Thursday, September 30, 2004

 
Some things never change II

Reagan was pilloried for his hope for dealing with "moderates" in Iran. Well, there seem to be some "moderates" being killed by Mullahs now. And even the Mullahs during the 80s, like the U.S., were enemies of the USSR.(and the procurement of arms for the Contras arguably made it all worthwhile, and as argued by YT years ago, guerilla wars against Soviet surrogates in Central America may have been as demoralizing to the USSR as a never-built missle defence system)
Still, that was nothing like the congenital fifth column Leftist impulse to find "moderates" in our enemies. -our resistance, arms programs, rhetoric etc. etc. alienated our social democratic allies and "strengthened the hard-liners" in Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. So also did Kerry appeal to fantasies of "reaching out" to moderate Muslims. As argued earlier we did "reach out" to moderate Muslims by liberating some of them from Saddam. If moderate Muslims have not supported us in our efforts in Iraq, where *would* they do so? Kerry also pandered to the fantasy that we can assuage fears of Muslims that we want to take their oil, colonize them and so on. (I favor seizing *all* of Saudi Arabia's oil as payment for what their people owe us for their complicity in and support for the 9/11 attacks, but not many, alas, share my views) As argued in emails before, holocaust deniers are all(or almost all)people who would visit a holocaust on Jews given the opportunity. Some holocaust deniers, no doubt, know that the holocaust did occur, but make their absurd claims anyway. The widespread belief that Jews carried out the 9/11 attacks is not something that can be assuaged by Kerry or anyone else, and co-exists quite comfortably in their "nutso" mentality with *approval* of those attacks and condemnation of any efforts to stop other from carrying out similar attacks. What we *still* need to convince Muslims is that harboring terrorists will bring down terrible and disproportionate retribution on the masses of their peoples. Sadly, deposing the worst of their leaders, apprehending some of the terrorists, building schools, democracy, prosperous economies, while desirable in and of themselves, isn't much of a deterrent even when sucessful. (Very few of the Muslims residing in the West, and enjoying those things, have given us much support of any kind.)