George and Alberto
I recently received a very kind letter from ToThePointer Hagan Hetz, of the famous Fairview Evergreen Nurseries in Pennsylvania (www.fairviewevergreen.com). He wanted to know what I thought of President Bush’s September 7 address to the nation on Iraq.
OK, Hagan, here it goes. While listening to GW, I was thinking about Alberto Fujimori.
In 1990, the country of Peru was in ruins, decimated by the presidency of a charismatic socialist, Alan Garcia, and the hideous Communist terrorism of Sendero Luminiso, the Shining Path. Peruvians were desperate to end hyperinflation, food rationing, pandemic corruption, and Shining Path slaughters — and thus elected a son of Japanese immigrants, Alberto Fujimori, as their president.
Fujimori ended hyperinflation with pro-capitalist shock therapy, captured Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman, hunted his terrorist followers down and shot them, and put Peru back together again.
Meanwhile, Peru’s northern neighbor, Colombia, seemed unable to rid itself of its own infestation, the Marxist narco-guerrillas of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and related armed groups of drug-running Communists. But instead of electing their version of Fujimori, Colombians opted for their version of Jimmy Carter instead — Andrès Pastrana, who promised to “give peace a chance.”
Pastrana proceeded to meet in the jungle with FARC leader Manuel Marulanda, and agreed to give the guerrillas a 42,000 square-kilometer “safe haven,” in exchange for their promise not to conduct depredations outside of it. The president of a sovereign nation had given a sanctuary the size of Switzerland to Communist drug-runners dedicated to his overthrow.
Fujimori had nothing but contempt for Pastrana and Pastrana knew it. So when Pastrana got a telephone call from Fujimori after the sanctuary announcement, he was stunned by Fujimori’s praise. “Congratulations, Andrès!”, Fujimori exclaimed. “I am overwhelmed by your brilliance. How did you ever get Marulanda to agree to it?”
Pastrana was puzzled. “You mean, Alberto, you actually support giving the FARC a sanctuary?” he asked.
“Of course I do!” Fujimori replied. “Now, instead of their being spread out all over the country, you’ve got them in one place where you can send the Army in and kill them all!”
Pastrana was scandalized. Just like Lefties and Bush-Bashers are over GW’s strategy in Iraq.
Here is the key quote from the President’s September 7 speech:
We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power… We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
In other words, sucker the world’s Jihadis into Iraq and go up against the world’s greatest professional military. Iraq is what Fujimori thought Pastrana’s terrorist sanctuary should have been. We can see now what GW was doing when he issued that much-criticized “Bring ’em on” challenge. The Lefty Media denounced it as macho cowboy bravado. Of course they didn’t get it. The challenge was a lure to draw the Jihadis into Iraq where our soldiers can hunt them down and kill them.
Draw them into Iraq — and away from America. This year’s September 11 passed without a whisper of Al Qaeda barbarism. The brilliant Bush strategy of protecting America from terrorist attacks by giving terrorists too tempting a target to refuse in Iraq is working — in both America and Iraq. Every day things are improving in Iraq and dramatically so. The biggest problem now is the Lefty Media’s refusal to report the good news.
Bush-bashers only want the negative in Iraq, or hype apparent policy reversals such as Colin Powell’s suck-ups to the UN. GW uses Powell as a good-cop while Rummy is the bad-cop, but such suck-ups are fluff and frosting. George W. Bush is a serious man, and he is seriously taking the fight to the enemy. That is something the New York Times and the Democratic Party will never forgive.