's rule served as a powerful symbol througout the region -- one that made the formula of menace to power (and murder in the name of allah) an easier sell for anyone who was trying to sell it.

But, thanks to American leadership, menace as a means to power in the Middle East is not such an easy sell today, because now there's a real alternative. And the prospect of Iraq's vast natural resources returned to the hands of its people make it a fertile field from which democracy can take hold and spread. Yet Obama expects us to ignore the potential impact of this change -- the potential that the Middle East might become populated with governments that serve their people instead of at their peoples' expense. Instead, he wants us look through a microscope at (for?) Osama Bin Laden, as though that would change any of the fundamental conditions that make Islamic terrorism a viable choice for those who live in the Middle East. Free people generally do not commit suicide. The 9/11 attacks were celebrated not only in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, but also in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East. Whether or not he was directly responsible, Saddam celebrated 9/11 because he understood the connection between it and the source of his own power. How could we elect a leader who wants to convince us that this connection is insignificant, or does not exist?

Even if one insists, as Obama does, on denying that the Iraq War was an effective way to attack the global menace of Islamic terrorism, the lack of nuance and good faith demonstrated by Obama and his party in addressing, or failing to address, the issue is startling. Whether or not democracy eventually takes hold in the Middle East -- and we are seeing real progress there -- America’s strategy to rid the Middle East of menace as a viable means to power by planting the seed of democracy in Iraq must be seen as one of the greatest feats of social engineering that any nation has ever undertaken; one that will take years to play out. And it is playing out right now. Yet Mr. Obama incredibly claims about this complex issue that he was “right about Iraq from the beginning.” But, sadly, Obama has to say this, because he and his party's power structure made their choice long ago. This explains why Obama voted twice against a bill that granted immunity to telecom companies who were sued for allowing taps on overseas terrorists, and explains why he vehemently opposed the overwhelmingly successful troop surge in Iraq. Even if one is torn as to the nature of the threat presented to the free world by Islamic terrorism, and the appropriate way to combat that threat (and we’re not), the Democrats’ approach must also be taken into account. This is summed up well by Cleveland native Daniel Henninger in today's Wall Street Journal: “To vote for Sen. Obama is to also vote for a Democratic Party that consumed most of the political system's available oxygen for seven years fighting a U.S. president harder than they did the perpetrators of September 11.”

This scares us more than anything that we suppose the nuts on the right could pull off: The Pick: John McCain +120 over Barack Obama.

Thanks to Power Hour for the photos.