The Great Divide
Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 3:15:00 pm PDT
Victor Davis Hanson looks back on the fires of 9/11: The Great Divide.
America was aroused after 9/11 in the manner that a comatose patient suddenly jerks up to find that an entire world in his slumber has become unrecognizable . It really has. Think of it: Were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan friends — or rather regimes staffed by a corrupt elite who clung to power by bribe money and pardons to killers, deflecting their citizens' frustrations at their own failed kleptocracies onto us? What in the world has become of the UN, of our childhood memories of Halloween UNESCO buckets and UNICEF Christmas cards — when Iran, Iraq, and Libya arbitrate questions of legality and human rights and a Security Council serves as a surrogate for a nonexistent French fleet and phantom Gallic divisions?
Whom — or is it what? — does NATO protect, when we woke up to learn that Germany is up, Russia in, and us increasingly out? Has the EU made the world safer, and proved helpful in the Middle East, its members careful to limit arms sales to tyrants, to discourage terrorist cliques in Palestine, and to ensure murderous states abroad do not harm the innocent? Had Oslo become temporarily "derailed," or was it the inevitable result of pretending that autocracies would not do what they exist for? Was India or France the better friend? And why were those countries where we based thousands of troops the most likely to oppose our efforts in Iraq — whether Germans, Belgians, Greeks, Saudis, or Turks? — and their newspapers to vent virulent anti-Americanism?
