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If Bush goes, I go
By Mark Steyn
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5167&page=1

What's up with Hawaii? Two polls in two Honolulu newspapers
over the weekend showed George W. Bush with a small lead over
John Kerry. That's not supposed to be happening. Hawaii's solidly
Democrat. It's a swing state only in the sense noted by Elvis
(˜And when she starts to sway/I gotta say/She really moves the
grass around'). Neither candidate has bothered looking in on the
joint, or even advertising there. Instead, Senator Kerry's been
frantically bouncing around the Great Lakes - Ohio, Michigan,
Wisconsin. It's gonna kill him if he's got to zip halfway across the
Pacific every other day to shore up his base with a hastily
arranged coconut-shooting expedition on the beach at Waikiki.

One poll would have been easy to dismiss. But two make a trend.

And so, for Bush, as the old song says, 'Hello, Hawaii, How Are
Ya?' Whereas for Kerry, as the even older song says - 1878,
written by Queen Liliuokalani - it's 'Aloha Oe, or Farewell To
Thee'. Since joining the Union, Hawaii has voted for the
Democrat presidential nominee by some of the largest margins in
the land every election day except two: in 1972 they went for
Nixon and in 1984 for Reagan. So one could argue, as some
psephologists are doing, that this is in line with Hawaii's tendency
to vote for Republicans when they're incumbents (George Bush Sr
being the exception to that rule).

But I wonder if something else isn't going on here. Hawaii is,
constitutionally, an American state but, geographically, it's a
bunch of remote islands in the middle of the Pacific. The
distinction is often noted the other way round: on September 11,
we heard a lot about how this was the first attack on 'the
American mainland' in two centuries - i.e., excluding Pearl
Harbor. But perhaps Hawaiians are sensing their distance from the
mainland: perhaps events that seem relatively remote from
Massachusetts - the Bali bombing, say - resonate more strongly
if you're working at a beach hotel in Maui. According to the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin's poll, while Caucasians split more or less
evenly for Bush and Kerry, Filipino-Americans prefer the
President by 56 to 36 per cent: could that be connected with the
ongoing Islamist subversion of the Philippines?

This is all pure speculation on my part, mainly because the editor
turned down my request to spend ten days on a fact-finding
mission to this critical battleground resort ...er, state. Nonetheless,
Bush's last- minute Filipino fillip in the Pacific is typical of
several curious aspects of this campaign that are difficult to
explain according to the usual presidential rules. While I'm
yelling, 'Wake up and smell the coconut milk', Democrats are
pointing to record levels of voter registration which they claim
portends a massive youth vote against Bush. Isn't that what
Howard Dean was banking on just before the Iowa caucus?

Unfortunately, they never showed up. As I remarked at the time, a
lot of the excitable youthful Deaniacs lost their enthusiasm when
they discovered that you couldn't cast your vote by leaving it in
the comments section on Howard's blog.

As if to demonstrate the meaninglessness of their game, last week
the pollsters at Harris released their latest findings in two
versions. Using the model of likely voters that proved accurate in
2000, Bush led Kerry by 51 to 43. However, if you discard that
model and use some new model factoring in a lot of folks who
didn't bother to vote in 2000, Bush leads Kerry only by 48 to 46.

Which is accurate? The first? The second? Neither? Harris can't
say. Is there a third model that shows Kerry leading by 73 to 26?
Doubtful. If there was, some pollster would surely have come up
with it by now. Maybe some other model entirely is the one to
use, but it seems unlikely any one will devise it before next
Tuesday.

So my hunch that that first Harris poll is the correct one is only
that - a hunch that Bush is ahead outside the margin of error.
Unfortunately, on election day, he also has to be ahead outside the
margin of lawyer, which is a tougher call. The Democrats already
have thousands of chad-chasers circling the courthouses in
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico and even New Hampshire, alas. It's
important for Bush to win big enough both to compensate for
Democrat fraud and to deter litigation.

In lively elections such as this the media usually run endless
features on 'angry white men', a demographic to which they're
not notably partial. After 'angry white men' threw out the
Democrats' congressional leadership in the 1994 elections, Peter
Jennings, the exquisitely condescending Canadian who anchors
ABC News, sniffed that 'the voters had a temper tantrum'. But
this time round the angry white men are all on the Democrat side,
and the media seem to think it's perfectly normal.

The other night, for example, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC's
'Senior Political Analyst' (i.e., Democrat hack), discussed John
Kerry with John O'Neill, spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth. This is a flavour of the senior political analysis offered by
the Senior Political Analyst, although for the full effect of his
shrieking over Mr O'Neill's attempted answers you really need
the big 72-inch screen with quadraphonic surround-sound ranting
and digital-quality close-up of his facial contortions:

"That's a lie, John O'Neill! Keep lying, it's all you do!... Lies!...
That's a lie! It's another lie! That's a lie! Absolute lie!... You're
just lying...It's a pack of lies!... He just lied to you! He spews out
this filth!... You liar!... You just spew lies!... I just hate the lies of
John O'Neill. I hate lies...O'Neill's a liar, he's been a liar for 35
years...They lied!... Lies! Just tell me the initials, you liar! Creepy
liar!..."

Etc.

A day after this calm measured display of quiet confidence in
Senator Kerry's campaign, his fellow MSNBC honcho, ol'
Pitchfork Pat Buchanan, read a prepared statement by the network
apologising for its senior analyst going bananas. Out on the street,
meanwhile, angry white men have burgled Republican offices in
Spokane, Washington; lobbed cinder blocks through Republican
offices in Flagstaff, Arizona; shot up Republican offices in
Knoxville, Tennessee; assaulted female Republican students
handing out flyers at the Gophers football game in Minnesota; and
are currently bullying early voting Republicans at polling booths
in Florida. If this campaign went on another two months, they'd
be seizing GOP county chairmen and beheading them on video.

As it is, if Bush wins by a few hundred in Ohio or New Mexico,
these fellows don't seem inclined to take it lying down.

I say 'angry white men' because it's not clear that the Democrats'
ethnic constituencies - blacks and Hispanics - have the Bush
Derangement Syndrome to quite the same degree. In 2000, Bush
got just 9 per cent of the black vote. Recent polls show he's
pulling about 18 per cent. If that holds up on election day, John
Kerry's finished. It will also be interesting to see whether Bush
can peel away any significant chunk of the hitherto loyally
Democrat Jewish vote. Given that he's already damned as a tool
of the Jews by such star ignoramuses of British diplomacy as Sir
Ivor Roberts, Her Majesty's man in Rome, and Sir Crispin Tickell
in these very pages, the least the sinister Hebrews could do is
show a little more enthusiasm for their puppet in the voting booth.

Just a small per cent in the right place - retirees in New Mexico,
for example - would pay off very nicely.

It seems unlikely to me that we're in for another nail-biter of a
chad-dangler. It would be astonishing if, after all the epochal
events of the first term, it all comes down to a 270-268 squeaker
in the electoral college - as if the waters of the mighty storm of
the last three years had briefly subsided to reveal the landscape
utterly unchanged. Most presidential elections aren't close and,
for all the talk of the 50/50 nation, it's not quite that even a divide:
in the 2002 House races, the Republicans took 53.4 per cent, the
Democrats 46.6 per cent. A small sliver of voters concluded that,
though we live in interesting times, the Dems have nothing
interesting to say and parked their votes elsewhere. The polls
didn't pick up that trend until the results started coming in on
election night.

The question now is whether the electorate is closer to the 2002 or
the 2000 model. Andrew Sullivan and the other moulting hawks
claim that, whatever his inner agonising, a President Kerry will
have no choice but to fight the war on terror as robustly - if more
smartly and multilaterally - than Bush. This rather overlooks the
fact that the strongest force in global affairs is inertia. It seems
most probable that, underneath the newly restored polite veneer of
international relations, everyone's attention will wander and the
league of nuclear rogue states will expand and so will the list of
freelance players in their Rolodexes; and, while John's hosting
Jacques at some summit to celebrate the new Franco-American
entente, something will happen and we'll have to learn the lessons
of 9/11 all over again.

So, taking a flyer on a guy who's spent 30 years siding with the
Vietcong, the Soviets, the Sandinistas, the Commies in Grenada
and - vis-à-vis Kuwait in 1990 - Saddam Hussein? No thanks.

My sense is that the 2002 model is still operative, and that the
Democrats and the media, talking to each other in their mutually
self-deluding cocoon, have overplayed the Bush-bashing. Next
Tuesday the President will win the states he won last time, plus
Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Maine's Second
Congressional District to put him up to 301 electoral votes.

Minnesota? Why not? Nudge him up to 311 electoral votes. Oh,
and what the hell, give him Hawaii: that's 315. The Republicans
will make a net gain of two seats in the Senate, one of which will
bring with it the scalp of the Democrats' leader, Tom Daschle.

Despite distancing himself from Kerry and running ads showing
him and Bush embracing, Daschle's floundering in South Dakota,
and his lugubrious mien will be even more lugubriouser within the
week. Look for a handful of Republican House gains, too. And
Democrats tearing their hair out - or John Kerry's and John
Edwards's hair, if they can penetrate the styling gel.

The above prediction needs to be able to withstand Democrat
fraud, which I'm nervous about. If Tuesday goes off as smoothly
as the Afghan election, we'll be very lucky.

Usually after making wild predictions I confidently toss my job on
the line and say, if they don't pan out, I'm outta here. I've done
that a couple of times this campaign season - over Wes Clark
(remember him?) - but it almost goes without saying in these
circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it
would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush
and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by
the people of American unexceptionalism - that they are a
slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom
of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly
the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass
myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical
forces at play. Obviously that doesn't bother a lot of chaps in this
line of work - Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert 'Mister Robert' Fisk,
etc., - and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years
doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of
sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith
in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe
it would be time to try something else - organising coups in
Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher is alleged to have
allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the
Presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don't think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a
choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of
September 10. I bet on reality.

The Power of Will
Winning still matters.
Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200410290825.asp

The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the struggle. Indeed, the Middle East, for all its revenue from inflated oil prices, has a smaller economy than Spain's. It has never won a war against a Western power. Arab nations lost in 1967, 1973, 1991, and 2004. Hence the fatwas must go back to millennia-old glories about Saladin, the siege of Cyprus, the Moors, and the Caliphate — about the last examples of Islamic victories over the West. The Middle East's only successes in 1956, or during the 1980s in Afghanistan, were due to either a United States' veto of British operations or the importation of American stinger missiles. The Iranian hostage crisis, Lebanon, and Mogadishu were Western retreats, not battlefield defeats — grievous, yes, but hardly arbiters of relative military advantage. The present terrorists are a nasty sort, but they are still not the SS or millions of Tojo's crack Japanese troops; nor do they have the organization or the skill of the Vietcong or NVA. These are losing hundreds of jihadists every week in Iraq and have failed to retake Afghanistan.

So why do the now-surrounded and desperate insurgents in Fallujah think they can prevail, especially after the rout of the Taliban in six weeks and the implementation of a consensual government in less than three years in Afghanistan? In a word, the jihadists and their fellow-travelers are once again convinced that this time it will be different because the West, and the United States in particular, have neither the patience nor the will to endure their primeval killing of a post-Saddam Iraq.

Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military. Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it. In a globalized world of instant communications, a bin Laden or Zarqawi trusts that most of us would prefer to take out the garbage than watch a blood-curdling video clip of yet another Western hostage kneeling before a half-dozen psychopaths as they begin to saw off his vertebrae. They hope that we the sickened ask, "Why waste our billions and hundreds of lives on such primordial folk?" — wrongly equating 26 million who wish freedom with a few thousand criminals and terrorists.

The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify the trauma and savagery of their attack — and do so often enough to make 300 million of us become exhausted with the entire "mess." The message of Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our will, is the target.

Al Qaeda and their appendages in Iraq do not know the requisite numbers of dead or wounded Americans necessary to break the resolve of the United States, but brag that with 1,000 fatalities they are nearing their goal — and thus a few more will give them a change of administration, schedules for withdrawal, an abandoned interim Iraqi government ripe to pluck, and a Lebanon-like paradise to reconstruct the lost sanctuary of Afghanistan. In other words, they are desperate for a reprieve from their looming destruction. Al Qaeda — "the Base" — without a base is not much of a terrorist organization since its own proud appellation has become an ironic joke.

Despite the three-week victory over the Baathists, there is some reason for the Islamists' optimism that they can break our will — given a decade of nonchalance after the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar towers, the USS Cole, and an assortment of other unanswered murders in the 1990s. The April withdrawal from Fallujah — whether due to worry about Iraqi civilian or our own casualties — was a grievous blow. The Spanish debacle was an even worse Western defeat. Killing about 200 Spaniards got a Socialist and anti-American prime minister elected and an almost-immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq — even though such appeasement was met not with thanks but with a subsequent attempt to blow up the judges of the Spanish High Court.

Meanwhile, here at home, John Kerry talks about timetables for departure and cessation of the present course. His supporters on the extreme left from George Soros to Michael Moore blame George Bush, not Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, for the current televised butchery. There is a reason why candidate Kerry now painfully insists that he would not precipitously withdraw — because everyone else worldwide, from a Chirac and Schroeder to Arafat and most of the Arab world — suspect that, in fact, he will.

An American flight would shame Tony Blair and John Howard, leave eastern Europe to the bullying of Paris and Berlin, destroy the Iraq interim government, take the heat off Arab autocracies, and send a message that American policy was back to Clintonian-like law enforcement, replete with jargon such as "sensitive" and "nuisance." It does not matter what Kerry would "really" wish to do, since the last two years of campaign rhetoric have earned him the worldwide reputation of the Bush antithesis, and thus his victory would, rightly or wrongly, be interpreted as a complete rejection of toppling Saddam and fostering a constitutional government in his place. His supporters and financial backers on the left would not tolerate anything less than a withdrawal.

Because of our astounding weaponry and superb military, the terrorists in Fallujah count on the help of such postmodern Western guilt and internecine blame to supply constraints on the American military every bit as effective as the old Soviet nuclear deterrent. Again, a Michael Moore — or so they believe — is worth an entire jihadist cell. Our parents were terrified that, should America resort to military force abroad, they would be nuked; we are even more scared that our lethality will earn us the parlor disdain of the French and Germans. The terrorists are assured that the Western press is obsessed with Abu Ghraib, but not at all with Saddam's necropolis or their own slaughter of innocents. They suspect that those who endured Omaha and Utah or scaled Suribachi are long sleeping in their graves, and that a few thousand creeps in Fallujah scare us more than a quarter million in the Bulge did our parents.

So yes, it is a strange war. Jihadists are amused that a few American soldiers, worried over their safety, can refuse orders, call 7,000 miles home in anguish, and expect that their complaints, handed over by Mom to the local TV station, will turn up on national cable news before their own commanders in the field even know what is up. A teenaged terrorist with a RPG, being filmed as he is killed, is every bit as an effective soldier through his globally broadcast death than had he lived on to hit his target Humvee with his rocket in the first place. We don't ask, "Which school-builder or power-restorer was he trying to obliterate?" but rather "Why did we have to kill him?"

When the Islamists behead a tearful Englishman or American, it is more likely that his surviving dad or sibling back home will be on television all over the Middle East within minutes damning Tony Blair or George Bush, without a word of censure for the Dark-Age head-loppers. After all, we are not Nepalese who storm the local mosque and put the fear of God into Islamists when they butcher our own. We are more likely to be frightened, turn on ourselves, and condemn some American somewhere who cannot stop "this."

But cannot our self-induced forbearance vanish as soon as we decide enough is enough? Should the American government ignore the EU hysteria, tell Kofi Annan to worry about his son's crooked shenanigans and not Americans' killing terrorists, and simply take Fallujah — as part of a larger effort to correct the laxity of the past and finish the war — then we would surely win. The fallout would be as salutary as our present restraint is disastrous. Like the murderous Pakistani madrassa zealots who flocked to Tora Bora only to be incinerated, Fallujah would not stand as a mecca for the jihadists, but an Armageddon better to watch on television than die in.

The truth is that war remains the same the more it changes. For all the technological gadgetry, foreign landscapes, baffling global communications, and endemic pacifism of the present age, war is still a struggle of the human spirit. The morality, materiel, and technology are all on our side. But we are confused in this postmodern age that such advantages should automatically equate to near-instantaneous and costless victory as they sometimes do in Panama and Serbia — as if the heart of the medieval caliphate next to Syria and Iran, replete with terrorism and a 30-year past of mass murder, is a mere Haiti or Grenada.

In the heart of even the most ardent liberal lies a dormant but still alive desire for victory, and in every strutting hawk there lingers the fear of abject defeat. Had we secured Iraq by June 2003, the sputtering Kerry candidacy would by now have been faulting Bush for not going into Iran. But blink, falter, and witness beheadings and hostage-taking on television, and Kerry can reinvent himself as the apostle of peace all along — and a bizarre group of creepy people come out of the woodwork professing Biblical wisdom about George Bush's purported catastrophes.

In short, the more sophisticated, the more technological, the more hyped and televised war becomes, the more pundits and strategists warn us about "fourth-generational," "asymmetrical," "irregular," and "new dimensional" conflict, the more we simply forget the unchanging requisite of the will to win that trumps all other considerations. John Kerry has no more secret a plan than George Bush — because there is no secret way to pacify Iraq other than to kill the killers, humiliate their cause through defeat, and give the credit of the victory, along with material aid and the promise of autonomous freedom, to moderate Iraqis. Victory on the battlefield — not the mysterious diplomacy of "wise men," or German and French sanction, or Arab League support — alone will allow Iraq an opportunity for humane government.

Meanwhile, we all vote. One candidate urges us to return to the mindset of pre-September 11 — law enforcement dealing with terrorists as nuisances. He claims the policies that have led to an absence of another attack at home, the end of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, idealistic efforts to extend freedom, and radical and positive changes in Pakistan, Libya, the West Bank, and the Gulf have made things worse. In contrast, the other reminds us that we are in a real war against horrific enemies and are no longer passive targets, but will fight the terrorists on their home turf, win, and leave behind humane government. No choice could be clearer. It is America's call.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.