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January 21, 2006
Posted at Old Right Pundits, Trumpet America and Liberty Post.
How many of America's politicians, policy-makers, pundits and other pontificators ever stopped to ask: What if some crazed Third World Islamo-Fascist potentate, using America's foreign policy as a precedent, decides to launch a pre-emptive strike on America?
This potentate hates America’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He hates the idea of America invading of Iran. He hates America’s nuclear arsenal. He hates America’s troop presence in 130 countries. He harbors an especially obsessive hatred for America’s troop presence and incessant meddling in the affairs of the Arab world.
He has had enough. Fearing that, after Iran, his country the next tour stop in the War on Terror, he decides to pre-empt America. (Indeed, one of his chief religious counselors has already proclaimed on TV that someone should “take out” the American president.) He does not bother with such niceties as U.N. resolutions. That would give the Great Satan too much advance notice.
His most elite hit men smuggle a nuclear device into Mexico and across the screen-door-in-a-submarine border into America. From somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley, they take turns driving and move this device to Times Square, where they proceed to detonate it.
America’s president declares martial law and suspends the Constitution. Almost all the American people gladly accept this. (They'll give up freedom to have security. No problem. It's not like they were using their freedom anyway.) Those who object are declared "enemy combatants" and are “dealt with accordingly.”
Not only has a rogue state caused horrible bloodshed on American soil, but the American people have finally surrendered their liberty. They have been doubly pre-empted.
Goodbye, America.
Adios.
Au revoir.
Auf Wiedersehen.
Ciao.
Sayonara.
Peace. Out.
What goes around comes around. You reap what you sow, and if you live by the sword you die by the sword. As long as America insists on being a superpower – as if by some divine anointing – America will have plenty of people hating it all over the world.
They don’t hate us for “our freedom and our democracy”. They hate us for our arrogance and hubris. Pat Buchanan recently made the point that, "To Islamic peoples, whether the Crusaders come in the name of God or in the name of democracy, they are still Crusaders." The Muslim world wants them gone. America has a terrorist problem not because it is free and pure and good, but because its government insists on endless meddling around the globe.
Empires don’t last. There have been numerous empires throughout history, and they have all ended. Some ended with a bang and some with a whimper. The American Empire is not immune to this. At some point, Americans will tire of paying for it, both in terms of money and blood.
While we in America may think we are a superpower, we are not a superpower in God’s eyes. While our original constitutional form of government may have been superior to all other forms of government, we forsook it along time ago. There is no provision for empire building in any of our Founding documents. Indeed, the Founders wanted no part of Europe’s wars. Time and again, Washington and Jefferson warned against alliances as they would be nothing but trouble. How prophetic.
Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. The American Empire will not last forever. Deal with it. You have a choice between, in Jefferson’s timeless words, “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations” or perpetual war and the hatred and animosity that accompany it. Opinions, ideas and philosophies have consequences.
Freely Speaking: Essays by Doug Newman
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