It Took This?

Should the United Arab Emirates really receive the tremendous credit that President George W. Bush insists on bestowing upon them simply because they have increased their assistance to us, and decreased same for the Islamists, since the latter slaughtered nearly 3,000 of our innocent citizenry in 2001? Osama bin Laden was decidedly active in the anti-American and anti-Civilization business for a full fifteen years prior to this attack, committing many other acts of violence against us and others in the run-up to the Big One. He finally got around to officially declaring war on the United States in early 1996, but he was never shy nor retiring about his intentions or his means. This is the very same bin Laden of and with whom the Emirates portion of the United Arab Emirates were quite fond and quite familiar right up to the point where he orchestrated and executed the September 11th murders.

Apparently, the Emirates have some sort of American carnage tolerance threshold, somewhere above the hundreds killed in the first World Trade Center assault, the north African embassy bombings and the off Yemen motor-by hit on the U.S.S. Cole, but below the nearly three chiliad killed in New York, Washington, D.C, and Pennsylvania at the outset of the new millennium. That bin Laden was the font of all of this and more was certainly no worldwide conspiratorial secret; in fact it was made into a worldwide conspiratorial proclamation by the Man with the demented Plan. Regardless, we knew it, and so too did the Caterpillar operating port sheiks of the U.A.E. and our other newlyweds in Pakistan and elsewhere. It is more than a might difficult to purchase their being with us now, when they were where they were then. We are not saying (although we are strongly intimating) that they should have actively opposed the barbarians in their gates, but they should have at least drawn the line somewhere before laundering Islamofascist millions (as done by the U.A.E.) or allowing the cutthroats in question to operate their training camps within their all too friendly confines (as done in and by Pakistan and others). To have simply remained neutral would have been more than sufficient under the circumstances.

Uncoalesced, Or Two People Who Have Nothing to Do With Christmas

Unfortunately, the United States at the time was sending, shall we say, mixed messages of word and deed as to just what to do. The global environment cultivated by the Clinton Administration, which George Will so aptly described as our "eight year hiatus from history", was one of assuming the ostrich cranial position on all things terror. It was Clinton's submission to every action and on every front that first prompted, and then promulgated, the rise of Al Qaeda and myriad other new or previously unhinged Jihadist groups to the multi-tentacled interwoven network with which we are currently attempting to deal. The High-Chair President's unamalgamated message of hear and see no evil, however, allowed many of our new friends, in the old days, to speak a great deal of malevolence, in conjunction with the overt terrorists, all around the world. From north Africa through Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to Israel through Palestine, Egypt, Iran and Iraq, to Lebanon through Syria and (again) Iran, to Russia through Chechnya and the Southern Tier, to India through (again) Pakistan (via Kashmir), to Indonesia and eastern Europe, this virulent strain of Islam that once existed merely in fragmented shards around the globe proliferated, morphed and metastasized into a worldwide, loosely affiliated search for Caliphatic oblivion.

Not Exactly an Air National Guard Memorandum

The emu bean hole belief existed, and to a large extent still does despite rife evidence to the contrary, that the different factions of Islamic zealotry and secularism in their caballic midst would proscribe tandem tilting at Infidel windmills. But we have come to find that Saddam Hussein's telluric Ba'athist regime was allowing Al Qaeda training camps to operate in Iraq's northern regions, and was cutting $25,000 checks to the families of hyper-religious Palestinian suicide bombers. Syria's Bashir Al-Assad, presiding over his own terrenial Ba'athist thugocracy, to this day funds and deploys, in conjunction with the Armageddon-in-our-lifetime Mullahs of Iran, the fundamentalist Sh'ia terrorist group Hezbollah to wreak havoc in lorded-over Lebanon and thereby gain border access to the hated Israel, and took secretive possession of Hussein's myriad chemical and biological weapons just prior to our 2002 invasion. Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf, leader of a military dictatorship despised by the Islamists within, and members of the Saudi royal family, who are detested by the likes of Al Qaeda and others for their alleged capitulation to the Great Satan (that would, again, be us), have nevertheless actively assisted those who loathe them, providing them either safe haven or copious dollars or both. As the saying goes, when one endeavors to feed the alligator, one had better utilize a long-handled spoon.

Fresh From the Other Side

These newly minted allies in the War on Terror have, we fear, too far to come from where they were to be completely trusted now. This is applicable to the Media scandal screed of the day (the rightly objected to ports ownership transfer) and a whole host of other areas. Johnny-Come-Lately status is fine when arriving tardy at the "I Like The Sopranos" party (a suarez at which we have yet to make an appearance), but not when it comes to differentiating between those who murder innocents and those who do not. To choose at the first to actively assist the former, and to stop only when the bigger, badder latter insists that you do so, does not inspire confidence in your novel endeavors toward pacification and peace. This is not to say that we should not accept their assistance; it is to say that we should do so with no pretensions whatsoever as to its greater meaning. They are only now on our side because we are bigger and badder, and have finally begun to act as if self-preservation is something in which we might be interested.

Use It Or Lose It

The bully pulpit is only successful when manned by the proper occupant, else it is left to the world's peonic goons of far inferior morality. We should ride these allied Arabic carts until the wheels fall off (and on many of them, they will), and no further, and we should most certainly not overextend ourselves in gratuitous posturing to those who should have been on the side of Civilization all along, and who have only just now decided to resist the swell towards worldwide murderous and barbaristic amnesty.