Friedman called for this approach:
Instead of sending Mr. McClellan out to flog Newsweek, President Bush should have said: "Let me say first to all Muslims that desecrating anyone's holy book is utterly wrong. These allegations will be investigated, and any such behavior will be punished. That is how we Americans intend to look in the mirror. But we think the Arab-Muslim world must also look in the mirror when it comes to how it has been behaving toward an even worse crime than the desecration of God's words, and that is the desecration of God's creations. In reaction to an unsubstantiated Newsweek story, Muslims killed 16 other Muslims in Afghanistan in rioting, and no one has raised a peep - as if it were a totally logical reaction. That is wrong.
"In Iraq, where Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni Muslims are struggling to build a pluralistic new order, other Muslims, claiming to act in the name of Allah, are indiscriminately butchering people, without a word of condemnation coming from Muslim spiritual or political leaders. I don't understand a concept of the sacred that says a book is more sacred than a human life. A holy book, whether the Bible or the Koran, is only holy to the extent that it shapes human life and behavior.
"Look, Newsweek may have violated journalistic rules, but what jihadist terrorists are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan - blowing up innocent Muslims struggling to build an alternative society to dictatorship - surely destroys the Koran. They are the real enemies of Islam because they are depriving Muslims of a better future. From what I know of Islam, it teaches that you show reverence to God by showing reverence for his creations, not just his words. Why don't your spiritual leaders say that? I am asking, because I want to know."
So there, I thought, the right approach is finally being broached.
But then, Victor Davis Hanson reminded me that while this is certainly part of the problem, given that we are in a war and must maintain the will to win, it isn't nearly the only problem we have. We in the West need to respect ourselves. Too many over here give respect and deferrence to the Moslem world though the Moslem world has not earned it. And those same people do not respect our own civilization:
In that sense, we can be as warped as the Afghan rioter. Westerners have their own delusions. We seem to think that our neat gadgets also equate with an ability to refashion human nature or that a fascist abroad needs to know how much we care about his hurt.
There is a sort of arrogance in the liberal West — the handmaiden to our own guilt and self-loathing — that strangely believes we are both to blame for the ills abroad and alone can solve them through handing out money. Almost all of the pathetic rhetoric of al Qaeda — "colonial exploitation," "American hegemony," or "blood for oil" — was as imported from the West as were the terrorists' bombs and communications.
Some Western intellectuals, I think, need a bin Laden to illustrate and confirm their nihilistic ideas about their own postmodern society, just as he needs them to explain why his culture's failure is not its own fault. So just as al Qaeda will always find an enabling Westerner to say, "You lashed out at us in frustration for your unfair treatment," so too a guilty Westerner will always find a compliant terrorist to boast, "Yes, we kill you for your sins." America was once a country that demolished Hitler and Tojo combined in less than four years and broke the nuclear Soviet Union — and now frets and whines that a few thousand deranged fascists want an apology.
Abroad, we battle Islamic fascists who hate us for our success and want to kill us with the tools of the modern world they despise. But at home, we are also at odds with our own privileged guilt-ridden aristocracy, whose very munificence has made them misunderstand why they are hated.
The Islamists insist, "We kill you for being soft." Westerners in response feel, "We are killed because we are not being soft enough."
And so they riot and kill in Afghanistan over a stupid rumor, and we seek to apologize that it somehow spread.
How truly sad.
It is more than sad. It is our great weakness. We have the power to win. And right now we have the will to win. But how thin is the margin to win? Even here where we have taken a hit on 9-11 that our more wobbly European allies have not, the commitment to win is not what I'd hoped. September 11 may have changed the margin just enough to fight but it did not "change everything" as was the common assumption in the fall of 2001. We have earned the right to respect ourselves, yet too many here are filled with guilt over small blemishes in a big picture of greatness and good.
I will not apologize for my country. For whatever our mistakes or even crimes are on occasion, we have done so much good in this world that we deserve to beat thugs that want to kill us in the millions and stone and oppress the survivors who deviate even a little from what they deem is acceptable.
Win first. Then, if we must, trot out the victims' studies professors to flog our victory secure in the fact that they are free to dispense the most silly rot about American guilt without consequences.
