- Sep 14, 2004
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Mark Steyn interview with Hugh Hewitt 07.07.05:
Thursday, July 7
Grim day in Great Britain
http://www.radioblogger.com/#000810 (rest of the interview)
As of this posting, the death toll is around 40, the injured are around 700, and the War on Terror has come to London. Mark Steyn joined Hugh Hewitt to start the show. Here's their conversation.
HH: To the roll call that begins with the World Trade Center in 1993, extends through the Embassy bombings, and the Cole, to 9/11, and from 9/11 to Madrid and Bali and Beslan. Now, we add London. To discuss this, I'm joined by Mark Steyn, columnist to the world. Hello, Mark.
MS: Hello, Hugh.
HH: I can't...I guess we cannot say we didn't see it coming.
MS: No, we can't. And really, I think, my sense is that this was a sophisticated operation, and that it was constrained only, really, by the human resources that these terrorists could put into it. To be able to blow up three tube trains simultaneously, more or less, or in other words, that people don't shut down the whole network before you've had a chance to blow up the second and the third, that is actually quite a difficult...should be quite a difficult thing to do. To be able to do it at a time when the United Kingdom is supposedly on the highest alert because it's hosting the G8 Summit, speaks very poorly for British security, I'm afraid. You know, one of the things about 9/11, was that it was 100% success rate for Al Qaeda. They set out to hijack four planes, and they hijacked all four. And if they tried to hijack 100 planes, between 7:30 and 8:30 that morning, I think it's pretty clear that they would have got all of them, too. There was a 100% systemic failure. To have that same 100% failure four years on is not an encouraging thing.
HH: Now, any doubt in your mind, Mark Steyn, and this is a point I want to try to get across on the entire broadcast. If they had had weapons of mass destruction, would they have used them?
MS: Yes. And I think in fairness, you know, to qualify what I just said, that's the only good news here, is that the individual bombs were still relatively small. So, in other words, they killed and injured dozens of people, injured hundreds of them where those bombs exploded. But I think there's no doubt that if they had been able to get dirty nukes, or anything worse than what they were able to have got, they would have used them. These are people who enjoy killing infidels. They enjoy killing schoolchildren. They enjoy killing Red Cross workers. They've just murdered the Egyptian ambassador in Iraq. They're threatening to execute a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. They enjoy killing. And if you are an infidel, you're a target.
HH: Now, I need to play for you something on Air America this morning, a conversation between Al Franken and the Boston Globe's Tom Oliphant, because it tells me we're at danger not just from jihadist murderers, but from a basic failure of intellect on the left, that makes us very, very vulnerable.
Cut number 8, please, Duane.
But all you have to do is look at the pictures from London, imagine the logisitical work that was necessary to arrange four coordinated attacks within an hour, imagine that a few of these people might have come into Britain in recent weeks or months, and you wonder, what use has this allegedly smooth functioning system, erected over the past four years, what, what's its value? That's the short term consideration. And then you look at the longer term political and diplomatic issues that involve the sea from which these people come, and you ask, are we making enough progress on the basic issues that create the environment out of which terrorism emerges...
Franken: Or have we made things worse...
Oliphant: Or have they gone in the wrong direction...
Franken: Right
Oliphant: In other words, imagine whoever did this, let's assume for a second that the authroties are correct, that it appears to be jihadists, um, were they inspired by the American occupation in Iraq? The middle east situation? What was it?
Franken: I mean, Rumsfeld himself said, openly, a couple years ago, we don't know if we are creating more or less in Iraq.
Oliphant: Not only that, he's begun to acknowledge that our very presence in Iraq, ah, ah, one reason that he doesn't want to increase the force level is to increase the magnitude of the American occupation and its impact in Iraq.
Franken: And, on the other hand, they just killed, you know, Zarqawi's people just killed the Egyptian envoy.
Oliphant: Yes they did, and they just missed on a couple of other hits.
Franken: So these are monsters. We are dealing with monsters.
Oliphant: Yes we are, but not very well in my opinion. And, um, what I think is so awful, in the short term, is that we don't see, is this culture that lacks acountability in the United States, just fascinates me.
Franken: You are talking about the Administration?
Oliphant: Yes! And Congress is complicit in this. And I don't care whether you are talking about 9/11 itself, the run-up to the war in Iraq, or the insurgency since then.
Franken: And that's why the [president's] speech [last week] just fried me, because there was not one acknowledgement of a mistake that they've ever made, and it was the same old crap.
Oliphant: If that fries you, then get get ready, because there is going to be a blitz, you watch, from here, ah, about how, despite what happened today, we're in fact making great progress in the international war on terror, to which I say, bunkum."
HH: Stop right there. Mark Steyn, what's wrong with these people?
MS: Well, I think they don't understand here, that when you're dealing with a situation where a guy is trying to kill you, you don't really care what his motivations are. You need to be able to stop him from killing you. And the fact of the matter is, that if you look at it historically, certainly in the United Kingdom, it's been Western dithering that has actually radicalized more Muslims than anything else. For example, the big thing that British Muslims got radicalized over was Bosnia, where the British and the Europeans sat on their hands as Muslims were slaughtered in the hundreds of thousands, in the heart of Europe, until the Americans demanded some action on it. And what happened there was that a whole generation of essentially non-observant westernized Muslims suddenly re-connected with the most ferocious version of their faith. And I think that tells you that in fact, this sort of do-nothing attitude, which comes form the likes of Tom Oliphant and Al Franken and Dick Durbin and sections of the Republican Party, is actually far more damaging in the end, because the Islamists have made a bet that western culture is too weak and too decadent to defend itself. And on the whole, when you listen to Tom Oliphant, you'd have to say they've been proved right.
HH: Oh, absolutely. I'll play more of this for the audience later. I was astonished driving today to hear not confronting evil, but how do we blame Bush for this? And over on some of the websites, the left has gone crazy. That's a different issue, though. What does it do to Great Britain? What's it do to England? Anything remotely like, at least the transient effect as happened in the United States following 9/11?
MS: Well, I think the choice really, for the British, is whether they want to be like the Spaniards, or like the Australians. And on the whole, the initial reaction will be the Australians. The determining factor with terrorism is whether the target decides to allow the terrorists a victory. That's what the Spaniards did. They got bombed, and said to the bombers, okay, you win. The British won't do that. The British people won't do that. But their political class has a long history of treating these things as nuisances, as legalistic things, and trying to finesse the whole thing away, and you can't. This is a long, existential struggle, by people who think that they can win, and that in fifty years time, Europe will be Muslim. They've made that bet, and they think they can win it.
HH: And they think that by going away now for another three months, six months, nine months, and then hitting Rome, or hitting Paris, that eventually, they'll just cause us what? To retreat from Arabia?
MS: Well, they think that...in fact, it's more than a retreat from Arabia, because people who say that this has to do with Iraq are idiotic. The British, in fact, have announced a plan to hand over a large part of their southern sector of Iraq in a year's time to Iraqi forces. So in fact, they were rewarded by announcing a troop withdrawal from Iraq by having the whole of central London blown up. So it's nothing to do with that. It's to do with the fact that these terrorists have a global reach. You know, most terrorism is small and local. IRA terrorism takes place in the British Isles. Basque separatist terrorism takes place in Spain. Islamist terrorism takes place across the planet. It's all one war. And you have to be able to fight it as one war. And unfortunately, it's very difficult to do that, when you have a legalistic approach, that essentially favors the enemy.
HH: You know, Mark Steyn, I've been reading a history of the British Navy, a brand new book, a wonderful book. But there are many times in the history of the U.K., where they did not do obvious things, and as a result, they suffered greatly, including the loss of their colonies in the United States, and other things as well. A hundred years from now, I think people will be asking why did the west allow Iran to get a nuke? Why did they give Gaza over to the laboratories of the Hamas? Do you think we're going to wake up in time?
MS: I hope so, but I know this for certain, that what we call the west at the moment, by which we mean North America and Western Europe and a few other places, we won't hold all of it. Certain countries are lost to us for good. You know, to see Chirac standing next to Tony Blair as they're making their statements this morning, to listen to what he said, this is a man who is deeply compromised in his whole relationship with Islam at its most militant. And I feel that you can't really get serious about it when you have a man like Chirac as President of France, when you have a man like Dick Durbin as Senator of Illinois, and when you have a man like Ken Livingston as Mayor of London. Sooner of later, the electorates in all these places have to get serious about the kind of guys they elect to high office.
http://www.radioblogger.com/#000810 (rest of the interview)
