Tag Archives: Mightier Pen

Watch this space #1: Mark Helprin dissects the China threat

(Washington, D.C.): Official Washington and much of the rest of the world may be focused on the War on Terror and the near-term implications it holds for America’s security, economic and strategic interests. This preoccupation risks missing altogether – or at least misconstruing – other dangers looming on the horizon.

Preeminent among these is the threat posed by an increasingly assertive, rich and ambitious Communist China. Fortunately, the implications of an ever-more worrisome PRC have not escaped the attention and searing insights of internationally renowned author and Wall Street Journal contributing editor Mark Helprin.

With characteristic perspicacity and eloquence, Mr. Helprin – the recipient of the Center for Security Policy’s 2001 “Mightier Pen” Award – treated readers of the Journal to a most timely reminder of the potential menace posed by a rising China. For example, he observes:

    With its new economic resources China has embarked upon a military traverse from reliance upon mass to devotion to quality, with stress upon war in space, the oceans, and the ether — three areas of unquestioned American superiority. China is establishing its own space-based assets and developing the means to counter others. It would neutralize American strategic superiority as the aging U.S. arsenal is reduced and it augments its own. Its submarine program is directed to the deployment of its strategic force and denial of successively greater bands of the Pacific — eventually reaching far out into blue water — to the safe transit of American fleets. It sees America’s advantage in informational warfare both as something to be copied and as a weak link that, by countermeasure, can be shattered. In short, it harbors major ambitions.

The Center commends Mr. Helprin for his latest contribution to the security policy debate — and commends that contribution to all who have a stake in protecting freedom from the challenges it will face in the years to come.

Beyond the Rim
By MARK HELPRIN
The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2004

From the beach at Santa Monica on a clear day in fall, with 3,000 miles of this country invisible at one’s back, the Pacific horizon is a precisely etched line empty of event and set in alluring color. But beyond the rim lie two things now tightly interwoven: China, and the destiny of the United States.

There never was and never will be a “unipolar” world. The existence of one pole being conditioned upon the existence of another, the notion of such a thing is as sloppy conceptually as the thinking of the “leading international relations specialist,” recently quoted in the Washington Post, who lamented that “The border . . . is becoming a dividing line.”

The short unhappy life of whatever passed for unipolarity is emphatically over not merely because the strategy of the moment has allowed a small force of primitive insurgents in Iraq to occupy a large proportion of American military energy, but because China is now powerful and influential enough, at least as a “fleet-in-being,” to make American world dominance inconceivable. And in the longer term, China is bent upon and will achieve gross military and economic parity with the United States.

* * *

China is methodically following the example of Meiji Japan in moving from a position of inferiority to one of military equality with far superior rivals, by deliberate application of a striking phenomenon of economics that is to the military relation between states what the golden section is to architecture. Consider a hypothetical country of 10 million people, and a $1 billion GNP, that devotes 10% of its $100 per capita GNP to defense. The people are left with $90/year, suffering one day in 10 to support a $100 million military outlay. But after 18 years of 8% economic growth and 2% population increase per annum, it becomes a hypothetical country of 14 million souls, a GNP of $4 billion, and a per capita GNP of $285. If the people retain only three-quarters of this, they are still almost two and a half times richer than they were before, and the military budget can safely rise to $1 billion. Thus, the GNP increases by a factor of four, per capita GNP more than doubles, and defense outlays swell by a factor of 10.

The Meiji called their variant of this, Fukoku Kyohei, “rich country, strong arms.” To contemporary Americans and Europeans accustomed to low-single-digit economic growth and periodic recession, an 8% annual growth rate over 18 years might seem too hypothetical. But between 1980 and the present, China’s GDP has grown at an average annual rate, like the 9.7% of 2004’s first half, of just under 10%. It is probably safe to say that any diminution of real growth as a result of inflation is roughly offset by gains in the unreported black economy, and clearly ironic that while in China a bunch of former Maoists appreciates the potentiality of high growth, in America the left thinks it unworthy of putting the nanny state at risk.

China’s steady expansion is impressive enough, but of greater significance is the 16.2% growth, in 2003, of the industrial/technical sector that has made China a mercantile power and not only contributes to social stability by providing consumer goods but assimilates and replicates Western military technology. Though the data vary according to source and time, they are all of the same complexion. In the CIA’s reasonable analysis, China’s is the world’s second largest economy, with a GDP, expressed in purchasing power parity (PPP), of $6.5 trillion. The resultant $5,000 per capita PPP GDP, given the risks of China’s transition to a market economy and the concomitant instabilities to be avoided, leaves less room at the margin for military expenditure than if stability were not in question, and China in 2003 devoted only 3.5% of GDP to defense. This moderation is simultaneously an effort to preserve social peace and a realistic view of the effective pace of military reform and technological transformation. Nonetheless, in 2003 at least $60 billion went to defense, thrice the expenditure of 10 years before.

That sum, while less than a fifth of American outlays other than the costs of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, does not reflect adjustment for PPP, which, though not as powerful a multiple as in the civilian sector (due to the nature of military goods, and procurement abroad) should boost equivalent Chinese military spending to at least $100 billion. Imagine then if China, as it easily could, were to double its GDP in the next eight or nine years, and, taking advantage of a parallel increase in gains per capita, double the defense share of GDP. It would then have (PPP) defense outlays roughly equivalent to ours.

China, however, moves with great deliberation, and many signs suggest that it is aiming for parity in 20 or more years time and in synchrony with advances in technology and military doctrine.

China is at risk if, as is its wont periodically, it runs off the rails into civil war, anarchy, or revolution. But the true counter-revolutionary import of the 11th Party Congress reforms of 1978 is that, unlike the former Soviet Union, China is making its transition to the free market in careful strides so as not to be forced backwards. Though neither ideal nor democratic, its incremental economic and policy choices are carefully calibrated, redolent of compromise, and configured for the survival and stability of the state. And the more time that passes, the more the development of its internal markets will protect its now mercantile economy from the gyrations of world markets.

With its new economic resources China has embarked upon a military traverse from reliance upon mass to devotion to quality, with stress upon war in space, the oceans, and the ether — three areas of unquestioned American superiority. China is establishing its own space- based assets and developing the means to counter others. It would neutralize American strategic superiority as the aging U.S. arsenal is reduced and it augments its own. Its submarine program is directed to the deployment of its strategic force and denial of successively greater bands of the Pacific — eventually reaching far out into blue water — to the safe transit of American fleets. It sees America’s advantage in informational warfare both as something to be copied and as a weak link that, by countermeasure, can be shattered. In short, it harbors major ambitions.

When China was great, it sent out military expeditions by land and sea into a large part of what was for it the known world, and despite robotic protestations to the contrary it will do so again. It has already begun what it itself might at one time have called imperial expansion, driven not by ideology but the need for markets and raw materials. Major crude oil importation, begun only recently, is one-quarter the volume of U.S. crude imports, leading China to compete for petroleum not only in the Middle East but in South America and at least six countries in Africa. This it can do with its immense $400 billion balance of payments reserves and ability to supply high quality manufactured goods at all levels to its potential oil suppliers.

An example of China’s growing power to interfere with crucial U.S. interests is the new Sino-Persian $100 billion trade agreement, the perfect complementarity of which — manufactures and military goods in exchange for oil and Islamic endorsement — is echoed by the fact that, at present, the chief American counter to Iranian nuclear weapons development is the threat of a trade embargo, which China need not observe, through the Security Council, over which China has a veto. A clue to how the world may yet divide is China’s willingness, like America’s in the Cold War, to take less-than-perfect states under its wing without a care for their moral improvement. In fact, China must be delighted (what rival would not be?) that America’s war aims in the Middle East are conditioned upon reordering the Islamic world, the most inconvertible of all divisions of mankind. Although U.S. intervention is obviously required, the nature and scope of the enterprise as stated is a gift to China worth many years of effort.

This and a persistent blindness in regard to China’s probable trajectory are wounds gratuitously self-inflicted, for no country, ever, has had both the mass and income at the margin that the United States has now, but rather than anticipate, meet, and discourage China’s military development, as it easily could, the U.S. has chosen to ignore it. America’s metiers are the sea, the air, and space, and with one exception our major allies in Asia are island nations. These factors could be combined to keep China on the straight and narrow for generations longer than otherwise, but America’s vision has been knocked out of focus by its ideals, and when China does develop the powerful expeditionary forces that it will need to protect its far- flung interests, the U.S. will probably have successfully completed transforming its military into a force designed mainly to fight terrorism and insurgencies.

* * *

Though the dangers of epidemics and terrorist nuclear attacks are now obviously pre-eminent, rising behind them is a newer world yet. This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its center, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America’s equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.

Mr. Helprin , a Journal contributing editor and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, is the author, most recently, of “The Pacific and Other Stories,” just out from Penguin.
Corrections & Amplifications:

China’s crude oil imports are one-quarter the volume of U.S. crude imports and its balance of payments reserves is $400 billion. Due to a transmission error, both of these figures were misstated in an earlier version of this commentary.

2004 Mightier Pen Award: William F. Buckley, Jr.

The Mightier Pen Award was presented on November 23, 2004 to William F. Buckley, Jr., a tireless defender of the principles of freedom and democracy and advocate of the philosophy of peace through strength.

Renowned essayist and author Norman Podhoretz introduced the guest of honor award during a luncheon at the 21 Club in New York by saying,

… Bill Buckley is one of the very best writers of English prose we have in America, or anywhere else the English language holds sway. It is a prose capable of manifold marvels–marvels of exposition, marvels of lyrical description, marvels of evocative portraiture, marvels of wicked humor and sly wit. Best of all, perhaps, are the marvels of devotional incantation. Here is one small sample, a particular favorite of mine:

… if there were nothing to complain about, there would be no post-Adamite mankind. But complaint is profanation in the absence of gratitude. There is much to complain about in America, but that awful keening noise one unhappily gets so used to makes no way for the bells, and these have rung for America, are still ringing for America, and for this we are obliged to be grateful. To be otherwise is wrong reason, and a poetical invitation to true national tribulation. I must remember to pray more often, because Providence has given us the means to make the struggle, and in this respect we are singularly blessed in this country, and in this room.

So indeed we are, in no small part thanks to William F. Buckley Jr.’s mighty pen, whose victories over the thousand swords that have leaped from their scabbards against him and his work it is our great honor to honor today.”

Over 100 people were in attendance at the luncheon – including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the 2003 Mightier Pen recipient, A.M. Rosenthal, writer Midge Decter – to salute one of the most influential thinkers and writers of our time.

 

 

2003 Mightier Pen Award: Abe Rosenthal

Legendary journalist and editor Abraham Rosenthal, over the course of his career, has been one of their most impassioned, articulate and effective champions of the world’s oppressed, suffering, and all those who love freedom and strive for its expansion around the globe. Today the Center for Security Policy is proud to thank him for his work and honor him as the 2004 Mightier Pen Award recipient.

Abe Rosenthal, as he was known to his friends, and A.M. Rosenthal as he was known to untold millions who admired his handiwork at the New York Times, in his syndicated column and recently as as a columnist for the New York Daily News is a truly extraordinary human being. He epitomizes the driven beat reporter, the fearless and intrepid foreign correspondent, the take-no-prisoners editor and the impassioned author of innumerable columns. In every position, he unflinchingly speaks the truth to power and “calls ’em like he sees ’em.”

He has spoken tirelessly for the victims of genocidal totalitarians, those who were often inconvenient and forgotten by policy-makers and those who had no representation in the councils of government. He savages phony solutions to real problems and their perpetrators. He has been a conscience for the time and, for serving as a hair-shirt, has been subjected to criticism and even ridicule by those he properly made uncomfortable.

The world is a better place for Abe Rosenthal’s long, steadfast efforts to make it so.

The War for Islam

Two columns should be considered absolutely required reading by every American concerned with their personal security and the dangers we may face as a nation in the future. While the two have slightly different focuses — the first, by Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Charles Krauthammer in todays Washington Post, and the second, by syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg — they have a common theme: The United States and the Western world more generally face a serious, determined and dangerous adversary in radical Islamists. But so does the rest of the Muslim world.

Dr. Krauthammer — who was recognized in 2002 for his extraordinary writing with the Center for Security Policys Mightier Pen award — explores this reality through the prism of the current McCarthyist attack against President Bushs nominee for the U.S. Institute of Peaces Board of Directors, Daniel Pipes.

Pipes has for years been warning that the radical element within Islam posed a serious and growing threat to the United States.During the decades when America slept, Pipes was among the very first to understand the dangers of Islamic radicalism. In his many writings he identified it, explained its roots — including, most notably, Wahhabism as practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia — and warned of its plans to infiltrate and make war on the United States itself.Sept. 11 demonstrated his prescience. Like most prophets, he is now being punished for being right. The main charge is that he is anti-Muslim. This is false. Pipes is scrupulous in making the distinction between radical Islam and moderate Islam. Indeed, he says, Militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.(1)

Mr. Greenberg examines the topic from an historical perspective — observing correctly that, as in the past, the civilized world may face a multifaceted threat but it should be under no illusion of the motivation its enemies share:

Today, [as in pre-World War II era], Western civilization faces a common enemy. That danger, too, goes by different names — a sign that we have yet to get a handle on the ideological threat out there. But whether it’s called Islamism, radical Islam, or Islamofascism, it is all much the same. These haters may have their factional rivalries, but one driving force unites all of them: a fierce resentment of the West, of modernity, of tolerance, of any society that lets people be themselves.

As Messrs. Krauthammer and Greenberg fully appreciate, Americans — and those who govern them — must urgently comprehend the threat Islamists pose to our society, our freedoms and our safety. In doing so, they should reject as legitimate interlocutors on behalf of peaceable, tolerant and law-abiding Muslims the self-declared Muslim-American and Arab-American organizations that associate with, support or simply apologize for the Islamists, especially those bankrolled or otherwise abetted by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

THE TRUTH ABOUT DANIEL PIPES

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 15 August 2003

The president has nominated Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace. This has resulted in a nasty eruption of McCarthyism. Pipes’s nomination has been greeted by charges of Islamophobia, bigotry and extremism. Three Democratic senators (Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd and Tom Harkin) have shamefully signed on to this campaign, with quasi-Democrat Jim Jeffords tagging along.

Who is Daniel Pipes? Pipes is a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He has taught history and Islamic studies at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is a scholar and the author of 12 books, four of which are on Islam. Unlike most of the complacent and clueless Middle East academic establishment, which specializes in the brotherhood of man and the perfidy of the United States, Pipes has for years been warning that the radical element within Islam posed a serious and growing threat to the United States.

During the decades when America slept, Pipes was among the very first to understand the dangers of Islamic radicalism. In his many writings he identified it, explained its roots — including, most notably, Wahhabism as practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia — and warned of its plans to infiltrate and make war on the United States itself.

Sept. 11, 2001, demonstrated his prescience. Like most prophets, he is now being punished for being right. The main charge is that he is anti-Muslim. This is false. Pipes is scrupulous in making the distinction between radical Islam and moderate Islam. Indeed, he says, “Militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.”

The dilemma for a free society is that radical Islam lives within the bosom of moderate Islam. The general Islamic community is the place radicals can best disguise themselves and hide. Mosques are institutions that they can exploit to advance the cause. These are obvious truths.

But when Pipes states them, he is accused of bigotry. For example, critics thunder against Pipes’s assertion that “mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.”

This is bigoted? How is this even controversial? Wahhabists and other radical Islamists have established mosques and other religious institutions in dozens of countries. Some of these — most notoriously in Pakistan — had become the locus of not just radical but terrorist activity. Where do you think Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was radicalized and recruited? In a Buddhist monastery? He was hatched in the now notorious Finsbury Park mosque in London.

Does that mean that all mosques or a majority of mosques or even many mosques harbor such activity? No. But it does mean any given mosque is more likely to harbor such activity than any given synagogue or church.

The attack on Pipes for stating this obvious truth is just another symptom of the absurd political correctness surrounding Islamic radicalism. It is the same political correctness that prohibits ethnic profiling on airplanes. We are all supposed to pretend that we have equal suspicions of terrorist intent and thus must give equal scrutiny to a 70-year-old Irish nun, a 50-year-old Jewish seminarian, and a 30-year-old man from Saudi Arabia. Your daughter is on that plane: To whom do you want the security guards to give their attention?

President Bush is considering bypassing the Senate and giving Pipes a recess appointment while Congress is out of town. For Bush, this would be an act of characteristic principle and courage. The problem, however, is that such an act makes the appointment look furtive. Worse, it lets the McCarthyites off too easy.

Pipes’s appointment would be a great asset to the U.S. Institute of Peace. But it would be an even greater asset to the country to bring the Democrats’ surrender to political correctness into the open. Let them declare themselves. Let the country see that for some of the most senior Democratic leaders, speaking the truth about Islamic radicalism is a disqualification for serious office.

Pipes’s nomination has been endorsed by, among others, Fouad Ajami, Walter Berns, Donald Kagan, Sir John Keegan, Paul Kennedy, Harvey Mansfield and James Q. Wilson.

Who are you going to believe? Such unimpeachable and independent scholars? Or a quartet of craven senators?

FOES’ NAMES MAY DIFFER, BUT THE WAR IS THE SAME

By Paul Greenberg

Arizona Daily Star, 13 August 2003

A couple of phrases in a wire story last week stuck in the memory and the craw. They leapt out of a dispatch about the attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, and both reflect a common misunderstanding about the nature of terrorism in today’s world:

The assumption that at it can be sliced and diced, and one kind of terror distinguished from another. As though they weren’t just different faces of the same enemy.

The attack on the Jordanian Embassy, said the story, “raised concerns that Iraq’s violence could be broadening from resistance to the U.S. occupation toward a terrorist insurgency.”

But what’s the difference between the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athists and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida? Disparate as they may seem at times, both are part of the same worldwide movement that declared war on the West years ago. Both are part of a common threat that wasn’t taken seriously until Sept. 11, 2001.

Americans were at war for years before this generation experienced its own Pearl Harbor; we just didn’t know it.

The earlier bombing of the World Trade Center, the murderous explosions at American embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole a pattern was forming, but our intelligence agencies failed to see it.

Just as there were many indications before Dec. 7, 1941, that Pearl Harbor was coming, but the pieces of the puzzle weren’t put together till afterward. There were lengthy postmortems back then, too, and charges that the administration had seen the attack coming but had done nothing to prevent it.

Some pundits and politicians warned that the war in Iraq would distract from the war against terror – as if they weren’t part of the same conflict against a common enemy.

That enemy is motivated by a common ideology, whatever its variations from locale to locale.

There were those in the century just passed who also tried to make distinctions between Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism, between Franco’s Falange and Tojo’s militarism.

Today, too, Western civilization faces a common enemy. That danger, too, goes by different names – a sign that we have yet to get a handle on the ideological threat out there. But whether it’s called Islamism, radical Islam, or Islamofascism, it is all much the same.

These haters may have their factional rivalries, but one driving force unites all of them: a fierce resentment of the West, of modernity, of tolerance, of any society that lets people be themselves. Their ideology is transnational.

A long-simmering frustration with the Rise of the West and its dominance has bred a taste for violence, and the violence has become an end in itself.

Today’s network of terrorists and their host regimes is but the visible manifestation of a shared rage. We have seen this kind of fanaticism before – in the death’s head on Nazi uniforms, in the kamikaze attacks on the American fleet in the closing days of World War II. Today’s terrorism is but one more form of death worship in the modern world.

The outcome will determine whether Islamic civilization, which was once the most advanced, hospitable and creative in the world, will recede farther into resentment and violence. And drag the rest of the world down with it. This is not a war against Islam. It is a war for Islam.

1. Similar themes to Dr. Krauthammers are examined in an outstanding editorial addressed particularly to Democrats in the current issue of the New Republic and an essay by David Frum distributed on National Review Online.

Krauthammer urges Bush to hold that line at the U.N.

(Washington, D.C.): Few syndicated columnists of our time address matters of state with the vision and verve of Charles Krauthammer. These qualities were recognized by the Center for Security Policy on 5 September when Dr. Krauthammer received its second annual “Mightier Pen” award — a distinction conferred on individuals who have, through their published writings, contributed to the public’s appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and military strength as an indispensable ingredient in promoting international peace.

The latest example of the deservedness of Charles Krauthammer’s “Mightier Pen” award is his column published in today’s Washington Post, entitled “Don’t Go Wobbly.” It echoes themes of sovereignty and leadership that Dr. Krauthammer spoke to in his acceptance remarks including, notably the following:

The Founders spoke of “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” [Recently,] in an article critical of the Administration and of our policy on Iraq, and particularly of American unilateralism, that phrase was cited as a way of saying that somehow unilateralism is a betrayal of this original American idea.

In fact, the Declaration of Independence twice self-consciously says that it must explain itself to the world. That is true. But what is striking about the document is the authors’ utter confidence in their own explanations. The entire train of logic that underlies the right of revolution in the Declaration is prefaced by the assertion of self-evidence. We are, said the founders, relying on nothing but axioms on self-evident truths, not on the opinion of mankind. What did the founders do? They declared, when they made war, the opinion of mankind was to be addressed, but nowhere was it consulted, no amendments were solicited, no compromise from prevailing views or opinions from other cultures, or other political persuasions, or other societies, was even contemplated….

The Security Council is essentially a committee of the great powers who manage the world in their own interests. The Security Council is on the rare occasions in which it actually works, realpolitik by committee. By what logic is it the repository of international morality? The Chinese, the Russians, the French will be making decisions in the Security Council entirely in pursuit of their own interests. Why that ought to confer legitimacy or morality onto our actions is beyond me.

For a quarter century this primacy of world opinion or international legality were the staple of liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalists sincerely believe, and when in power they make a fetish of, multilateral action; in particular, action blessed by the UN as, in and of itself, morally superior and more legitimate than American action unilaterally asserting its own national interests.

Again I ask, by what logic is action that is taken with the blessings of the ex-apparatchiks in Moscow, or the cynics in Paris, inherently more worthy than the action taken by the people of the United States in Congress assembled….

This is not an argument in principle against consultation. It has its place as a tactic to assuage, occasionally to gain wisdom. We may not have thought of everything, that is true; nonetheless, we have no moral obligation to consult. We do it because it might be useful to achieve our own ends. Not because the foreign advice intrinsically carries more moral valance than our own delibera tions….A decent respect for the opinion of mankind impels us to state our reasons, to present our facts to a world, candid or not, and then to act, regardless….

Amen.

Don’t Go Wobbly

by Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 1 November 2002

The American people, in Congress assembled, have given President Bush the authority to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein. The president has delegated to Colin Powell the authority to negotiate this with the U.N. Security Council. Powell is in the process of negotiating away that authority to France. And France’s game is to give that authority to Hans Blix, the bureaucrat weapons inspector whose most salient characteristic is politeness.

Blix was director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which, before the Persian Gulf War, gave Hussein the nuclear Good Housekeeping seal, consistently rating as “exemplary” his compliance with IAEA inspections. After the Gulf War, it was discovered that Hussein had not one but several parallel clandestine nuclear weapons programs going on at once.

Powell has now spent seven weeks negotiating the president’s position at the United Nations. He has already made numerous concessions to France, watering down a U.S. draft, eliminating an automatic trigger for military action and dropping a clause allowing permanent members of the Security Council to attach their own inspectors to the team.

It is now down to the bottom line. For the American threat to disarm Hussein to retain any credibility, the State Department will have to hang on to three elements of the current U.S. draft resolution:

(a) Citing Hussein as being in “material breach” of the resolutions he signed to end the Gulf War. Material breach is recognized as a casus belli.

(b) Threatening “serious consequences” if Hussein does not comply with the new inspection regime.

(c) Devising a tough inspection regime that not only includes Hussein’s presidential “palaces” but also allows the safe and free interrogation of Iraqi scientists who know where the weapons are — which means taking them out of the country and giving their families asylum if they so request.

The French, who have spent the past decade on the Security Council acting as Hussein’s lawyer, at every turn weakening measures to force him to disarm, are now at it again. At first they tried to keep the words “material breach” out of the resolution. This requires gall, because the material breach is undeniable: Everyone acknowledges that Hussein has violated more than a dozen post-Gulf War U.N. resolutions.

Finding it hard to get around this inconvenient fact, the French are proposing to make the phrase meaningless. They are willing to say that Hussein “was” in material breach but that things will get serious, and military action be warranted, only if he ends up in “further” material breach. Which makes all of the previous material breaches immaterial.

Will Powell buy this sophistry that undermines America’s right to act on Saddam Hussein’s current and past egregious violations? I don’t know.

Furthermore, the French want to leave the question of future material breaches to Blix. God help us. Why should the United States forfeit to him — and his proven track record of failure — its freedom of action to defend itself against a supreme threat to its national security?

But the French go one better. They want a third check on American freedom of action, a third point at which they can shut down the United States. They insist that even if Blix finds Hussein in material breach, the question must come back to the Security Council, so that the French (and the Russians and the Chinese — and the Mauritians and the Cameroonians and the Guineans) can judge how material the breach actually is.

Most crucial of all, however, is the attempt to water down U.S. condition (c) on the nature of the inspections. The only way we’re going to find these weapons is if Iraqi scientists tell us where they are. Satellites are not going to find stuff that can be hidden in a basement. In the mid-1990s, inspectors missed Hussein’s huge stocks of biological weapons until we learned about them from defectors.

Now, if you interrogate the scientists in the presence of an Iraqi government minder, you’ll get nothing. They know that if they say anything, they — and their families — will be tortured and killed. Unless these scientists are taken to safe locations, we can write off in advance the entire inspection process as a farce.

Blix says there are “practical difficulties” with this approach.

Well, solve them, Hans!

The French want to leave the question of “safe” interrogation to Blix. Not a chance. He’ll likely take the path of least resistance, the one with the fewest “practical difficulties” — questioning scientists in Iraq, hostages of Hussein. And when he does, the United States will be left powerless.

Why we should agree to these conditions is beyond me. Why is Colin Powell even negotiating them? And why does the president, who is pledged to disarming Hussein one way or the other, allow Powell even to discuss a scheme that is guaranteed to leave Saddam Hussein’s weapons in place?

The Case Against Saddam (IV): What International Community’?

(Washington, D.C.): Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer once again today displayed the strategic acumen, moral clarity and articulateness that on 5 September earned him the Center for Security Policy’s 2002 “Mightier Pen” Award. In an essay published in the Washington Post, Mr. Krauthammer illuminated the mendacity of the premise relied upon by many who argue that the United States must not act to counter the growing threat posed by Iraq unless the United Nations’ approves: There is no such thing as an “international community.”

Mr. Krauthammer starts by stripping away the preposterous notion that the UN General Assembly actually matters, let alone that its lynch-mob majorities reflect anything remotely akin to a higher moral authority. He makes a similar, and no less correct, assessment of the mostly tiny countries and in some cases (notably, Syria) downright problematic governments that currently cast votes in the Security Council as non-permanent members of that body.

What one is left with then, after counting Great Britain as with us, are three veto- wielding states who, Mr. Krauthammer correctly observes, will act in the UN as elsewhere to advance their own national interests. Nothing more, nothing less. To the extent that those interests diverge from Saddam Hussein’s, whom the French, Russian and Chinese governments have long regarded as a valued client, there may, repeat may, be a basis for concerted action by the United Nations. Our experience in the past, however, is not encouraging — in particular, these countries’ joint and several efforts over the last eleven years that have, in Mr. Krauthammer’s words, “been responsible for the hopelessly diluted and useless inspection regime that now exists.” Under no circumstances should their current self-interested posturing be confused with a legitimate claim to moral superiority, let alone authority to speak on behalf of the “international community.”

What is at stake in the present debate is not merely the future of the Democratic Party in the United States — whose sorry regression is pointedly addressed by Mr. Krauthammer’s comparison of President Kennedy forty years ago with his brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, today. Neither is what hangs in the balance confined to the question of whether Saddam Hussein will actually be disarmed in the only way that will prove effective — i.e., by the liberation of Iraq from his misrule.

Rather, we must reckon with the reality that nothing less than our sovereignty as a free, independent and powerful nation is risk. For far too long, the American people have been subjected to the creeping assertion by the “international community” of its authority over our ability to act in self-defense, to conduct our international and domestic trade and even to exercise certain rights guaranteed by our Constitution. This steady erosion of our sovereignty — which some have dubbed “post-Constitutionalism” — must be understood for what it is, and strenuously resisted by all those who, like Charles Krauthammer, cherish our freedoms and security.

The Myth Of ‘U.N. Support’

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 4 October 2002

“This nation is prepared to present its case against the Soviet threat to peace, and our own proposals for a peaceful world, at any time and in any forum — in the Organization of American States, in the United Nations, or in any other meeting that could be useful — without limiting our freedom of action.”

— President John F. Kennedy, Cuban missile crisis, address to the nation, Oct. 22, 1962

“I’m waiting for the final recommendation of the Security Council before I’m going to say how I’m going to vote.”

— Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Iraq crisis, address to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Sept. 27, 2002

How far the Democrats have come. Forty years ago to the month, President Kennedy asserts his willingness to present his case to the United Nations, but also his determination not to allow the United Nations to constrain America’s freedom of action. Today his brother, a leader of the same party, awaits the guidance of the United Nations before he will declare himself on how America should respond to another nation threatening the United States with weapons of mass destruction.

Ted Kennedy is not alone. Much of the leadership of the Democratic Party is in the thrall of the United Nations. War and peace hang in the balance. The world waits to see what the American people, in Congress assembled, will say. These Democrats say: Wait, we must find out what the United Nations says first.

The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, would enshrine such lunacy in legislation, no less. He would not even authorize the use of force without prior U.N. approval. Why? What exactly does U.N. approval mean?

It cannot mean the U.N. General Assembly, which is an empty debating society. It means the Security Council. Now, the Security Council has five permanent members and 10 rotating members. Among the rotating members is Syria. How can any senator stand up and tell the American people that before deciding whether America goes to war against a rogue state such as Iraq, it needs to hear the “final recommendation” of Syria, a regime on the State Department’s official terrorist list?

Or maybe these senators are awaiting the wisdom of some of the other nonpermanent members. Cameroon? Mauritius? Guinea? Certainly Kennedy and Levin cannot be saying that we must not decide whether to go to war until we have heard the considered opinion of countries that none of their colleagues can find on a map.

Okay. So we are not talking about these dots on the map. We must be talking about the five permanent members. The United States is one. Another is Britain, which supports us. That leaves three. So when you hear senators grandly demand the support of the “international community,” this is what they mean: France, Russia and China.

As I recently asked in this space, by what logic does the blessing of these countries bestow moral legitimacy on American action? China’s leaders are the butchers of Tiananmen Square. France and Russia will decide the Iraq question based on the coldest calculation of their own national interest, meaning money and oil.

Everyone in the Senate wants a new and tough inspection regime in Iraq: anytime, anywhere, unannounced. Yet these three countries, whose approval the Democrats crave, are responsible for the hopelessly diluted and useless inspection regime that now exists.

They spent the 1990s doing everything they could to dismantle the Gulf War mandate to disarm Saddam Hussein. The Clinton administration helplessly acquiesced, finally approving a new Security Council resolution in 1999 that gave us the current toothless inspections regime. France, Russia and China, mind you, refused to support even that resolution; they all abstained because it did not make yet more concessions to Saddam Hussein.

After a decade of acting as Saddam Hussein’s lawyers on the Security Council, these countries are now to be the arbiters of America’s new and deadly serious effort to ensure Iraqi disarmament.

So insist leading Democrats. Why? It has no moral logic. It has no strategic logic. Forty years ago, we had a Democratic president who declared that he would not allow the United Nations or any others to tell the United States how it would defend itself. Would that JFK’s party had an ounce of his confidence in the wisdom and judgment of America, deciding its own fate by its own lights, regardless of the wishes of France.

Or Cameroon.

2002 Mightier Pen Award: Charles Krauthammer

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer received the Center for Security Policy’s Second Annual ‘Mightier Pen’ Award for his contribution to the public’s appreciation for strong national security policies.

The prolific Washington Post writer, whose columns appear in more than 100 newspapers, is a “national treasure,” in the words of Center President Frank Gaffney, who presided at the 5 September 2002 event.

In a letter to the Center, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld saluted Krauthammer, noting, “his keen insight and vivid capacity to communicate complex issues has facilitated public understanding of the importance of a strong national defense and in so doing, contributed to the security of the nation, proving that the pen can, indeed, be mightier than the sword.”

Under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim joined the Center’s award ceremony, along with a hundred officials and friends. “What I think is significant about all of us getting together to honor ‘Charlie,’ as I knew him when I first met him, and ‘Charles’ as he’s now known, and to hear [2001 Award recipient] Mark Helprin speak is that basically this is a family,” Zakheim said. “We have been in the trenches together now well before Frank set up the Center for Security Policy.”

Helprin, a novelist and Wall Street Journal contributing editor, said, “He’s getting the award because — and listen to each one of these adjectives, because they are very accurate — he is brilliant, brave, steady, sagacious and true . . . . It’s an honor to pass on the award.”

In his acceptance speech, Krauthammer spoke of American leadership in the world. “I want to be clear: Unilateralism does not mean, necessarily, wanting to act alone,” he said. “Unilateralism simply means that we do not allow ourselves to be held hostage to the opinions and policies and preferences of others. We do what we have to do.”

“The way to achieve multilateralism is to be prepared to act unilaterally and, in those circumstances, if you are — as we are — the leading country in the world, you will then find coalitions aligning themselves behind you.”

On the War We Are Now In

(Washington, D.C.): The explosions that destroyed the World Trade Center, wreaked havoc on the Pentagon and shattered American illusions of invulnerability have also unleashed a torrent of editorial commentary and punditry. Two of the most trenchant were authored by good friends of the Center for Security Policy — Syndicated columnist and television pundit Charles Krauthammer and the recipient of CSP’s 2001 "Mightier Pen" award, Mark Helprin. Their essays about the character of the war thus thrust upon the United States and the responses required of our leaders and countrymen should be required reading for all those in with an interest in the freedom and security of this nation’s society at home and its equities around the world.

 

To War, Not to Court

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 12 September 2001

This is not crime. This is war. One of the reasons there are terrorists out there capable and audacious enough to carry out the deadliest attack on the United States in its history is that, while they have declared war on us, we have in the past responded (with the exception of a few useless cruise missile attacks on empty tents in the desert) by issuing subpoenas.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s first reaction to the day of infamy was to pledge to "bring those responsible to justice." This is exactly wrong. Franklin Roosevelt did not respond to Pearl Harbor by pledging to bring the commander of Japanese naval aviation to justice. He pledged to bring Japan to its knees.

You bring criminals to justice; you rain destruction on combatants. This is a fundamental distinction that can no longer be avoided. The bombings of Sept. 11, 2001, must mark a turning point. War was long ago declared on us. Until we declare war in return, we will have thousands of more innocent victims.

We no longer have to search for a name for the post-Cold War era. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. Organized terror has shown what it can do: execute the single greatest massacre in American history, shut down the greatest power on the globe and send its leaders into underground shelters. All this, without even resorting to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of cowards perpetrating senseless acts of violence is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly, vicious warriors and need to be treated as such. Nor are their acts of violence senseless. They have a very specific aim: to avenge alleged historical wrongs and to bring the great American satan to its knees.

Nor is the enemy faceless or mysterious. We do not know for sure who gave the final order but we know what movement it comes from. The enemy has identified itself in public and openly. Our delicate sensibilities have prevented us from pronouncing its name.

Its name is radical Islam. Not Islam as practiced peacefully by millions of the faithful around the world. But a specific fringe political movement, dedicated to imposing its fanatical ideology on its own societies and destroying the society of its enemies, the greatest of which is the United States.

Israel, too, is an affront to radical Islam, and thus of course must be eradicated. But it is the smallest of fish. The heart of the beast — with its military in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey and the Persian Gulf; with a culture that "corrupts" Islamic youth; with an economy and technology that dominate the world — is the United States. That is why we were struck so savagely.

How do we know? Who else trains cadres of fanatical suicide murderers who go to their deaths joyfully? And the average terrorist does not coordinate four hijackings within one hour. Nor fly a plane into the tiny silhouette of a single building. For that you need skilled pilots seeking martyrdom. That is not a large pool to draw from.

These are the shock troops of the enemy. And the enemy has many branches. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Israel, the Osama bin Laden organization headquartered in Afghanistan, and various Arab "liberation fronts" based in Damascus. And then there are the governments: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya among them. Which one was responsible? We will find out soon enough.

But when we do, there should be no talk of bringing these people to "swift justice," as Karen Hughes dismayingly promised mid-afternoon yesterday. An open act of war demands a military response, not a judicial one.

Military response against whom? It is absurd to make war on the individuals who send these people. The terrorists cannot exist in a vacuum. They need a territorial base of sovereign protection. For 30 years we have avoided this truth. If bin Laden was behind this, then Afghanistan is our enemy. Any country that harbors and protects him is our enemy. We must carry their war to them.

We should seriously consider a congressional declaration of war. That convention seems quaint, unused since World War II. But there are two virtues to declaring war: It announces our seriousness both to our people and to the enemy, and it gives us certain rights as belligerents (of blockade, for example).

The "long peace" is over. We sought this war no more than we sought war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan or Cold War with the Soviet Union. But when war was pressed upon the greatest generation, it rose to the challenge. The question is: Will we?

 

We Beat Hitler. We Can Vanquish This Foe, Too.

by Mark Helprin

The Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2001

America, it is said, is slow to awaken, and indeed it is, but once America stirs, its resolution can be matchless and its ferocity a stunning surprise.

The enemy we face today, though barbaric and ingenious, is hardly comparable to the masters of the Third Reich, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Berlin that we had reduced to rubble. Nor is he comparable to the commanders of the Japanese Empire, whose doubts about our ability to persevere we chose to dissuade in a Tokyo we had reduced to rubble. Nor to the Soviet Empire that we faced down patiently over half a century, nor to the great British Empire from which we broke free in a long and taxing struggle that affords a better picture of our kith and kin than any the world may have today of who we are and of what we are capable.

And today’s enemy, though he is not morally developed enough to comprehend the difference between civilians and combatants, is neither faceless nor without a place in which we can address him. If he is Osama bin Laden, he lives in Afghanistan, and his hosts, the Taliban, bear responsibility for sheltering him; if he is Saddam Hussein, he lives in Baghdad; if he is Yasser Arafat, he lives in Gaza; and so on. Our problem is not his anonymity but that we have refused the precise warnings, delivered over more than a decade, of those who understood the nature of what was coming — and of what is yet to come, which will undoubtedly be worse.

The first salvos of any war are seldom the most destructive. Consider that in this recent outrage the damage was done by the combined explosive power of three crashed civilian airliners. As the initial shock wears off it will be obvious that this was a demonstration shot intended to extract political concessions and surrender, a call to fix our attention on the prospect of a nuclear detonation or a chemical or biological attack, both of which would exceed what happened yesterday by several orders of magnitude.

It will get worse, but appeasement will make it no better. That we have promised retaliation for decades and then always drawn back, hoping that we could get through if we simply did not provoke the enemy, is appeasement, and it must be quite clear by now even to those who perpetually appease that appeasement simply does not work. Therefore, what must be done? Above all, we must make no promise of retaliation that is not honored; in this we have erred too many times. It is a bipartisan failing and it should never be repeated.

Let this spectacular act of terrorism be the decisive repudiation of the mistaken assumptions that conventional warfare is a thing of the past, that there is a safe window in which we can cut force structure while investing in the revolution in military affairs, that bases and infrastructure abroad have become unnecessary, that the day of the infantryman is dead, and, most importantly, that slighting military expenditure and preparedness is anything but an invitation to death and defeat.

Short of a major rebuilding, we cannot now inflict upon Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden the great and instantaneous shock with which they should be afflicted. That requires not surgical strikes by aircraft based in the United States, but expeditionary forces with extravagant basing and equipment. It requires not 10 aircraft carrier battle groups but, to do it right and when and where needed, 20. It requires not only all the infantry divisions, transport, and air wings that we have needlessly given up in the last decade, but many more. It requires special operations forces not of 35,000, but of 100,000.

For the challenge is asymmetrical. Terrorist camps must be raided and destroyed, and their reconstitution continually repressed. Intelligence gathering of all types must be greatly augmented, for by its nature it can never be sufficient to the task, so we must build it and spend upon it until it hurts. The nuclear weapons programs, depots, and infrastructure of what Madeleine Albright so delicately used to call "states of concern" must, in a most un-Albrightian phrase, be destroyed. As they are scattered around the globe, it cannot be easy. Security and civil defense at home and at American facilities overseas must be strengthened to the point where we are able to fight with due diligence in this war that has been brought to us now so vividly by an alien civilization that seeks our destruction.

The course of such a war will bring us greater suffering than it has brought to date, and if we are to fight it as we must we will have less in material things. But if, as we have so many times before, we rise to the occasion, we will not enjoy merely the illusions of safety, victory, and honor, but those things themselves. In our history it is clear that never have they come cheap and often they have come late, but always, in the end, they come in flood, and always in the end, the decision is ours.

Memo to the President: Your Legacy Must Be to Restore America’s Military

(Washington, D.C.):The Center for Security Policy presented novelist and essayist Mark Helprin its first “Mightier Pen” award on 18 April, in the company of nearly 150 past and present security policy-practitioners, senior congressional staff members and journalists. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz presented Mr. Helprin with the award, which recognized the enormous contribution his published writings have made to the public’s appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and military strength as an indispensable ingredient in promoting international peace.

As the following column, based on his acceptance speech at the Center event, attests, Helprin’s work indeed embodies the spirit of the “Mightier Pen.” His spirited and moving call for a restoration of America’s military power is, rightly, based not on a desire for war, but rather for the strength that will ensure the Nation’s ability to deter war into the turbulent future.

The Fire Next Time

By Mark Helprin

The Wall Street Journal, 24 April 2001

From Alexandria in July of 1941, Randolph Churchill reported to his father as the British waited for Rommel to attack upon Egypt. In the midst of a peril that famously concentrated mind and spirit, he wrote, “You can see generals wandering around GHQ looking for bits of string.”

Apparently these generals were not, like their prime minister, devoted to Napoleon’s maxim, “Frappez la masse, et le reste vient par surcroit ,” which, vis-a-vis strategic or other problems, bids one to concentrate upon the essence, with assurance that all else will follow in train, even bits of string.

Consensus Destroyed

Those with more than a superficial view of American national security, who would defend and preserve it from the fire next time, have by necessity divided their forces in advocacy of its various elements, but they have neglected its essence. For the cardinal issue of national security is not China, is not Russia, is not weapons of mass destruction, or missile defense, the revolution in military affairs, terrorism, training, or readiness. It is, rather, that the general consensus in regard to defense since Pearl Harbor — that doing too much is more prudent than doing too little — has been destroyed. The last time we devoted a lesser proportion of our resources to defense, we were well protected by the oceans, in the midst of a depression, and without major international responsibilities, and even then it was a dereliction of duty.

The destruction is so influential that traditional supporters of high defense spending, bent to the will of their detractors, shrink from argument, choosing rather to negotiate among themselves so as to prepare painstakingly crafted instruments of surrender.

A leader of defense reform, whose life mission is to defend the United States, writes to me: “Please do not quote me under any circumstances by name. . . . Bush has no chance of winning the argument that more money must be spent on defense. Very few Americans feel that more money needs to be spent on defense and they are right. The amount of money being spent is already more than sufficient.”

More than sufficient to fight China? It is hard to think of anything less appealing than war with China, but if we don’t want that we must be able to deter China, and to deter China we must have the ability to fight China. More than sufficient to deal with simultaneous invasions of Kuwait, South Korea, and Taiwan? More than sufficient to stop even one incoming ballistic missile? Not yet, not now, and, until we spend the money, not ever.

For someone of the all-too-common opinion that a strong defense is the cause of war, a favorite trick is to advance a wholesale revision of strategy, so that he may accomplish his depredations while looking like a reformer. This pattern is followed instinctively by the French when they are in alliance and by the left when it is trapped within the democratic order. But to do so one need be neither French nor on the left.

Neville Chamberlain, who was neither, starved the army and navy on the theory that the revolution in military affairs of his time made the only defense feasible that of a “Fortress Britain” protected by the Royal Air Force — and then failed in building up the air force. Bill Clinton, who is not French, and who came into office calling for the discontinuance of heavy echelons in favor of power projection, simultaneously pressed for a severe reduction in aircraft carriers, the sine qua non of power projection. Later, he and his strategical toadies embraced the revolution in military affairs not for its virtues but because even the Clinton-ravished military “may be unaffordable,” and “advanced technology offers much greater military efficiency.”

This potential efficiency is largely unfamiliar to the general public. For example, current miniaturized weapons may seem elephantine after advances in extreme ultraviolet lithography equip guidance and control systems with circuitry not .25 microns but .007 microns wide, a 35-fold reduction that will make possible the robotization of arms, from terminally guided and target-identifying bullets to autonomous tank killers that fly hundreds of miles, burrow into the ground, and sleep like locusts until they are awakened by the seismic signature of enemy armor.

Lead-magnesium-niobate transducers in broadband sonars are likely to make the seas perfectly transparent, eliminating for the first time the presumed invulnerability of submarine-launched ballistic missiles, the anchor of strategic nuclear stability. The steady perfection of missile guidance has long made nearly everything the left says about nuclear disarmament disingenuous or uninformed, and the advent of metastable explosives creates the prospect of a single B-1 bomber carrying the non-nuclear weapons load of 450 B-17s, the equivalent of 26,800 100-pound bombs. Someday, we will have these things, or, if we abstain, our potential enemies will have them and we will not.

To field them will be more expensive than fielding less miraculous weapons, which cannot simply be abandoned lest an enemy exploit the transition, and which will remain as indispensable as the rifleman holding his ground, because the nature of war is counter-miraculous. And yet, when the revolution in military affairs is still mainly academic, we have cut recklessly into the staple forces.

God save the American soldier from those who believe that his life can be protected and his mission accomplished on the cheap. For what they perceive as extravagance is always less costly in lives and treasure than the long drawn-out wars it deters altogether or shortens with quick victories. In the name of their misplaced frugality we have transformed our richly competitive process of acquiring weapons into the single-supplier model of the command economies that we defeated in the Cold War, largely with the superior weapons that the idea of free and competitive markets allowed us to produce.

Though initially more expensive, producing half a dozen different combat aircraft and seeing which are best is better than decreeing that one will do the job and praying that it may. Among other things, strike aircraft have many different roles, and relying upon just one would be the same sort of economy as having Clark Gable play both Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.

Having relinquished or abandoned many foreign bases, the United States requires its warships to go quickly from place to place so as to compensate for their inadequate number, and has built them light using a lot of aluminum, which, because it can burn in air at 3,000 degrees Celsius, is used in incendiary bombs and blast furnaces. (Join the navy and see the world. You won’t need to bring a toaster.)

And aluminum or not, there are too few ships. During the EP-3 incident various pinheads furthered the impression of an American naval cordon off the Chinese coast. Though in 1944 the navy kept 17 major carriers in the central Pacific alone, not long ago its assets were so attenuated by the destruction of a few Yugos disguised as tanks that for three months there was not in the vast western Pacific even a single American aircraft carrier.

What remains of the order of battle is crippled by a lack of the unglamorous, costly supports that are the first to go when there isn’t enough money. Consider the floating dry dock. By putting ships back into action with minimal transit time, floating dry docks are force preservers and multipliers. In 1972, the United States had 94. Now it has 14. Though history is bitter and clear, this kind of mistake persists.

Had the allies of World War II been prepared with a sufficient number of so pedestrian a thing as landing craft, the war might have been cheated of a year and a half and many millions of lives. In 1940, the French army disposed of 530 artillery pieces, 830 antitank guns, and 235 (almost half) of its best tanks, because in 1940 the French did not think much of the Wehrmacht — until May.

How shall the United States avoid similar misjudgments? Who shall stand against the common wisdom when it is wrong about deterrence, wrong about the causes of war, wrong about the state of the world, wrong about the ambitions of ascendant nations, wrong about history, and wrong about human nature?

The Prudent Course

In the defense of the United States, doing too much is more prudent than doing too little. Though many in Congress argue this and argue it well, Congress will not follow one of its own. Though the president’s appointees also argue it well, the public will wait only upon the president himself. Only he can sway a timid Congress, clear the way for his appointees, and move the country toward the restoration of its military power.

The president himself must make the argument, or all else is in vain. If he is unwilling to risk his political capital and his presidency to undo the damage of the past eight years, then in the fire next time his name will be linked with that of his predecessor, and there it will stay forever.

Mr. Helprin, a Journal contributing editor, is a novelist.

2001 Mightier Pen Award: Mark Helprin

(Washington, D.C.): On 18 April, in the company of nearly 150 past and present security policy-practitioners, senior congressional staff members and journalists, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz presented novelist and essayist Mark Helprin with the Center for Security Policy’s first “Mightier Pen” award. This honor was bestowed on Mr. Helprin in recognition of the enormous contribution his published writings — in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Forbes, Commentary and The New Yorker and numerous highly acclaimed novels — have made to the public’s appreciation of the need for robust U.S. national security policies and military strength as an indispensable ingredient in promoting international peace.

Highlights of the introductory remarks made by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the award luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel included the following:

“Mark Helprin…brings a novelist’s insight to his writing on national security affairs, with powerful prose, eloquent phrasing [and] profound insights. And he holds the radical belief that the past and the present are intimately connected.”

“The subject of national security is so important and so often poorly covered or misunderstood by an easily-distracted public. We’re short these days on practical experience in national security affairs, and the trends are only getting worse.”

“Today the public-at-large is often disconnected from our men and women in uniform, and frequently disinterested in national security policy and the issues that are important for our nation’s defense. Today, and even more so tomorrow, most of the public’s knowledge of national security issues will come from the media, and disproportionately from the print media. That is an awesome burden.”

“If we are going to repair and ultimately transform our national defense, we will need the support and the understanding of the American people. We will require national security reporters who are interested in background, substance and fact, and who can give us better news stories, better essays, better features. Most of all we need writers who are capable of informed judgement, animated by mightier pens. Pens like that of Mark Helprin.”

The following were among the most notable of Mr. Helprin’s characteristically witty, elegantly expressed and trenchant remarks:

“To some extent we have neglected what I consider to be the cardinal issue. The cardinal issue of American national security is not China, is not Russia, is not weapons of mass destruction, is not missile defense, or terrorism, readiness, unit cohesion, or anything else of that sort. It is rather, that the general consensus in regard to defense since Pearl Harbor — that ‘doing too much is better than doing too little’ — has been destroyed.”

“The last time we spent a lesser proportion of our resources on defense, we were well-protected by the oceans. We were in the midst of a depression. We had no major international responsibilities. And it was still a dereliction of duty.”

“It’s hard to think of anything less appealing than war with China. But if we don’t want that, we have to be able to deter China. And to deter China, we must be able to fight China.”

“God save the American soldier from those who believe that his life can be protected and his mission accomplished on the cheap. Because what they perceive as extravagance is always cheaper in the end than the wars that this so-called extravagance will deter or win quickly.”

Mr. Helprin concluded his acceptance address with a direct appeal for President Bush to engage on behalf of the necessary increases in defense preparedness:

    In defending the United States, doing too much is more prudent than doing too little…. Only [the President] can sway a timid Congress, pave the way for his appointees and move the country toward the restoration of its military power. The President himself must make the argument, or all else is in vain. If he is unwilling to do so; if he is unwilling to risk his political capital and his presidency to remedy the damage of the past eight years, then in the fire next time, his name will be linked with that of his predecessor and there it will stay forever.

Among those present for the CSP luncheon were: Dean McGrath, Deputy Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney; the Director of the Office of Net Assessment, Andrew Marshall; former Under Secretary of State William Schneider, now counselor to Secretary Rumsfeld; former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle; former National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane; Pentagon Spokesman Rear Admiral Craig Quigley; Captain William Luti USN, Military Assistant to the Vice President; Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer; U.S. News and World Report editor, Michael Barone; and CSP Military Committee Members, Admiral Bruce DeMars USN (Ret.), General Frederick Kroesen USA (Ret.), Admiral Wesley McDonald USN (Ret.) and Vice Admiral J.D. Williams USN (Ret.); and CSP sponsor Poju Zabludowicz.