9/11 and President Bush's Victory in 2004

Article sent to MacLeans Magazine in Canada, dated Feb. 11, 2004

The comments made in the article "Canadians to Bush: Hope You Lose, Eh" (Maclean’s, Feb. 9, 2004 edition) smacks of the same left-wing tripe that seems so common amongst the effete elite of Toronto’s Liberal establishment, and Ottawa’s cocktail club Socialist intelligentsia.

This magazine, which "acknowledge(s) the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (PAP)…" has often come across to me as Canada’s own Soviet-era Pravda, and parrots, very effectively, the same kind of banal garbage put forward by Liberal MP Caroyln Parrish, although much more tactfully.

Despite the thinly disguised propaganda, come November the new "JFK" (John F. Kerry) will lose resoundly to President George W. Bush and it won't be because "only 15 per cent (of Canadians)…would definitely cast a ballot for Bush if they had the opportunity." It will be because the end of the Cold War, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have changed the old political rules forever, something which, apparently, hasn’t quite sunk-in for many people yet.

In his book, "The Shield of Achilles," Philip Bobbitt says of the post-Cold War era: "The problem for the United States has become to identify it’s interests and future threats so that it can use it’s power to strengthen the world order that is has fought, successfully, to achieve..." World wide terrorism, the threat posed by rogue nations (like the formerly Saddam-run Iraq), and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, are some of those "future threats." And while we in Canada may feel a sense of superiority to our friends farther south, we cannot glibly dismiss the actions of their president simply because the more jingoistic left-wingers among us simply see him as a "moron" with a conservative agenda.

The sad truth is that the events of 9/11, along with the other happenings following the end of the Cold War, radically changed the American political landscape. Under former US President Bill Clinton, the US and the world virtually slept through the bulk of the 1990’s while people like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein plotted and schemed against our allies, and us. Then one sunny day in New York City in 2001, some Moslem fanatics took over a few aeroplanes and brutally murdered a bunch of innocent people, live and in colour. This sudden jolt reawakened a slumbering giant and energising a complacent (and inward-looking) American public, not unlike the attacks on Pearl Harbour did two generations ago.

That event brought home the sad, brutal truth there are people in this world who have, and always will, hate America, hate Canada, hate the West, and hate the liberty and prosperity that 2,000 years of state-craft have given us. It has also presented us with the choice of either quietly giving in to them, through the surrender our national existence via the route of accommodation and "appeasement" (a la Munich, 1938). Or the decision, like President Bush has, to hunt them down and bring justice to them through swift and decisive military action wherever they may be found or suspected; whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the far ends of the Earth.

We might not like this "new dawn" of American power, we might even hate the US president who brought it about. But in the unpredictable and dangerous era we’ve entered into since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, I believe its exercise is as critical for the future security, prosperity, and liberty of the United States, as it is for all free nations, including ours.

The only question for us, as Canadians, then, is not whether we like or dislike George W. Bush, but whether we are willing to stand by and let him and the Americans do the fighting for us, or join them in battling the common enemy we all face. But in order to make this decision we must stop listening to the propaganda of cocktail-club Socialists and the Liberal intelligentsia and accept the new political reality that the end of the Cold War, and the events of 9/11, has forced our friends to the south to confront.

Sincerely,
I.M. Ulysses