The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  It’s correct that, for hygiene purposes, they were shaved, which was “culturally inappropriate.” But then, if the U.S. wanted to be culturally appropriate, they’d herd ’em onto a soccer pitch and stone ’em to death as half-time entertainment. As to whether or not they are prisoners of war, there is a legitimate difference of opinion on their status: you can’t ask them for name, rank, and serial number, because the last two they lack and, if Richard Reid is anything to go by, they keep a handy stack of spare monikers. This is new territory. But surely the Fleet Street whingers must know, if only from the testimony of their fellow Britons among the inmates, that there is no “torture” (The Mail on Sunday), not even by the weather.

  In fairness, instead of coasting on non-existent diseases and wild guesses at the weather, the always elegant Matthew Parris at least attempted to expand Guantanamo into a general thesis. “We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject,” he wrote in The Times. “America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat.”

  This caused endless amusement over here. As the Internet wag Steven den Beste commented, “By George, I think he’s got it!”

  “America has simple gods and likes to keep her satan simple, too,” Mr. Parris continued. “In Salem it was once witches. In Senator Joe McCarthy’s heyday it was Commies. Now it is al-Qa’eda.”

  Just for the record, the Salem witch trials were conducted not by citizens of the United States but by British subjects. As for Senator McCarthy’s heyday, well, there were a lot of Commies around: in short order, they’d seized half of Europe, neutered much of what was left, and had become the dominant influence on the Third World’s political class. Suppose America had followed the rest of the west and elected a détente sophisticate like Helmut Schmidt or Pierre Trudeau, whose first act upon retirement from office was to take his young sons to see Siberia because “that was where the future was being made”—in 1984! The world would be very different today, and not to my liking. The west won’t work if every country’s Canada and every leader’s Trudeau. The only thing that enables Belgium to be Belgium and Norway to be Norway and Britain to be Britain is the fact that America’s America—for all the reasons my Spectator colleagues deplore.

  1Michael Fish is a longtime British telly weatherman, famous for his forecast of October 15, 1987: “A woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way,” he chortled. “Don’t worry, there isn’t!” A couple of hours later, the worst storm in three centuries hit southern England and killed nineteen people.

  THE LIMITS

  National Review, December 30, 2008

  MY PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY of the Bush years is simple enough:

  For the first eight months, I did shtick. We all did. In April of 2001, he went to Quebec for the Summit of the Americas and was greeted by the then Canadian Prime Minister, whose name escapes me, as I trust it does you. “Bienvenue,” he said to Dubya. “That means ‘Welcome.’” Ha-ha. What fun we had. There were the usual riots, of course, led by that French farmer famous for destroying his local McDonald’s on the grounds that “the free market is violence.” He was accompanied by various weekending trustafarians who’d motored up from the Ivy League, plus large numbers of Canadian students who’d had their exams postponed and were given three hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers’ money in order to enable them to get to Quebec City and smash the place up. I forget what the Summit was about, although I had plenty of one-on-one face-time with lonely Latin American foreign ministers who couldn’t find anyone else to talk to, and I may even have filed a couple of widely unread thumbsuckers on the lines of: “The Guatemalan Deputy Trade Minister gets it. Why don’t we?” In the end, the Summit wasn’t really “about” anything. Not a lot was in those days.

  Then came a Tuesday morning in September. And “Steyn butched up,” as a Canadian columnist recently put it. There was a lot of that about. Even mild-mannered coves like the State Department’s Richard Armitage were getting General Musharraf on the phone and threatening to bomb his country back to the Stone Age. The Taliban fell, and Mullah Omar scuttled out of town, hitching up his skirts and pausing only to put a false beard over his real beard, with no time to pack even the Rod Stewart cassettes subsequently found in the compound of the man who famously banned music throughout the land. (The old “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Rod, not the namby-pamby Rod Stewart Slays the Great American Songbook stuff.) When the troops got to Tora Bora, they discovered our enemies really did live in caves. And not the Bond-villain underground lairs the CNN graphics department mocked up—vast inverted Trump Towers burrowing deep into the earth with Osama stroking a Persian as he plotted world domination from the upside-down penthouse in Sub-Basement Level 43—but just regular caves. As in a smelly hole in the ground with a carelessly demarcated communal latrine at the back.

  And then, with the Taliban gone and the world’s slowest “rush to war” with Iraq just getting underway, I made the mistake of going to Europe to visit the famous banlieues of Paris and other Continental Muslim neighborhoods. And at that point I started to get the queasy feeling the bewildered investigator does when he’s standing in the strange indentation at the edge of town and, just as he works out it’s a giant left-foot print, he glances up to see Godzilla’s right foot totaling his Honda Civic. I began to see that it’s not really about angry young men in caves in the Hindu Kush; it’s not even about angry young men in the fast growing Muslim populations of the west—although that’s certainly part of the seven-eighths of the iceberg bobbing just below the surface of 9/11. But the bulk of that iceberg is the profound and perhaps fatal weakness of the civilization that built the modern world. We’re witnessing the early stages of what the United Nations Population Division calls a “global upheaval” that’s “without parallel in human history.” Demographically and psychologically, Europeans have chosen to commit societal suicide, and their principal heir and beneficiary will be Islam.

  And once I’d stumbled on that even the thought of Mullah Omar prancing round the room to Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs” couldn’t cheer me up.

  When I go hither and yon doing my apocalyptic vaudeville, I’m often asked a variant of the following: If what you say is true—that Islam is likely, if only by default, to take over much of the west in a generation or two—why would it be so dumb as to jump the gun on 9/11? After all, before that Tuesday morning, few of us gave any thought to the subject.

  The short answer is that Islam is not monolithic, and that it’s perfectly understandable for Osama bin Laden to play bad cop to the western Muslim lobby groups’ good cop, granted that they share the same aim: the wish to annex the crusader lands to the House of Islam.

  The longer answer is that, even if 9/11 was a strictly unnecessary provocation, it was still a useful revelation of the limits of the Great Satan’s resolve. Or to look at it another way: A couple of years back, over in The Corner at National Review Online, some of the more bloodthirsty lads were demanding to know why Bush didn’t do this and why Bush didn’t do that. I forget what it was now—knock off Assad, freeze Saudi bank accounts, whatever. John Podhoretz responded that we were missing the point, which was this: Bush was as good as it was going to get.

  On some or other “Whither conservatism?” panel a few years back, I remarked of George W. Bush that it requires a perverse genius to get damned day in day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you’re Tony Blair with a ranch. I’ll stand by that. Yet nevertheless: Bush was as good as it was going to get.

  The electors have made a bet that we can return to that happy capering playground at the Summit of the Americas, where all the great questions have been settled and indulgent governments can subsidize their own anarchists. If 9/11 ultimately revealed America’s self-imposed constraints, November 4 is already understood as a comprehensive repudiation even of that qualified resolve. Like I said: for America’s enemies, that’s useful to know.

  TOO BIG TO WIN

&nbs
p; National Review, June 6, 2011

  WHY CAN’T AMERICA win wars? It’s been two-thirds of a century since we saw (as President Obama vividly put it) “Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” And, if that’s not quite how you remember it, forget the formal guest list, forget the long-form surrender certificate, and try to think of “winning” in a more basic sense.

  The United States is currently fighting, to one degree or another, three wars. Iraq—the quagmire, the “bad” war, the invasion that launched a thousand western anti-war demonstrations and official inquiries and anti-Bush plays and movies—is going least badly. For now. And making allowances for the fact that the principal geostrategic legacy of our genteel protectorate is that an avowed American enemy, Iran, was able vastly to increase its influence over the country on our dime.

  Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. Does being murdered by the soldiers and policemen you’ve spent years training even count as a “combat” death?

  Perhaps that’s why the U.S. media disdain to cover these killings: In April, at a meeting between Afghan border police and their U.S. trainers, an Afghan cop killed two American soldiers. Oh, well, wild country, once you get up near that Turkmen border. A few weeks later, back in Kabul, an Afghan military pilot killed eight American soldiers and a civilian contractor. On May 13 a NATO “mentoring team” sat down to lunch with Afghan police in Helmand when one of their protégés opened fire and killed two of them. “The actions of this individual do not reflect the overall actions of our Afghan partners,” said Major General James B. Laster of the U.S. Marine Corps. “We remain committed to our partners and to our mission here.”

  Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

  According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small—Somalia, Gulf War I, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have. . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck.

  Inconclusive interventionism has consequences. Korea led to Norks with nukes. The downed helicopters in the Iranian desert led to mullahs with nukes. Gulf War I led to Gulf War II. Somalia led to 9/11. Vietnam led to everything, in the sense that its trauma penetrated so deep into the American psyche that it corroded the ability to think clearly about war as a tool of national purpose.

  For half a century, the Cold War provided a kind of cover. At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. In the military sphere, this meant NATO. If the rap against the UN Security Council is that it’s the World War II victory parade preserved in aspic, NATO is the rubble of post-war Europe preserved as a situation room. In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own security. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries.

  In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren’t Super and don’t like each other terribly much. At the beginning of the Afghan campaign, Washington invested huge amounts of diplomatic effort trying to rouse its allies into the merest gestures of war-making: The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s twenty-six members agreed to commit an extra six hundred troops and three helicopters. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Half a decade of quagmire later, Washington was investing even larger amounts of diplomatic effort failing to rouse its allies into the most perfunctory gestures of non-combat pantywaist transnationalism: We know that, under ever more refined rules of engagement, certain allies won’t go out at night, or in snow, or in provinces where there’s fighting going on, so by the 2010 NATO confab, Robert Gates was reduced to complaining that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. Supposedly forty-six nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at ten “trainers” per country. Imagine if the energy expended in these ridiculous (and in some cases profoundly damaging) transnational fig leaves had been directed into more quaintly conventional channels—like, say, identifying America’s national interest and pursuing it.

  The Cold War casts other shadows. In Korea, the U.S. forbore even to cut its enemy’s Chinese supply lines. You can’t win that way. But in the nuclear age, all-out war—war with real nations, with serious militaries—was too terrible to contemplate, so even in proxy squabbles in Third World backwaters the overriding concern was to tamp things down, even at the price of victory. And, by the time the Cold War ended, such thinking had become ingrained. A U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. Were it not for the brave passengers of Flight 93 and the vagaries of the Oval Office social calendar, the fourth plane on 9/11 might have succeeded in hitting the White House, decapitating the regime, leaving a smoking ruin in the heart of the capital, and delivering the republic unto a Robert C. Byrd Administration or some other whimsy of presidential succession. Yet, in allowing his toxic backwater to be used as the launch pad for the deadliest foreign assault on the U.S. mainland in two centuries, Mullah Omar either discounted the possibility of total devastating destruction against his country, or didn’t care.

  If it was the former, he was surely right. After the Battle of Omdurman, Hilaire Belloc offered a pithy summation of technological advantage:

  Whatever happens

  We have got

  The Maxim gun

  And they have not.

  But suppose they know you’ll never use the Maxim gun? At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdle
d into Massively Applied Desultoriness.

  Clearly, if one nation is responsible for near half the world’s military budget, a lot of others aren’t pulling their weight. The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

  Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? The geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he’s lost all sense of national interest. Readers will be wearily familiar with the tendency of long-established pop-culture icons to go all transnational on us: Only the other week Superman took to the podium of the United Nations to renounce his U.S. citizenship on the grounds that “truth, justice, and the American way” no longer does it for him. Good ol’ GI Joe is now a Brussels-based multilateral acronym—the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity.1 I believe they’re running the Libyan operation.

  An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims?