Too Late?

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.

Joseph Sobran