Too Late?
October 9, 2001
by Joe Sobran
My, my. Tempers after the 9/11 attack are
high, and I'm getting a lot of angry mail and
e-mail complaining about my negative and
unpatriotic attitude. Some of the more temperate
messages say that while my analysis may be correct,
as far as it goes, I don't offer useful "solutions"
for our present difficulty.
My analysis is the same one I've offered for
years, except that it may be too late to take my
advice. I've said our government's foreign policy,
especially in the Middle East, was asking for
trouble. Until a month ago, this was ignored. Now
that I turn out to have been quite right, some
people want me to explain how to get ourselves out
of trouble.
I really wish I knew. My point was that it's a
lot easier to avoid stepping into an abyss than to
climb out of it. It's a lot easier to avoid making
enemies than to defend yourself when they want to
kill you.
Let me put it another way. Suppose I warn you
that if you smoke, you may get cancer. You go ahead
and smoke; and sure enough, you get cancer. Then
you come to me and say, "Okay, you're so smart --
what's the cure for cancer?" I can only answer: "I
have no idea. If I knew of a cure, I wouldn't have
had to warn you, would I? I'd have told you to go
ahead and smoke, since if you got cancer I could
cure you."
The real irony of the situation is that Osama
bin Laden is essentially demanding that we live by
our own original principles. Not that he knows or
cares a whit for constitutional government, the
counsel of the Founding Fathers, and suchlike
infidel malarkey; but his demand for American
withdrawal from the Middle East would never have
been necessary if we had retained the modest
"republican form of government" that was bequeathed
to us. Instead the United States has become a
global empire.
And of course people like me are "anti-
American" for preferring the old constitutional
republic we've abandoned. And now, in order to
defeat bin Laden, we are moving, and moving
rapidly, even further away from a limited,
decentralized, constitutional system. By executive
order, President Bush has created a second
Department of Defense -- called the Office of
Homeland Security -- to do what the first
Department of Defense was supposed to do, but has
failed to do. And in today's parlance, a "patriot"
is an American who favors this unconstitutional
expansion of government power.
We are told that bin Laden hates freedom and
democracy. But he didn't ask us to ignore the Bill
of Rights, and specifically the Ninth and Tenth
Amendments; our own government, with popular
support, has been doing that on its own initiative.
It's been doing it for a long time, but in wartime
the process accelerates.
So no, I don't have a solution. I knew how to
prevent an incurable disease; but, as I say, it may
be too late for that. The last thing most Americans
want to do now is to restore the original
constitutional republic, with severely limited
powers, and with neither a huge welfare state at
home nor a military colossus abroad.
Does this mean "blaming America first"? I
don't blame the U.S. Constitution, which, if
adhered to, would have kept us out of the Middle
East cauldron that has now scalded us. I don't
blame ordinary Americans, who hardly know what
their government is and does. I don't even blame
our present government for the crimes of bin Laden
and his allies; the blood of thousands is on their
heads.
But I certainly do blame our arrogant, short-
sighted elites for putting this country on a
collision course with simple-minded fanatics who
don't distinguish between the innocent and the
guilty. It was foreseeable and avoidable, on our
own founding principles -- principles to which our
elites have no more attachment than bin Laden does.
The question now is whether the war on
Afghanistan will solve the problem or make it even
worse. It may destroy bin Laden and weaken his
network, without (if we're lucky) creating a wider
war and making us more enemies in the future; but
even if it succeeds in its immediate aims, it
certainly won't take this country back toward
constitutional government. It's already doing just
the opposite.
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