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A Look Back: My First Comments After the 9/11 Attacks.

9/11/03 is upon us. And, since I have so many new readers, I thought I should re-post the original 9/13/01 comments.

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It is recorded in our history books that when he looked down at the ship full of smiling, victorious faces… faces of his flyers, just having returned from Pearl Harbor, Japanese fleet Admiral Yamamoto was quiet, pensive, even apprehensive. He later wrote in his private diary, “I fear all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

As this column is written, it is the second night after the dastardly attacks on the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and the Pentagon. In that amount of time, I have heard, on the news channels, and on the internet, a phase batted about several times, in various refinements, when discussing these attacks: “Like Pearl Harbor”.

Something in that phrase struck a deeper chord with me. It was, at the same time, unsettling, and reassuring. And about 20 minutes ago, my memory finally coughed up that quote from Yamamoto, and with it, my entire thought process about these events crystallized. In that revelation, it occurred to me I’d already written about what I was feeling.

In that column, I wrote of my worry that our influence on the world stage had suffered seriously, under the weight of Bill Clinton’s international bumbling. Well, Bumbling isn’t the right word. Bullying, is perhaps more accurate, yet still not spot-on.

I said, then:

>>> From Oslo to Camp David, Clinton has pushed Israel to the bargaining table, and pressured her to give up vital strategic and cultural assets she has no business giving away, if survival is at all on her agenda.  Ehud Barak, by his giving into Bill Clinton (who, along with his staff including Jim Carville, did much to put Barak into office), has done little more than demonstrate just how empty the Palestinians’ peace talk really is, and how desperate Clinton was to be seen as a good President, his crimes against his oaths not withstanding. 

Consider….

At Clinton’s insistence, Barak offered Arafat the keys to the kingdom; just about all of the West Bank and Gaza, plus East Jerusalem and even Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount. How do the peace loving Palestinians respond?  Yasser Arafat turned it all down, and gave us another few nights of headlines, filled with kids in the street throwing stones, and being shot, occasionally. He also sent his armed forces, (You recall, they’re supposed to be policemen?) to fire at the Israelis, apparently hoping for an excuse to tell the rest of the world how Israel is a war-mongering nation.

Of course that should have been a signal to about anyone with a brain that he didn’t give a damn about peace. All he and his followers are interested in is the destruction of Israel. It should have also been a signal that Clinton’s attempt at a legacy backfired, big time, and more, that it didn’t have a chance to start with…. something that Clinton should have known, did he have any understanding of the situation at all. You will recall, perhaps that back in 1992 , Clinton more or less bragged he had no understanding of matters of foreign policy. This was never quite so clear as during this monstrosity Mr. Clinton unleashed on the world.

For Israel’s part, all of this has been laid at the feet of Ehud Barak, perhaps unfairly. No, I don’t think he was the man for the job, and clearly was only in the PM’s position because Clinton’s people worked so hard to get him there, apparently hoping to set up Clinton’s brokering a of peace deal. Easy to do when you have the PM of Israel owing you his election. But Barak apparently was under pressures he had no control of, having nothing to do with politics at home, or the Palestinians… both of which were quite out of his control to begin with, in any event.. He was concerned with Israel continuing to get support from the US. In this concern, he saw Israel as being on the controlled end of the puppet’s string… and knowing that if he did not capitulate to Clinton’s demands, that vital US support would wither as quickly as Benjamin Netenyau’s prime ministership did, when
it became clear he wasn’t going to buckle to Clinton’s concession demands.

And Barak wasn’t alone, nor was the left in Israel, in this perception of US control versus Israel’s survival. Yitzhak Rabin, hardly a liberal even by American standards and certainly not under Bill Clinton’s extortion based control to the extent that Barak was, saw the same problems. His longtime friends, according reports I’ve seen, tell us he was deeply troubled over the prospect of losing US support… and therefore bought into the ‘land for peace’ deals being brokered by the liberals in the US. This was something I predicted he wouldn’t have done.

Israeli voters, seeing this happening, and clearly annoyed with the US control over Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians, trounced Barak in the polls. Unless one considers this anger, the election of Ariel Sharon, his replacement, is hard to fathom, since he has never been overly popular, as best I can tell. But perhaps the people of Israel are finally figuring out what the real story is.. that in truth, there is no dealing with the Palestinians, and Arifat. 

One hopes that they’ve not been too late in coming to this conclusion. If they are, world war seems fairly certain to me… possibly nuclear in nature.

>>>

Others learned the lessons, painful as they tended to be. Chaimberlin’s England, for example, along with the remainder of the free world, learned about appeasement of a mortal enemy the hard way. The American left, apparently not having leaned the lesson taught by the infamous socialist, Hitler, was taught the lesson again, by another band of socialists, as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan 40 or so years later.