Freedom's Friends

Civilized world must act to liberate Iraq
By William J. Bennett
March 23, 2003


     Three weekends ago, millions of demonstrators across the globe protested on behalf of ''human rights.'' Their marches, slogans, placards and speeches did not declaim against Saddam Hussein, did not cite the human rights reports detailing his tyranny and torture, did not take into account the plaints of Iraqis fortunate enough to live in exile. Rather, they protested the United States and the United Kingdom and their efforts to topple Saddam and liberate Iraq.


     It is appropriate to remember President Abraham Lincoln's lament: ''The world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty.' '' With Saddam flouting international law, and President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair attempting to enforce it, portrayals of Bush as Adolf Hitler--as we saw and heard in the protests--betray an ignorance of liberty, an ignorance of right and wrong, an ignorance of common sense. Because Bush and Blair put together a coalition of countries to oust Saddam, they are labeled the warmongers and tyrants. We live in a confusing time indeed.


     Lincoln described liberty by a useful analogy: ''The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.'' Lincoln made it clear who the sheep was and who the wolf was. It is equally important to recognize who the liberator is. Those who march against the United States and the United Kingdom today, those who condemn Bush and Blair and remain silent when it comes to Saddam, are in league with the wolf's view that the shepherds are destroying liberty. The people of Iraq will soon know what Afghans know. The true wolf was devouring Afghans, the true shepherd saved them.


     It is worth remembering what those in the former Soviet Republics know and what the anti-American Western street has forgotten: It was, and is, U.S. and British resolve that truly liberates the oppressed and that defends the lives and liberties of the free against the appetites and ill will of the world's dictators.


     In 1998, President Bill Clinton stated, ''What if he [Saddam] fails to comply [with disarmament] and we fail to act? He will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then go right on building up his arsenal. Someday, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use that arsenal.'' Last year, former Vice President Al Gore stated, ''[W]e know that he has stored away secret supplies of biological weapons and chemical weapons throughout his country.''


     It is not Bush who woke up one day to discover that Saddam was making and harvesting weapons of mass destruction. Yet it is Bush who is blamed for doing something about it. Saddam may be mad, but he is not a scientist. He does not collect chemical and biological weapons for mere pleasure and intrigue. Just ask the survivors of Halabja.



     Those who protest against the United States are legatees of those who protested in the 1980s, when we fought the focus of evil then, the Soviet Union. But ask a former Soviet, or East Berliner, if he is better off now than he was, say, 15 years ago. Ask a Nicaraguan. Ask a Bosnian Muslim. U.S. resolve can be thanked for all that, even as those who protested our defense and military posture marched in favor of appeasement. The only logical conclusion one can reach is that for the protesters today, weapons in the hands of the United States are to be met with outrage while weapons in the hands of Saddam are to be met with silence.


     We seek to liberate Iraq today--not only because for Saddam ''[t]orture is not a method of last resort in Iraq, it is often the method of first resort,''according to Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's director of Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council. We seek to liberate Iraq because after Sept. 11, 2001, we were put on notice that the civilized can no longer live in a bubble and hope for the best.


     In Iraq as in other contemporary situations, the responsibility to act has been ours because the ability has been ours. The responsibility has been ours because oppressed people look to us for their deliverance. There is a duty in being the nation that Abraham Lincoln, speaking of our Declaration of Independence, called ''a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.'' That is who we happen to be. And it is an honor.


     William J. Bennett, chairman of Americans for Victory Over Terrorism (www.avot.org), is a former secretary of Education and author of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, re-released and updated in paperback (Regnery, 2003).


This article taken from the Chicago Sun-Times, March 23, 2003.







Allies, Not 'Counterweights'

By Ms. Palacio
March 25, 2003



     The EU has an extremely important role to play on the international scene, and Spain's support for a common foreign and security policy has been and remains unswerving. However, such a European foreign policy cannot be focused on the maintenance of a balance of world power, but rather on the values and objectives we share with the United States, summarized in the notion of freedom. As our Cervantes had Don Quixote say, liberty is "one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon Man. No treasures the earth contains or the sea conceals can be compared to it. For liberty one can rightfully risk one's life."


     Ms. Palacio is foreign minister of Spain.


The above excerpted from the Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2003.




An American Story
Review & Outlook



     You don't have to tell Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani what Arab- and Muslim Americans are going through in the aftermath of the World Trade Center killings. Invited by the president to attend the prayer service at the National Cathedral, Sheik Kabbani was told by U.S. officials on the way out that he might do better to avoid airports by driving back home to Detroit. That is how he came to be on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, where he found himself subjected to obscene gestures from other drivers and motorists and pulled over by a police officer who said he was checking out something "fishy."


     What lends this tale a bitter irony is that Sheik Kabbani is not part of the victimist choir that views such ugly incidents as evidence of an America just itching to break out the white sheets and hoods. To the contrary, this is a man worth listening to. Indeed, if people had listened to Sheik Kabbani before, things today might have been very different -- not least for the thousands of innocent American families now burying their dead and the equally innocent Muslim Americans who find themselves blamed for it.


     Mr. Kabbani is a Muslim scholar and leader of the Naqshbandi order of Sufis in North America. Back in January 1999, when we thought the terrorists had given the Twin Towers their best shot and lost, Sheik Kabbani went to the State Department to deliver an address titled "Islamic Extremism: A Viable Threat to U.S. National Security" (now posted at https://www.islamicsupremecouncil.org/index3.htm). In what today appears to be almost prophetic language, he said that an extremist ideology had openly declared war on America; he noted that extremist elements were well financed by "outside regimes;" and he specifically warned about thousands of "suicide bombers being trained by Bin Laden in Afghanistan who are ready to move to any part of the world and explode themselves."


     So how was Sheik Kabbani rewarded for his courage? Well, a group of organizations denounced him, ranging from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Circle of North America to the American Muslim Council -- and issued a statement twisting his words and portraying him as feeding Islamophobia rather than fighting it. But the sheik has stood his ground. In sharp contrast to a coalition of "progressive" pastors who have now issued a statement telling Muslims "don't talk to the FBI," the sheik emphasized on the "Today" show last week how important it was to cooperate with authorities, to help them get the men who have so monstrously blasphemed the Islamic faith.


     Indeed, as we peer into the future, we'd say that, far from looking to purge our shores of our immigrant citizens from the Mideast, America is going to need them. And we need them not simply to cooperate with authorities but to become authorities themselves, bringing to the nation's police forces, military services and intelligence agencies the skills only Arab- and Muslim Americans can provide about a critical part of the world we clearly don't yet understand.


     The difficulty, Sheik Kabbani tells us, is that voices such as his have trouble being heard because the extremists have been successful at "hijacking the mike." But he reminds us, too, that while many of the self-appointed spokesmen for American Islam have verbally attacked him, thousands of ordinary American Muslims have phoned, faxed or e-mailed their support. In the aftermath of the worst attack on our home soil in American history, we might do well to heed a leader who did his best to warn us before.


This article from the Wall Street Journal, Friday, September 28, 2001.