We Still Have Paris
You won’t hear the song about the
decline of the nation’s power and influence overseas along American rivers out
on its farms or in its factories, nor in its offices and homes, but only
among the self-obsessed chattering class in Manhattan, Washington, and in
self-important academic enclave after enclave where it’s an award winning
soundtrack. America’s best days as a power in the world, as a force for
good, are over, is how its words go. More than that -- that such days
should be over because it was never really a force for good, not really.
Instead, America is and was an oppressive imperialist state, immoral and power
mad. Murderous “cowboys” always upsetting the more sophisticated,
accommodating, and nuanced goals of the much smarter ruling European intellectual
elite.
Indeed, the intellectuals, both
theirs and ours (please remember that intellectual doesn’t mean “smart” it
means having no life experience other a theory) have created such a din about
America’s faults that the American media and many American politicians,
especially those with a leftist hue, have bought into the concept.
And so we have a United States
senator standing up in Congress to accuse American soldiers of being jackbooted
thugs, we have a man elevated to Secretary of State who once opined that
American solders could be compared to the murdering hordes of Genghis Khan, and
of course we have our sad president today. A man who, from the moment of his
flash transition from a lazy, obscure, and thoroughly corrupt state politician
to the great “hope” of mankind, rarely hid his disdain for and ignorance of
uniformed Americans in the air, afloat. and on the ground overseas. The “kids
we went to high school with” who despite what those intellectuals would have us
believe, keep the peace so that all those picturesque European cities and
farms, stay picturesque European cities and farms.
It’s all very tiresome to discuss,
but we must because for six years Barack Obama has been throwing bricks through
the glass storefront windows of ally after ally: Britain, France, German, the
Czech Republic, Egypt, even little Albania, and lately of course, Israel. And
at first blush it’s not at all apparent that the next administration or the one
after that can clean it all up. Only, in that conversation, we shouldn’t make
the mistake of biting on the baited hooks the intellectual and their outriders
in the media drag in the water in front of us about issues from secret CIA
prisons to the purported American assassination of Allende
Instead, it’s more prudent, much
more enlightening in truth, to return to a long ago day – July 4th 1917. On
that day, the recently arrived U.S. Army 16th Infantry Regiment paraded in
front of Lafayette’s tomb in Paris and the words “Lafayette, we are here” were
spoken by a member of U.S. Army General John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing’s
staff. For Britain and France and countless oppressed people everywhere, the
instant before those words were said was the low point of the First World War,
the instant after the first moment in which they knew good would triumph
because something akin to the army of God was piling in on their side and
would, in the fullness of time, put things right.
Indeed, those long ago words in
front of Lafayette’s tomb earned an affection and trust in the common man in
Europe which has only deepened and spread through two world wars and decades of
sometimes shooting but mostly cold war. So in answering the question of
America’s continued relevance in light of a president who flees from
American responsibilities one has to ask, does that reservoir of goodwill and
trust which first sprang into being almost a hundred years ago still exist? Has
a president who forever apologizes for the nation, who abandoned Europe’s
missile defense shield, reduced this country's military footprint, who ran
out on obligations in the Middle East, and allowed a nuclear power to start
forming in Iran with the avowed purpose of conquering not only all Moslem lands
but killing every man, woman and child in Europe who refuses to embrace its religion,
so poisoned the water that nobody wants to see America stand up again?
It’s a question easily answered, but
before we do it’s wise to recall that Obama is not just incompetent, he is
thoroughly incompetent -- in everything he does. Remember his attempt to
jumpstart the economy with the socialist fever dream of a trillion-dollar
stimulus, the eight or so speeches he gave to in support of his tawdry
ObamaCare, to put the brakes on energy production, to demonize local law
enforcement, and tie the banking industry up in knots all the while blithely
assuming we will accept the excesses of himself, his wife and all his cronies,
the worst personal excesses of any administration in American history.
None of it has worked. Just as his
best effort to destroy American credibility overseas, especially in Europe, has
not worked, indeed utterly founders on the enormous reserves of goodwill
America still has among Europe’s people.
Just examine the two amazing set of
photographs which have surfaced this week past. The first shows what
happened when an American Army Stryker unit motored across Poland. Pulling into
one small town, they were mobbed by citizens of every age and sex cheering
them, standing on the armored vehicles for pictures while one pretty Polish
girl after another (they’re all pretty) crawled through the hatches in order to
pose with an American soldier.
And so America still has that long
ago day in Paris in its pocket, not as a memory of jubilant millions rushing
into the streets to honor America but in the facts on the ground, with the
common people of Europe to this day. Because those generations of Americans who
first liberated so many and then kept so many safe so honorably have piled up
such a mountain of goodwill and admiration that no one very bad American
president can disperse it, not in six years and not in eight.
Which means the tedious
self-contempt of the argument against a twenty-first century America able to
throw its weight once more into the contest between good and evil falls on
inspection.
Because all we have to do is scrape
this administration off our shoe in 2016 and return to doing good. Not a
matter of arrogance or pride, but just in the simple announcement that we’ve
come back. Millions of hearts in Europe and elsewhere will answer, “We always
knew you would.”
Richard F. Miniter is an ex-Marine
and the author of The Things
I Want Most, Random House, BDD. He lives and writes in the colonial era
hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs at richardfminiterblog.com and can also
be reached at miniterhome@aol.com
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