Mark Steyn - America Alone

But sometimes you die anyway.

Every so often, I find myself, for the umpteenth time, driving behind a Vermont granolamobile whose bumper not only proclaims the driver’s enduring post-2004 support for Kerry/Edwards but also bears the slogan “FREE TIBET.” It must be great to be the guy with the printing contract for the “FREE TIBET” stickers. Not so good to be the guy back in Tibet wondering when the freeing thereof will actually get under way. Are you in favor of a Free Tibet? It’s hard to find anyone who isn’t. Every college in America is. There’s the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan chapter, and the University of Montana Students for a Free Tibet in Missoula, which is where they might as well relocate the last three Tibetans by the time it is freed. Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree — as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the ‘very first “FREE TIBET” sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inert: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new “FREE TIBET” sticker. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet shtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he’d been proudly displaying decade in, decade out: “But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?” she insisted. “You’re not doing anything, are you?”

“Give the guy a break,” I said when we got back home. “He’s advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, ‘Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET’ stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.’”

But there’ll never be a Free Tibet — because, through all the decades Americans were driving around with the bumper stickers, the Chinese were moving populations, torturing Tibetans, imposing inter-marriage until Tibet was altered beyond recognition. By the time the guys with the Free Tibet stickers get around to freeing Tibet there’ll be no Tibet left to free.

That’s “stability.”

As President Reagan liked to say, “status quo” is Latin for “the mess we’re in.” When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warns (as he did before the Iraq war) that America is threatening “the whole stability of the Middle East,” it’s important to remember that “stability” is Arabic for “the mess we’re in.” Yet just as the environmentalists believe in ongoing dramatic “climate change,” so the foreign policy establishment believes equally in ongoing, undramatic geopolitical nonchange. And, just as there’s minimal evidence for “climate change,” so there’s minimal evidence for “stability.” The geopolitical scene is never stable; it’s always dynamic. If the Western world decides in 2005 that it can “contain” President Sy Kottik of Wackistan indefinitely, that doesn’t mean the relationship between the two parties is set in aspic. Wackistan has a higher birth rate than the West, so after forty years of “stability” there are a lot more Wackistanis and a lot fewer Frenchmen. And Wackistan has immense oil reserves, and President Kottik has used the wealth of those oil reserves to fund radical schools and mosques in hitherto moderate parts of the Muslim world. And large numbers of Wackistanis have emigrated to the European Union, obliging opportunist politicians in marginal constituencies to pitch for their vote. And cheap air travel and the Internet and bank machines that take every card on the planet and the freelancing of nuclear technology mean that Wackistan’s problems are no longer confined to Wackistan; for a few hundred bucks, they can be outside the Empire State Building within eight or nine hours.

“Stability” is a surface illusion, like a frozen river; underneath, the currents are moving, and to the casual observer the ice looks equally “stable” whether there’s a foot of it or just two inches. There is no status quo in world affairs. “Stability” is a fancy term to dignify inertia and complacency as sophistication. If America and its allies defer to their foreign policy stability fetishists in the years ahead and continue to place their faith in September 10 institutions like the UN, then in the long run we’ll all go the way of Tibet: there’ll be nothing left to free.

“Containment” is another overvalued commodity: it’s an expensive dictator-management program that, in the case of Iraq after the first Gulf War, required the United States Air Force and the RAF to bomb the country ineffectually every other week for twelve years, in return for which the Americans and British were blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids — or two million, according to which “humanitarian” agency you believe. Of course, the minute the war started and these genocidal sanctions came to an end, the Left decided this UN “containment” had after all been a marvelous and desirable thing. Even what’s regarded as a successful example of the strategy — the West’s decision to “contain” the Warsaw Pact — was in practice no such thing, not for those on the receiving end. Aside from the fact that telling the other fellow he has to spend fifty years under Communism is easy for you to say, the toll taken on those nations with every passing decade was grisly. On the hit parade of nations with the unhealthiest demographic profile, the top five are all former provinces of European Communism: Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Russia, and Ukraine. Of the top ten, nine are ex-Commie (the exception is Spain). Of the top twenty, sixteen are. Communism was so loathed by its subjects they gave up even breeding. And every year we allowed the Warsaw Pact to remain in place we weakened further the viability of any post-Communist societies that might emerge from the rubble.

“Stability” and “containment” pose the opposite challenge in the Muslim world. Those countries are mostly in the upper reaches of the fertility hit parade. Whatever they loathe about their regimes; they don’t loathe Islam: in many cases, the mosques provide the only political space in those lands. So they breed with gusto, and thus every year we remain committed to “stability” increases the Islamists’ principal advantage: it strengthens the religion — the vehicle for their political project — and multiplies the raw material. So another decade or two of “stability” and the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages. Now, as then, Europe has its do-nothing kings — les rois fainéants — though these days we call them European commissioners and chancellors and prime ministers. Now, as then, we have a Great Plague — the virus of Islamism — and the great migrations — the continent-wide version of “white flight” already under way in Holland, as the beleaguered Dutch leave their native land for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Now, as then, we must all bow before the “edict of toleration” — as laws and customs are rearranged to abase themselves before the gods of boundless multicultural tolerance.