Too Late?
by Joseph Sobran
My, my. Tempers after the 9/11 attack are high, and I’m getting a lot of angry mail and e-mail complaining about my negative and unpatriotic attitude. Some of the more temperate messages say that while my analysis may be correct, as far as it goes, I don’t offer useful "solutions" for our present difficulty.
My analysis is the same one I’ve offered for years, except that it may be too late to take my advice. I’ve said our government’s foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, was asking for trouble. Until a month ago, this was ignored. Now that I turn out to have been quite right, some people want me to explain how to get ourselves out of trouble.
I really wish I knew. My point was that it’s a lot easier to avoid stepping into an abyss than to climb out of it. It’s a lot easier to avoid making enemies than to defend yourself when they want to kill you.
Let me put it another way. Suppose I warn you that if you smoke, you may get cancer. You go ahead and smoke; and sure enough, you get cancer. Then you come to me and say, "Okay, you’re so smart – what’s the cure for cancer?" I can only answer: "I have no idea. If I knew of a cure, I wouldn’t have had to warn you, would I? I’d have told you to go ahead and smoke, since if you got cancer I could cure you."
The real irony of the situation is that Osama bin Laden is essentially demanding that we live by our own original principles. Not that he knows or cares a whit for constitutional government, the counsel of the Founding Fathers, and suchlike infidel malarkey; but his demand for American withdrawal from the Middle East would never have been necessary if we had retained the modest "republican form of government" that was bequeathed to us. Instead the United States has become a global empire.
And of course people like me are "anti-American" for preferring the old constitutional republic we’ve abandoned. And now, in order to defeat bin Laden, we are moving, and moving rapidly, even further away from a limited, decentralized, constitutional system. By executive order, President Bush has created a second Department of Defense – called the Office of Homeland Security – to do what the first Department of Defense was supposed to do, but has failed to do. And in today’s parlance, a "patriot" is an American who favors this unconstitutional expansion of government power.
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