Black Tuesday
by Frank Creel (Virginia)
September 17, 2001
Black Tuesday has placed America at a crossroads. We must now have the wisdom
to take the only path open to a safe future for ourselves and our children.
This will not be easy. A number of dangerous paths beckon. The initial
indications from our leaders and in our media are not all that reassuring. Every
patriot must keep uppermost in mind the long-term interests of the country, and
help our government steer carefully between the Scylla of passivity and the
Charybdis of unrestrained violence.
That we are not immune to the dangers of passivity and complacency was
demonstrated by the horrible events, themselves, of September 11. We have known
for years that airport security systems were a joke. Enterprising reporters
enjoyed a very high penetration rate three years ago when they tested the
systems, and the results were widely broadcast.
Virtually nothing was done to improve them. Certainly, no measures were taken
to raise the pay of airport screening personnel, recruit more qualified
applicants and thoroughly check the backgrounds of successful applicants.
The Independent National Committee is no advocate of federalizing every
problem. But the federal government could shuck off many thousands of its
existing functions before it got rid of something as important as the security
of air travel. It is obvious that the airline industry needed more stringent
rules than the FAA gave it.
Our national unity is very important right now. We cannot criticize our
leaders and our government as much as they deserve to be. The INCLetter,
however, reaches only a small fraction of the readership of the Washington Post,
where Richard Cohen admitted Saturday that "our government utterly failed
us." We must not forget this failure when the time comes for us to turn
introspective over this great tragedy.
As we sort through our options, we must simultaneously analyze them for the
short term, the long term and in between.
THE SHORT TERM
No one can doubt that America must retaliate against this horrific act of
war, which appears to have killed more Americans in one strike than in any other
hostile act in our history. If we are able to definitively identify and locate
the masterminds and surviving perpetrators of this heinous barbarism, simple
justice demands payback. As I write this, all indications are that Usama bin
Laden and his followers are responsible, even though he has publicly denied
responsibility. If bin Laden lives to greet 2002, the American people,
especially those who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
will justifiably feel aggrieved.
A few cruise missiles fired at Afghan peaks and empty tents, a la Clinton,
will not satisfy this demand for justice. Indeed, the farcical ineptitude of the
Clinton Administration in responding to past outrages was a major contributing
factor to the disaster America suffered last Tuesday.
Let us hope, too, that the loss of thousands of innocent civilians to
terrorism will cure us of our reluctance to put our soldiers in harm's way in
pursuit of our national interests. Soldiers understand (I write as a combat
veteran of Vietnam) that putting on the uniform signifies a willingness to risk
one's life in order to carry out assigned missions. It may be necessary to
insert ground troops in order to achieve justice in this affair, and the
Commander in Chief must not shrink from giving the necessary orders.
Ideally, we will be able to carry out our short-term objectives with the
cooperation and support of other countries (Pakistan, Turkey, Russia,
Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and perhaps even Syria come to mind). But we
must also be prepared to go it alone and to deal with the political and
strategic implications and repercussions over the mid-term and the long term.
THE MIDDLE TERM
Depending on how long it takes us to achieve our short-term objective of
adequate retributive justice for our thousands of dead citizens, we must begin,
either during the military operations or immediately after they are successful,
to address the injustices, real or perceived, which rightly or wrongly gave rise
to the fanatical hatred of America we all witnessed last Tuesday.
Let us begin with the real injustices. If we can deal with those, it seems
likely that many, if not all, the unreal and perceived injustices floating
around in the heads of our enemies will be dissipated.
The following are mistakes in the formulation and execution of our global
policies that the INC would be attacking even if they had not encouraged mass
terror against us:
(1) The United States must quickly begin to shed the conceit (as "the
only remaining superpower") that it can act as global cop. We do not have
all the hard information, cultural understanding and physical resources it would
take to contend with or reconcile the maelstrom of conflicting desires and
forces constantly being loosed upon this very large planet we inhabit. Every
successful use of force creates winners and losers, and the losers will
invariably be transformed into America's implacable enemies. We will be paying
for Clinton's ill-advised bombing of Serbia, for example, for many decades into
the future. Until the FBI identified the culprits, in fact, I was keeping open
the possibility that the pilots of those guided bombs were Serbs.
A month or so ago, the Washington Post highlighted a group of
"conservative" thinkers who argued that the United States should
frankly pursue empire and use its power to achieve good things for the world.
Such thinking has no roots in the heritage we received from the Founding
generation of Americans. No course would more rapidly lead to our own national
dissolution. It is nothing short of insanity to convert our international policy
making structures into a machine for spitting out enemies like sausages.
(2) Even if we cannot immediately carry the day against those who wish to
keep America "engaged" with the world at large, at least we must have
a more limited victory over those whose chief purpose in life seems to be to
make the world safe for Sangerism.
For those who have not yet noticed, the "population explosion" was
a dud. Even the United Nations, which has probably hired naught but zealous
disciples of Margaret Sanger for many decades, and which until recently was
striking the tocsins to warn against a rise of population towards 12 billion, in
1999 had to issue a new analysis showing that world population would peak in
2050 at, um, about 8.9 billion and perhaps as low as 7.3 billion and then go
into a steady decline back to about where it is today. (See: www.unfpa.org/swp/1999/images/box1.gif).
There may be even more striking updates since 1999, but I have not seen them.
Meanwhile, the Agency for International Development, apparently staffed
mostly by the ideologues of yesteryear, continues to spend more on population
control measures than on any other health or developmental program, and vastly
more than it does on malaria control, amoebic dysentery, clean water, and
childhood nutrition, the real needs of the peoples it "serves."
These kinds of government "aid" programs are deeply offensive to
the values and mores of hundreds of millions of people and are rightly perceived
as having their origins in a deep-seated racism against brown, yellow and black
skinned people. Those who doubt this should go back and read Margaret Sanger in
the original. Hitler did and was very much impressed by her theories. It is
pathetic that the ideology of that strange woman, who died almost 40 years ago,
is still a major force in the policies of the United States Government.
(3) With the deconstructionist interpretation of our Constitution abroad in
our land and prevailing among the justices of the Supreme Court and the U.S.
District and Appellate Courts, there is probably very little that can be done
immediately at the governmental level to address this next problem. Namely, our
extremely vibrant and corrupted culture is spewing its corruption into every
nook and cranny of the planet. Just as it is doing here at home, this corrupt
culture is breaking down religious and familial protections of youthful
innocence and fomenting rebellion against parental and societal authority.
Traditional societies especially are terrified by this onslaught and correctly
see America as its fountainhead.
This, of course, is a long term problem, but work on correcting it must begin
immediately. As noted, there is very little we can do right now at the
governmental level. We must see the problem clearly, however, and do everything
in our power to insulate our own families against it, and then hope that our
children will gradually be able to leaven the larger society. The baleful and
baneful "liberations" of our hedonistic society in the form of
iconoclastic music, sitcom brainwashing, and sewer pornography are powerful
enough to overwhelm every human being not inoculated against them by prayerful
parents and profoundly formed by them in the conscious dignity of being a child
of God.
Politically, everyone should know by now that establishment politicians are
part of the problem, not part of the solution. Democrats and Republicans, by and
large, have internalized that infernal, deconstructionist conception of the
Constitution that holds, for example, that public indecency and pornography are
forms of "free expression" protected by the First Amendment.
The Founders had no such intent. They were sensible and practical men who
knew that the First Amendment was one of the safeguards against the emergence of
tyrannical government on our shores and, therefore, that it protected political
speech, never obscenity or even "artistic" expression having no
connection with the making of our laws.
I sometimes fantasize that the Founders might return to life, establish a
Court of Assize and hold public sessions on the performance of contemporary
courts. I can see today's Lilliputians standing before these giants of the past,
stammering out confused explanations of how they came to hold that the First
Amendment actually protects nude dancing, Internet depravity and blasphemous
art, and prevents parents and local authorities from protecting their children
from moral contamination!
The only long term solution for such idiocy is to gradually quarantine from
public office the idiots who hold such views. In the meantime, we cannot profess
shock that other nations wish to shield their families from such corruption, and
that they nurse increasingly bitter hatred of the country that is its source.
As Jessica Stern, author of "The Ultimate Terrorists," wrote on
Saturday, "It matters what other people think of us. We need to think much
more seriously than we have about whether we are perceived by people in other
parts of the world as malevolent or benevolent. Being feared for our military
strength alone is not sufficient to guarantee our security."
(4) Peace must be imposed on the combatants in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Richard Cohen also wrote on Saturday that "America was not, as (Bush)
maintains, targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom
and opportunity in the world,' but because it has repeatedly inserted itself
into the Middle East...(W)e have taken the lives of Muslims, and some of them
will not forgive us. Our ally, Israel, controls Jerusalem's Islamic holy places.
We have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, too close, apparently, to holy Mecca
... And everywhere we go in the region and even from outside it, we exude a
noxious modernity the music, the clothing, the contempt for tradition and
authority. We are a dangerous people."
Caryle Murphy was the Post's Cairo bureau chief from 1989 to 1994. She wrote
on Sunday that "the 50-year-old conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians rages on. Seen through Muslim eyes,it is a conflict prolonged by
America's bias toward Israel. Muslims do not comprehend, for example, how the
United States, which gives Israel more than $3 billion annually, could not have
stopped Israel from allowing more than 200,000 Jewish settlers half of them
since the 1993 Oslo peace agreement to move into occupied territory Palestinians
had envisioned as their homeland...If we want to avoid creating more terrorists,
we must end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quickly and in a way both sides see
as fair."
I was in Vietnam during the Six Day War of 1967 and remember being thrilled
by Israel's quick victory over its enemies. Several months later, however, I
gained a better appreciation of the Mid-east conflict from the perspective of
America's permanent interests by reading Alfred Lilienthal's "What Price
Israel?"
I concluded at that time that America's interests required a quick and
peaceful resolution of the conflict. The high opinion I still held of Israeli
leaders led me to the firm conviction that they would soon demonstrate their
good will toward their Arab neighbors by withdrawing from all the occupied
territories and returning to the boundaries established for them by the original
U.N. partition. Such a magnanimous withdrawal, coupled with vigorous Israeli
initiatives towards economic development for the entire region while serving as
a model of political stability and openness, would have secured an indefinite
period of peace (or demonstrated for the entire world the bad faith of Israel's
Arab neighbors) and avoided the awful bloodshed that has taken place in the past
34 years. That golden opportunity was squandered, I believe, by Israeli
shortsightedness. I grew increasingly disenchanted about ultimate Israeli
intentions as the months and years passed with no serious peace overtures of
that sort.
Israel now has at its helm Ariel Sharon, probably the most shortsighted
politician in Israel's history. The United States can no longer afford the
luxury of turning a blind eye to Israeli shortsightedness without criminal
neglect of its own abiding interests. Israel and the Palestinians came
tantalizingly close to a final agreement last year, but the Israelis could not
bring themselves to make the necessary concessions on the status of Jerusalem,
and Arafat was too concerned for his own political skin to take any chances on
Jerusalem.
Time is running out. Robert Kaiser ended his Sunday commentary by noting that
"It could be chemicals or germs or nukes the next time."
THE LONG TERM
As I told the delegates to the Independent American Party conference last
July in Salt Lake City, the mission God has given America is to serve for the
rest of the world as a model of political stability, economic dynamism and
cultural sanity. (See Religion
and Patriotism speech for the full text.)
We will have the capacity to achieve no part of that mission if we permit
ourselves to be dragged into a global war with Islam and its billion believers.
Unless we quickly and resolutely address the injustices associated with our
country by, not only Muslims, but other members of the human race, we can
succeed only in weakening ourselves and strengthening the fanatics who see
success only in our destruction.
Reluctant as I am at this moment to criticize the President, I must observe
how alarming has been some of his rhetoric since the disaster. We cannot take
seriously his assertion that we are now embarked on a crusade "to rid the
world of evil-doers," which implies that they are all foreigners and that
our hands are perfectly clean.
As stated above, we have no choice but to seek redress, militarily if
necessary, for the massive crime committed against our innocent civilians. But
we must never lose sight of the evil and injustice that we ourselves,
individually and collectively, are guilty of in God's eyes.
As Jesse Jackson (of all people) observed, God alone is the world's
"sole remaining superpower." Even as we prepare to unsheathe our
"terrible swift sword," let us humbly remember that we do so against
our fellow evil-doers, sons and daughters all of Adam and Eve.
This is a practical as well as moral imperative. If our anger and desire for
revenge make us forget our standing before God, we will accomplish nothing but
to open the gate to greater evils. In an era where terrorists have access to
nuclear and biochemical technologies, we have no alternative for responding to
evil except with steady and clear-eyed devotion to justice. If the deaths of
thousands of innocents are so devastating to our spirit, we must not contemplate
a course in which millions will perish.
We are at a crossroads. If we fail the test it poses to our wisdom, our
children and grandchildren will look at us as we look at the terrorists, with
mournful hearts and reproachful eyes. Let us pray fervently we do not fail them.
Frank Creel is Chairman of the Steering Committee of the Independent National Committee,
and the Virginia contact for the Independent American Party.
