Messing with their Security

When our nation was just born, Ben Franklin told someone about her form of government. He said, "A republic, if you can keep it." Whether we will keep our republic for long is very much in doubt today as we vote for President. Amazingly, the challenger, John Kerry, offers no explicit plan for how he would wage the war more effectively than Bush -- or whether he will fight at all -- and yet he stands a real chance of winning. His blank resume apparently doesn't bother some people. Too, we are at war, yet the comfort he has provided our past enemies has not stopped him from being a serious candidate.

When I was thinking about what I would post today, I was considering the bin Laden tape again. Since writing about his obscene offer to the "yellow" states, I'd seen other commentators speak about it from another angle: that bin Laden was hoping to lull our people by making a nonthreatening offer. I think that's what he's doing, but why does he think he can get away with it? I've been turning this one around in my mind, wondering whether bin Laden had some sort of diaboloical mass-psychological (psychohistorical?) insight. Is he a sort of real-life Hannibal Lecter who could offer great insights to mankind, but who chooses to murder instead? No. I have concluded that he has nothing beyond a low cunning: The fact that a nonentity like John Kerry could become a serious candidate for President at all means that America might be ripe for such a bargain.

This goes beyond disturbing. Our physical safety is at risk. The Koran offers us three "choices": (1) convert to Islam, (2) live as second-class citizens under Islamic law, or (3) die. I submit that Islam offers only the last. I do not have time to elaborate on this, but the demand for complete submission to the teachings of any religion is not a life proper to man. Indeed, it is a living death. But beyond that, even in the literal, corporeal sense of bare survival, conversion to Islam offers nothing: I need only point out that Muslims are constantly killing each other over minor sectarian differences. This is not accidental, but it is an essential of the fanatically religious mindset. When man abandons reason, persuasion by rational argument is out and only force is left.

A religious fanatic like Osama bin Laden is not a self-confident man. For the religious fanatic, opinions that differ from his will shake his confidence initially, as they shake very foundations of his own worldview. But dispassionate inquiry and weighing of evidence have no place to the man blinded by faith, and then he will seek to assuage his fear by removing its object -- the dissenting opinion. He will do this even if it means murdering a human being -- destroying a unique life, an entire universe, in the process. This is why Theo Van Gogh was killed today. Like Salmon Rushdie, he dared to question the "religion of peace," and he paid for his impertinence with his life. And it is this impertinence, this desire to use one's own mind, this deepest meaning of the word "freedom," that bin Laden really means when he says "mess with our security." The lives of the men -- some probably idealistic in their own way -- that bin Laden sends to die mean nothing to him. He does not really care about the lives of the people in the Islamic world either. (If he did, he'd quit giving us reasons to go over there with our military.) It is his faith-based view of the world, regardless of what he could learn from the world by reason, that concerns him. America's existence challenges his point of view and that is why we were attacked just over three years ago. This is why his truce offer means nothing. Our decision to continue to fight or to quit today will not change bin Laden's desire to kill us, only his ability.

A republic, if you can keep it. Your life, if you wish to live it. This is not a war of retribution we fight, but a war for our own survival.

-- CAV