Places yet remain in the continental United States to which news of the world barely penetrates. Paradise Inn, 5400 feet up the south slope of Mount Rainier, has no Internet connections. The rooms have no radios or TV’s. There used to be a television in the bar, but the bar has been demolished to make way for handicapped-accessible guest rooms (vide infra). The only newspaper is the Tacoma News-Tribune, which arrives late in the day and rarely covers events farther away than Seattle. Yesterday’s front page was filled with a story about the worst local traffic intersections. Neither civilization nor the Obamamessiah cult has collapsed, I presume, since last Thursday. Of finer levels of detail, I am at the moment unaware.
Paradise Inn was built 92 years ago, before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and pottered along perfectly well, with occasional refurbishment and expansion, till 2005, when someone realized that it didn’t accommodate wheelchair users. That is obviously an important priority at a location where the only recreations are hiking mountain trails and climbing a 14,000 foot peak. Hence, it became necessary to shut the Inn down for the 2006 and 2007 seasons while ADA-compliant rooms were added.
To be fair and balanced, other useful work was done, such as shoring up the foundations and repairing the ornate but visibly cracked lobby fireplaces. And I’ve seen a couple of guests in wheelchairs!
The Inn is open seasonally, from mid-May to mid-October. My custom has been to arrive on opening weekend, before the winter snows are gone. This year, global warmenists will be annoyed to hear, the snowfall at this level was over 900 inches, with 180 inches remaining on the ground as of May 15th. Both figures are well above average. On the other hand, they might be heartened by the distinctly unseasonable 70-plus degree daytime temperatures. By contrast, during my last visit, in 2005, the snowpack was about six feet and the thermometer barely got above freezing. One night, the electric heat went out for a couple of hours, and my room cooled to 45 degrees; this year, I didn’t bother turning the heater on.
Anti-globalizers should keep away. (Harry Truman once stayed here, but I doubt that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would want to visit.) A large proportion of the staff are college students from Singapore. It’s hard to imagine two locales more different than a warm, sea level, overcrowded city-state and a (usually) chilly, hard-to-reach mountainside inhabited only by bears, mountain lions, beavers, foxes, miscellaneous critters, and tourists.
Between bouts of hiking (my legs are definitely three years older), I started reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision. Already I can see why the elite media want to consign it to oblivion. To begin with, Mr. Feith, a genuine realist rather than the faux variety that have adopted that moniker, doesn’t suffer from the delusion that perfection is the world’s default state. As he writes in his introduction,
Critics commonly suggest that every problem is the result of some policy maker’s error. But policy making often involves choosing to accept one set of likely problems overanother. . . . Historical events look different before the fact: Once one knows how a story turns out, it is easy to sift the record for telling comments and actions that can be connected to grand outcomes. But before the fact, we cannot know which potential problem or opportunity might become the hinge of fate.
The pro-mufsidun Left and the media (if I may indulge in pleonasm) have constructed a “narrative” of the War on Terror, “narrative” having become the progressive antonym of “fact”. According to the “narrative”, George W. Bush’s administration, particularly the Jews neoconservatives (of which Mr. Feith, who served from 2001 through 2005 as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is one), took office determined to pursue an aggressive agenda abroad and seized on 9/11 as an excuse to implement it. They then forsook the business at hand, punishing the perpetrators on the attack, in favor of a distracting sideshow in Iraq, for which their plans were optimistic and superficial.
The “narrative” has been largely constructed by journalists who have filtered selected officials’ recollections through an ideological sieve. Mr. Feith counters with a chronicle based not just on his memory but also on contemporary documents, many only recently declassified. Most are posted on his Web site.
I quote extensively from these written sources, with attention to accuracy and context. Some of the documents I rely on remain wholly or partially classified. But if I have been inaccurate or unfair, I know that people in the government (including members of Congress, who have access to many of the relevant documents) will quickly call me on it.
Perhaps the purveyors of the “narrative” will take up this challenge.
The first and most crucial strategic decision in the War on Terror was to give first priority to preventing future attacks rather than exacting retribution for al-Qa’eda’s atrocity. That decision was uncontroversial at the time. Now it lies at the heart of the debate over American policy. The Democratic Presidential candidates call for ridding ourselves of “distractions” and making the capture of Osama bin-Laden our principal objective, for the sake of which they say they are willing to pour more troops into the wilds of Afghanistan. Once bin-Laden is “brought to justice”, normalcy will return. At least, neither Slick Barry nor the Lioness of Tuzla has proffered any anti-terrorist program that looks further into the future.
The set of problems that arose from the decision to break up the international terror network is easy to perceive: a long war against an amorphous foe, with all of the friction and frustration that war entails. War and Decision presents the other side, the alternative set of problems that an Obama-Clinton strategy would entail.
From the standpoint of September 2001, effective retribution against al-Qa’eda was not a simple task. The U.S. had little intelligence about the group’s hideouts in Afghanistan. We could fire missiles at guesstimated targets, which might luckily kill bin-Laden and his top lieutenants or unluckily make us look impotent. The first potential problem, then, was that attempted but unsuccessful punishment might encourage terrorists to bolder actions.
The second problem was that destroying al-Qa’eda would not eliminate the multitude of other anti-Western terrorist organizations, many of which received aid and comfort from foreign governments and might in the future gain access to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. If they were left undisturbed, the only way to prevent a repetition of 9/11 would be a massive heightening of internal security.
Much of what makes America happy – our self-governance, economic prosperity, domestic tranquility, and opportunity to better ourselves – derives from the liberal and democratic nature of our society and the degree of mutualtrust . . . that such a societyengenders. . . . And this is what terrorism has the potential to undo. Beyond the cost in lives and property, the 9/11 attack – or, rather, our reaction to it – could have far-reaching consequences, especially if it were followed by more such attacks. To protect ourselves physically, we might have to change fundamentally the way we live, sacrificing our society’s openness for hoped-for safety.
Of course, no anti-war liberal advocates the slightest diminution of openness, but maximum civil liberties and minimum action against terrorism are not compatible policies. We can accept recurring 9/11’s as “the price of freedom”, or we can construct a quasi-police state as “the price of safety”, or we can find ways to appease the mufsidun as “the price of normalcy”. President Bush’s aim was to avoid that array of choices. If his critics are honest, they will declare that they prefer them to war – and will tell us wish option strikes them as least abominable.
Fundamentally, the current debate is not about whether the Iraqi campaign has been handled well or badly but about whether Americans can live safely, freely and happily in a world where hostile governments can “outsource” their enmity to increasingly adept bands of murderous fanatics. President Bush’s answer was that we can’t. For six and a half years, the policies that flowed from that answer succeeded at the most vital level: There have been no significant terrorist attacks on American soil, and our way of life has suffered only the most minimal level of disruption. It will be “interesting”, in the sense of the proverbial Chinese curse, to find out whether “yes, we can” is a more successful idea.
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