The Miscalculation!
Did I just imagine writing this post about a recent 60 Minutes show, the one where Abu Jandal, the former body guard of Osama bin Laden was interviewed. One of Jandal's most striking comments, as near as I can recall, was his hope that his infant son could follow in his footsteps and be a martyr for the Islamic cause. Bob Simon, who has a daughter, implied he would not want that for his child. Jandal said that is the difference between us, you would not want to sacrifice your child for America! That filled me with a certain amount of dread.
Reading Victor Davis Hanson, this morning, the following comment got me thinking again about Abu Jandal.
Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it.Hanson's article is Has Ahmadinejad Miscalculated? The answer is yes and so has Jandal. American kids are going to Iraq and Afghanistan, and will go to Iran, Syria or North Korea if asked. Many will even volunteer! And many will re-up for another tour, and those injured will be itching to get back with their soldier buddies. There are a few "Cindy Sheehans", sure, but most mothers and fathers, are scared but proud of the sacrifices their kids are making.
Hanson makes a good point about Israel.
...no responsible Israeli can take the chance that he presided over a second holocaust and the destruction of half the world’s surviving Jewry residing in what the radical Islamic world calls a “one-bomb state.”And Hanson makes this point about President Bush
...no American president wants to leave a nuclear Iran for his successor to deal with — especially when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the one in control of the nukes and promising a jihad if confronted, is probably a former American hostage taker and terrorist.President Bush will not be restrained by the polls to do what he believes is right with respect to Iran's nuclear ambitions. And when he strikes, and really that is the only option,
a humiliated Iran is defanged; the Arab world sighs relief, albeit in private; the Europeans chide us publicly but pat us on the back privately; and Iranian dissidents are energized, while theocratic militarists, like the Argentine dictators who were crushed in the Falklands War, lose face.Indeed! We don't spend more on defense than the next 10 nations combined for nothing.[...]
So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.
