Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  The voters sense it. The Republicans took a whipping in the 1989 elections. Their social agenda (most prominently, abortion) proved unenactable. And that was the fallback for a party whose economic and foreign policy agenda has already been enacted.

  There is another turn ahead. Democrats will do everything in their power to blow it, but one new idea and the ’90s belongs to them.

  The Washington Post, November 24, 1989

  THE ’90S: SERENITY

  What does it mean when the major item in the president’s end-of-year news conference is a puppy-naming? It means we should be wistful at the passing of 1997. We may never see another year like it. When a chocolate Lab leads the news, we know times are good.

  How good? Look at the numbers. Unemployment is at its lowest in two decades. Inflation hovers at 2%, early 1960s numbers. That is not supposed to happen. We have been bred on the axiom that unemployment and inflation are mutually contradictory, that when one form of social misery declines, the other must rise. Well, not anymore.

  The economy is growing at more than 3%. Hourly wages are up 4%. Factories are producing at that perfect knife-edge of near capacity, but not quite so much as to create industrial bottlenecks (and thus shortages and inflation).

  Even more amazing are the indices of social pathology, which we once assumed must inexorably get worse. They have reversed course. Crime is down, dramatically. Rape, for example, is down 45% since 1993; murder about 30%. In New York City, the crime rate has not been this low in 30 years. The unlivable has become livable again.

  Welfare rolls are down, too. After just 12 months of welfare reform (August 1996–July 1997), one in every six welfare recipients has gone off the dole. That is almost 2 million people. In places with aggressive anti-welfare programs such as Wisconsin, rolls have been cut by a third. Even such recalcitrant indices as abortion are down.

  Nor are the good times just economic and social. Geopolitically, we are enjoying the fruits of victory in the Cold War. At no time in the past 500 years has the gap in power between the No. 1 nation and its nearest rival been as great as it is today. While the critics had conceded America’s military and cultural hegemony—a carrier in every ocean, a Big Mac in every pot—they had long clung to the idea of American economic decline.

  And look what happened. We are now riding a productivity and growth spurt that has left the rest of the world in our dust. Europe lives with double-digit unemployment and almost total economic stagnation. Asia, the rising tiger, is now in the throes of a collapse so great that its ripples, ironically, constitute the one major threat to our current prosperity.

  Now the puzzle: If this is a golden age, why doesn’t it feel like a golden age? I recently told an assembly at my son’s high school that they were living through a time so blessed they would tell their grandchildren about it. They looked at me uncomprehendingly. First, because they have known little else but good times. And second, because it is hard for anyone to apprehend the sheer felicity of one’s own time until it is gone.

  But I suspect there is a third reason: We live in gold—but without glory. We associate golden ages with heroic times like that of Pericles. Our triumphs, in contrast, are of the domestic variety. This is the age of Seinfeld, life in miniature. No great battles, no great art, no great triumphs. We know these are diminished times when our most recent military hero is a pilot who, shot down by ragtag Serbs, manages to survive by hiding in the forests of Bosnia like a “scared little bunny rabbit” (his words: Scott O’Grady’s heroism is his honesty).

  No matter. Who needs wars? Who needs heroes? Who needs glory? These things are not sought; they are thrust upon a nation, unwillingly. Britain’s finest hour was 1940. Would you choose for your child to live in London during the blitz or in Lansing under Clinton? By any historical standard, life has never been so good. Why, the news has gotten so absurdly good we have to cast our net very far to find the bad. El Niño is about the best we can do.

  Does this mean that the news will only get better? On the contrary. With every passing month of such profound tranquillity and prosperity, the implausibility of these times becomes all the more striking.

  Golden ages never last. There might be a sudden crisis, perhaps a collapse of economic confidence coming from the Asian contagion. Or perhaps just a gradual undoing of all the self-reinforcing good news: a spike of inflation, a little recession, a rise in welfare, and the whole cycle slowly reverses itself.

  I hold with those who say this lovely world will end in ice, not fire. But either way, it must surely end. So enjoy it while it lasts. Because it won’t.

  The Washington Post, December 19, 1997

  COLD WAR NOSTALGIA

  We look back to that era now, and we long for a—I even made a crack the other day. I said, “Gosh, I miss the Cold War.” It was a joke, I mean, I don’t really miss it, but you get the joke.

  —President Bill Clinton, interview with the Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1993

  It is not really a joke. It is an alibi. When the Clinton administration runs into trouble abroad—debacle in Somalia, humiliation in Haiti, dithering over Bosnia—it likes to preface its list of extenuations with: Of course, we no longer have the easy divisions of the Cold War to make things clear and crisp and simple. Things are so much harder now.

  So clear and crisp and simple? Curious. During the Cold War, especially during its last two decades, liberals claimed that things were not so simple, that only ideologues and dimwits—Ronald Reagan, for example—insisted on seeing the world through the prism of the Cold War.

  Now they tell us how clear and clarifying it was. “We had an intellectually coherent thing,” said Clinton of the Cold War era. “The American people knew what the rules were and when we did whatever.” How about when we did Vietnam? Vietnam, fought under the theory of containment enunciated first by Harry Truman in 1947, was the quintessential Cold War engagement. It was also the most divisive.

  At the time, Bill Clinton called it “a war I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I have reserved solely for racism in America.” Yet it was prosecuted by two successive administrations. In the 1972 election, the winner by a landslide was Richard Nixon, war president. Same war. Clinton had a clarity of vision about the war no less certain than Nixon’s—only diametrically opposed.

  Vietnam rent the nation because it presented the basic dilemmas of the Cold War period: Was containment the paramount American foreign policy goal? Was it worth the risk of military intervention? Where? At what cost? There were no easy answers. There was certainly none of the unanimity that nostalgics now pretend there was.

  To hear the blather about Cold War consensus, one would think that the ’80s never happened. At every turn, on every issue for which there presumably was one simple, knee-jerk, anti-Soviet answer—the MX, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, “Euromissile” deployment—there was deep division. And practically every time, liberals, so wistful now for the easy choices of yore, made the wrong choice.

  In the late ’70s, for example, the Soviets aggressively deployed medium-range Euromissiles designed to intimidate and neutralize Western Europe. It was a clear-cut challenge. The correct response was equally clear-cut: a NATO counterdeployment of comparable medium-range missiles.

  Reagan and Thatcher and Kohl pulled it off. But not without enormous resistance from Western liberals and leftists. In America the resistance took the form of a nuclear-freeze movement that would have frozen Soviet missiles in place and frozen NATO’s out.

  Where were the Democrats on this one? They forced a nuclear-freeze resolution through the House of Representatives, 278 to 149. Their central idea—if one can speak of a hysteria in terms of ideas—was that Reagan was blinded by his Cold War anti-Sovietism. The real enemy, they insisted, was not communism but the nuclear weapons themselves.

  Similarly on the other great Cold War issue, Third World revolution: The real enemy, the Democrats protested, was not communism but deprivation. In the great debates over El Salva
dor and Nicaragua, liberals insisted that to see these conflicts in Cold War, East-West terms was again to miss the point.

  “If Central America were not racked with injustices, there would be no revolution,” said the Democrats in a 1983 televised address opposing military aid to El Salvador. “There would be nothing for the Soviets to exploit. But unless those oppressive conditions change, that region will continue to seethe with revolution—with or without the Soviets.”

  As history has demonstrated: wrong. No one would dare claim that in Central America poverty and injustice are gone. But the region no longer seethes with revolution. What happened? Injustice did not disappear. The Soviets did, and with them the sinews and romance of socialist revolution.

  The evil empire was the enemy. That was the central tenet of American cold warriors. Liberals deplored such talk as crude Manichaeism. Now, after 20 years of deriding anti-communists for being blinded by the Soviet threat, they wistfully recall how the Soviet threat brilliantly illuminated the foreign policy landscape—and lament how obscure it all is with the lodestar gone. Ah, the Golden Age when everything was easy and we all joined hands in the Cold War battles of Vietnam and Nicaragua and the Euromissiles.

  Yesterday, cold warrior was a liberal epithet. Today everyone pretends to have been one. My father, who had a Frenchman’s appreciation for cynicism, had a term for this kind of after-battle résumé revision. Maquis d’après-guerre: resistance fighter, post-war.

  Time, November 29, 1993

  CHAPTER 14

  THE AGE OF HOLY TERROR

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  This is not crime. This is war. One of the reasons there are terrorists out there capable and audacious enough to carry out the deadliest attack on the United States in its history is that, while they have declared war on us, we have in the past responded—with the exception of a few useless cruise missile attacks on empty tents in the desert—by issuing subpoenas.

  Secretary of State Colin Powell’s first reaction to the day of infamy was to pledge to “bring those responsible to justice.” This is exactly wrong. Franklin Roosevelt did not respond to Pearl Harbor by pledging to bring the commander of Japanese naval aviation to justice. He pledged to bring Japan to its knees.

  You bring criminals to justice; you rain destruction on combatants. This is a fundamental distinction that can no longer be avoided. The bombings of Sept. 11, 2001, must mark a turning point. War was long ago declared on us. Until we declare war in return, we will have thousands of more innocent victims.

  We no longer have to search for a name for the post–Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do: execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

  This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. Nor are their acts of violence senseless. They have a very specific aim: to avenge alleged historical wrongs and to bring the great American satan to its knees.

  Nor is the enemy faceless or mysterious. We do not know for sure who gave the final order but we know what movement it comes from. The enemy has identified itself in public and openly. Our delicate sensibilities have prevented us from pronouncing its name.

  Its name is radical Islam. Not Islam as practiced peacefully by millions of the faithful around the world. But a specific fringe political movement, dedicated to imposing its fanatical ideology on its own societies and destroying the society of its enemies, the greatest of which is the United States.

  Israel, too, is an affront to radical Islam, and thus of course must be eradicated. But it is the smallest of fish. The heart of the beast—with its military in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and the Persian Gulf; with a culture that “corrupts” Islamic youth; with an economy and technology that dominate the world—is the United States. That is why we were struck so savagely.

  How do we know? Who else trains cadres of fanatical suicide murderers who go to their deaths joyfully? And the average terrorist does not coordinate four hijackings within one hour. Nor fly a plane into the tiny silhouette of a single building. For that you need skilled pilots seeking martyrdom. That is not a large pool to draw from.

  These are the shock troops of the enemy. And the enemy has many branches. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Israel, the Osama bin Laden organization headquartered in Afghanistan, and various Arab “liberation fronts” based in Damascus. And then there are the governments: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya among them. Which one was responsible? We will find out soon enough.

  But when we do, there should be no talk of bringing these people to “swift justice,” as Karen Hughes dismayingly promised mid-afternoon yesterday. An open act of war demands a military response, not a judicial one.

  Military response against whom? It is absurd to make war on the individuals who send these people. The terrorists cannot exist in a vacuum. They need a territorial base of sovereign protection. For 30 years we have avoided this truth. If bin Laden was behind this, then Afghanistan is our enemy. Any country that harbors and protects him is our enemy. We must carry their war to them.

  We should seriously consider a congressional declaration of war. That convention seems quaint, unused since World War II. But there are two virtues to declaring war: It announces our seriousness both to our people and to the enemy, and it gives us certain rights as belligerents (of blockade, for example).

  The “long peace” is over. We sought this war no more than we sought war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or Cold War with the Soviet Union. But when war was pressed upon the greatest generation, it rose to the challenge. The question is: Will we?

  The Washington Post, September 12, 2001

  WHEN IMAGINATION FAILS

  A few men with knives. Why didn’t the passengers, numbering in the dozens, just overpower them? Of the four hijacked planes, only one failed to reach its terror destination. Why just one? The question seems unfair, even disrespectful. But its answer illuminates the deepest problem in facing terrorism: failure of the imagination. The passengers’ seeming passivity is reminiscent of the Holocaust. We ask, with trepidation: How could Jews have allowed themselves to be herded into gas chambers by just a few people carrying machine guns? Because it was inconceivable—six decades later it remains inconceivable—that the men carrying the weapons would do what they, in fact, did do. The victims were told these were showers. Who could imagine herding children into gas chambers? In all of human history, no people had ever done that. The victims could not plumb the depths of their enemy’s evil.

  I suspect the same happened to the doomed passengers on the hijacked planes. After all, hijackings have been going on for 40 years. Almost invariably, everybody ends up okay. The hijacker wants to go to Cuba, or make a political point, or get the world’s attention. Never in history had hijackers intentionally turned a passenger plane into a flying bomb, killing everyone aboard, including themselves. Decades of experience teach us that if you simply do what the hijackers say, they’ll eventually get tired and give up. That’s the rule.

  But when the rules don’t apply, when inconceivably cold-blooded evil is in command, the victims are truly helpless. In the face of unfathomable evil, decent people are psychologically disarmed. What is so striking—and so alien to civilized sensibilities—about the terrorists of radical Islam is their cult of death. Their rhetoric is soaked in the glory of immolation: immolation of the infidel and self-immolation of the avenger. Not since the Nazi rallies of the 1930s has the world witnessed such celebration of blood and soil, of killing and dying. What Western TV would feature, as does Palestinian TV, a children’s song with the lyric “How pleasa
nt is the smell of martyrs … the land enriched by the blood, the blood pouring out of a fresh body”?

  The most chilling detail of the 1983 marine barracks bombing in Beirut is that in his last seconds the suicide bomber was smiling. Bassamat al-farah, it is called. The smile of joy. Suicide bombers are taught that they are guaranteed immediate admission to paradise, where 72 black-eyed virgins await their pleasure.

  The West has not known such widespread, murderous perversion of religion since the religious wars of the 17th century. Who could have imagined deliberately flying into a building? The FBI didn’t. The FAA didn’t. We could hardly believe it as we saw it happening. What hijacked passenger could possibly imagine such a scenario? Why then did the passengers on the plane that went down near Pittsburgh decide to resist the hijackers and prevent them from completing their mission? Because they knew: Their relatives had told them by cell phone that the World Trade Center had already been attacked by hijacked planes. They were armed with final awareness of the nature of the evil they faced.

  So armed, they could act. So armed, they did.

  Time, September 24, 2001

  “THE BORDERS OF ISLAM ARE BLOODY”

  We’ve had unintended wars. We’ve had phony wars. We’ve had a Soccer War (Honduras–El Salvador, 1969). But not since the War of Jenkins’ Ear—sparked by Spanish mistreatment of British seamen, including one Capt. Robert Jenkins, whose display to the House of Commons of his severed ear launched a war on the Spanish nasties in October 1739—have we had anything quite as, well, idiosyncratic as the War of Parsley Point.