The Week

National Review, Nov 11, 2002

-- Australians and Americans fought together in all of the 20th cecentury's wars-not just the popular crusades of the world wars (in each of which Australia fought longer than we did), but in the grim Cold War struggles of Korea and Vietnam. Australians fought with us in Afghanistan. Now, in the Bali disco bombings, al-Qaeda has struck Australian men and women in the way it prefers-without provocation, by stealth, murderously. Our hearts go out to a great and grieving nation.

-- No one knows how many innocent people the bombing killed, since so mamany bodies were burned. Approximately 100 young Australians died, as did at least seven Americans. The operation was an elegant Islamofascist strike-it killed Western revelers on a Hindu island; and by hurting the tourist industry, it will drive Indonesia's faltering economy yet further down, thus boosting the prospects of fanatical Islamist groups. Abu Bakar Bashir, the leader of one such group, Jemaah Islamiyah, blamed the bombing on Jews and Americans, praised Osama bin Laden, threatened Australia, and advised the families of the victims to convert to the religion of peace. Indonesia has denied American warnings that it harbored Islamists, though Muslim mobs have been killing native Christians there for years. The culture of Southeast Asia encourages conflict avoidance, until pent-up wrath breaks out in slaughter (running "amok" is a Malay term). So far, the Indonesian government has supplied the denial, and the Islamists the slaughter.

-- Can the Democrats be trusted with the country's defense? The cocongressional vote on Iraq provides mixed evidence. A majority of House Democrats voted against letting President Bush deal with the Iraqi threat. But all of the party's presidential hopefuls-Daschle, Gephardt, Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman-voted with the president, as did all but one of its senators who are up for re-election this year. The exception was Paul Wellstone, who voted his peacenik convictions. Some of the hawks were voting their convictions, too; others, their ambitions. Lieberman is probably the only Democrat who, if he were president, might have chosen the same course as President Bush. The rest of the Democrats have proven that they are willing to authorize military action once a Republican president and the electorate force their hand. The Scoop Jackson wing of the party is still dead.

-- Been called "Talibanic" lately? If so, you must be a coconservative Republican. That's the new trick: We are "Talibanic," or members of the "Taliban wing" of the Republican party. It's kind of an old trick, too. Back in the early 1980s, when Sam Donaldson discovered Hezbollah (as it was hijacking, kidnapping, murdering, and committing other mayhem), he delighted in referring to "the Hezbollah wing of the Republican party"- that meant all those GOP-ers who supported Reagan. Now the Taliban's "in." When Democrats say "Taliban wing," they smile like they're the first to have thought of it. But we have to ask: Who was it who fought, ruined, and banished the Taliban? Bunch of "Taliban Republicans," really, starting with the President of the United States.

-- Logic tells the mind that the risk of being shot by the Beltway snsniper cannot be significantly greater than the risks of everyday activities-e.g., driving a car. But cars do not intend to crash themselves; the deaths and injuries on the road are accidental. The malignancy of the sniper makes him terrifying. His tarot cards and his request for money (if genuine) make it unlikely that he is a terrorist. But terrorists, or their copycats, may learn from him. Al-Qaeda and its patrons are surely sending other plans of murder our way. Americans must learn the virtues of daily stoicism-the right mixture of prudence and unconcern. We will do our best to hunt our enemies down. They are scum. The rest is in God's hands.

-- The sniper has called forth a Pavlovian response from liberals, who ththink his crimes illustrate the need for-of course-gun control. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wants to ride the issue to victory in the Maryland gubernatorial race. Never mind the failure of the state's current Democratic administration to enforce existing gun laws. The cause du jour is "ballistic fingerprinting." Create a registry of fingerprints, and supposedly the police would be able to track a bullet to the gunowner who fired it. There are serious questions about the reliability of ballistic fingerprinting, but leave those aside (or see John R. Lott Jr.'s "Bullets and Bunkum," page 28). Registering new guns would still do nothing to deal with the over 200 million guns already in circulation in America. If liberals were willing to advocate the prohibition of long-range rifles, including the confiscation of those already owned, it would be possible for them to argue that their favored policies would stop the sniper in his tracks. We would still disagree with them. But at least their position would deserve respect, as it now does not.

-- A little more than a year after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin LaLaden is on the run or possibly dead, the financial base of al-Qaeda has been ruptured, and Afghanistan's Taliban government is no more. And yet, according to CIA director George Tenet, "the threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer"-i.e., before the most fatal terrorist strikes in history. At least that's what Tenet told a congressional panel on October 17. This vague warning has the look of a self-administered inoculation: If something awful does happen in the near term, nobody can say Tenet didn't give us a heads-up. The warning must also be interpreted as a startling admission of failure. Tenet, a Clinton holdover, has directed central intelligence for five years; he says he declared "war" on bin Laden four years ago; and now he has had more than a year of almost limitless resources to protect Americans from a specific enemy. He insists that we are still no better off. It makes one wonder if we'd be better off without Tenet.