Political Correctness: The Terrorists' Best Friend

Now more than ever we see the true fruits of political correctness, not only for America, but for Israel in its current conflict. Due to 9/11, political correctness did not play too much of a part in Afghanistan, which is why American troops were so successful there in overthrowing the Taliban and installing a new government. In Iraq, it has been a different story. The Iraqi government was overthrown in short order, primarily due to the unwillingness of Iraqi troops to die for their beloved leader, Saddam Hussein. The Hussein regime was overthrown in what turned out to be the swiftest victorious invation in the history of the world. Bringing stabilization to Iraq is where political correctness has effectively ruined the US cause. At the outset, various military units had "embedded" reporters that travelled around with them, shadowing them and reporting on the action. This was both good and bad: it allowed Americans back home to see what was going on in the war, but when the tough decisions had to be made on the ground, having a reporter there made our soldiers think twice.

When the insurgents started firing out of and storing weapons in mosques, there was a huge debate over whether the US should start bombing those mosques. By firing out of and storing weapons in mosques, the Iraqi insurgents not only violated the Geneva Conventions, but they turned their own religious sites into military targets...yet, due to political correctness, we could not bomb these now-legitimate targets.

It has also become very un-PC to deny that the United States engages in torture. After the Abu-Garaib scandal surfaced, US status as the worst violator of human rights ever became something akin to Gospel truth. Whether Abu Garaib or GTMO, the only PC conclusion is that the US is evil...never mind the fact that terrorist training manuals uncovered in England instructed terrorists to make up allegations of torture...or the fact that Senator Dick Durbin, one of the most outspoken of those condemning GTMO could suddenly find no words of condemnation after he visited GTMO himself and saw what was going on there with his own eyes.

What's more, the political Left in America did everything it could to re-write the Bush Administration's arguments for the war, bringing them all down to a single issue: weapons of mass destruction. When the US military didn't find WMD ("the smoking gun," as the Left called it then), the war suddenly became unjustified, and "Bush lied." Then there was the "16 words" scandal, when President Bush said in his State of the Union Address that British Intelligence had stated that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium ore from the nation of Niger. The evidence that this was incorrect hinged on the informal testimony of Joe Wilson. Now, all other aspects of "Plamegate" aside, in his assessment of the situation, Wilson said that Saddam Hussein had been trying to open commercial ties with Niger. Niger is is a third-world nation. Most of its economy consists of subsistence agriculture. Niger's primary export is uranium, of which it has one of the richest supplies in the world (its second export is livestock...but it's a very distant second). If Saddam Hussein was looking to open up commercial ties with Niger, then he really was trying to acquire uranium ore.

Unfortunately for the Bush Administration, not only is it not politically correct to try and point out that the Administration had several reasons for the invasion of Iraq (WMD, human rights violations including torture, rape, and mass murder, and 12 years of continuous violations of United Nations resolutions), but "Plamegate" made it very un-PC to point out that the British intel that the President referred to in his speech was right.

Here in the United States, we're even too politically correct to secure our own nation! After 9/11, we had a brief moment of unification, and then the politically correct machine ramped right back up again, hindering efforts to bring security against further terrorist attacks. The Patriot Act? Too strict. Forget the fact that citizens of America have temporarily given up certain rights during wartime throughout history in the interests of defeating the enemy, and we are better off for it. Forget the fact that the Clinton Administration's blundering had to be fixed. Secure our ports? Why? Why should Congress do anything substantive to secure our ports when they can just yell and holler and criticize the Bush Administration for not doing anything about it? Secure our borders? Never! We have a responsibility to the poor peoples of the world, and that includes allowing them to cross our border illegally. We should stand up for these "undocumented workers." What? There are drug smugglers and terrorists coming across our border, too? Ya don't say! (It's interesting how the issue of border security, just like President Bush's arguments for the Iraq war, are re-written by liberals to have one, single reason backing them up, when, in fact, conservatives have posited several equally legitimate reasons for a secure border). Unfortunately for America, liberals, particularly liberal leaders, would rather politicize our national security, criticizing any measures taken to make our nation secure, criticizing the Bush administration over measures not taken, defending media outlets such as the New York Times when they reveal covert measures taken, and obfuscating issues surrounding other measures so that they seem unrelated to the issue of national security.


Now there is another crisis in the Middle East, and the Political Correctness movement is doing all that it can to ensure victory for Hezbollah terrorists. Israel is expected to follow the Geneva Conventions to the letter and beyond...because they "stole" the Palestinians' land, which was a very un-PC thing to do. Meanwhile, Hezbollah fighters hide among the civilian population, all the while not allowing those same civilians to leave (because then the terrorists would lose their human shields). They hide in hospitals and mosques and use ambulances as troop transports. They hide behind UN outposts. And all the while, they have been shooting unguided rockets into Israeli towns and villages.

The reason Israel is being condemned so much for its actions in this campaign is because they are fighting war in the classic style: the un-PC style which, while more effective, was usually fought without a 24-hour cable news cycle showing images of dead people constantly. Civilians have been killed in Israel's attacks, and all fingers are pointed at Israel for those deaths, in spite of the fact that the reason civilian areas become military targets is because Hezbollah uses those areas to launch its rockets. Meanwhile, the PC crowd bandies around intelligent-sounding phrases like "disproportionate response" and "collective punishment", seemingly forgetting that the goal of war is to crush the enemy (and maybe Hezbollah shouldn't have provoked Israel if they didn't have the military might to withstand an all-out Israeli attack), and that it is Hezbollah that is turning civilian and UN areas into military targets, not Israel. But it is very un-PC to point that out, and if conservatives start winning arguments, the PC crowd always has the "stolen land" argument to fall back on.

At the root of this current conflict is the fact that Hezbollah is putting civilians into harm's way, and then parading their bodies around in front of the cameras in order to turn world opinion against Israel. And it seems to be working. The deaths of these civilians, the blame for which should be laid squarely on the shoulders of Hezbollah, who are using them for propaganda purposes, are tragic, but are not the fault of Israel. Israel, from the start, has done its best to hit only strategic and military targets. That civilians are in the way is the fault of Hezbollah, who is actively preventing them from leaving. Furthermore, many of the press reports on the number of civilians killed get their numbers from Hezbollah. How many of those civilians were actually Hezbollah fighters is unclear, but what is clear is that if Israel is at fault for anything, it is not doing enough. The most effective means to combatting Hezbollah would be an all-out, hard-and-fast invasion of Lebanon, bringing quick death to any and all Hezbollah militants they find, and searching out and destroying any and all weapons caches found within Lebanon. Unfortunately, though, that would be very, very un-PC.

The conclusion is this: if we fail or are failing in the War on Terror (aka the War on Islamic Fascism), it is because the Politically Correct Left and the Politically Correct culture is forcing us to fight a Politically Correct war...and a Politically Correct war is a war that cannot be won. In order to win this war, we must kill the enemy until they are either entirely dead, or forced to surrender. Israel, by facing up to Hezbollah, is fighting another front in the War on Terror, and they are showing us just how much political correctness enables our enemies. If we want to win the War on Islamic Fascism, we must learn, as a people, that Islamio-fascists are our enemies, and if we don't kill them, they will kill us. It doesn't matter why they hate us. We don't have to understand them beyond their aspirations to convert or kill each and every man, woman, and child on the planet. That may not be politically correct, but it happens to be the state of affairs on planet Earth, and if the politically correct don't come to terms with that, we will all pay the price. As Ann Coulter wrote on September 13, 2001, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."