Letters to the Editor

Where our appeasement has led us

Fixation on short-term consequences often leads to long-term disasters. Those who urge restraint on American military retaliation for the attacks of Sept. 11, have, like a fifth grader quivering in the face of a bully, let cowardice eclipse better judgement.

On this, history is unequivocal. Diplomatic cowardice at every juncture — i.e., appeasement — is what has led to our present situation. When in the 1950s Iran and other Middle Eastern nations seized the oil U.S. companies had discovered and the industry they had built to extract it, our response was appeasement. We thus provided them with what has become the terrorists' principal cash cow.

As unanswerable evidence has mounted for the sponsorship of terrorism by Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other states, we sit idly by. As Arafat wages guerrilla warfare on Israel, continually resorting to the murder of random civilians when his demands at the negotiating table are not met, our answer is to discourage Israel from defending herself and to urge further negotiations, i.e., appeasement.

In the wake of hundreds of deaths in the bombings of our own embassies in Africa by the same state-sponsored terrorist organizations that most likely executed the Sept. 11 attacks, our retaliation — wasting cruise missiles on the unpopulated mountains of Afghanistan and a Sudanese pharmaceutical company — was paltry and meaningless. We merely continue to pump 100 million dollars in "humanitarian aid" into the same countries we know are harboring and sponsoring terrorists.

What do we expect the terrorists, and the states of which they are agents, to conclude from this? The tragic irony of our appeasement is that we are not a quivering fifth grader. We are the freest, most productive, most powerful nation in world history being picked on by hissing, degenerate looters whose idea of civilization harkens back to the stone age.

And it is this very fact — our superior strength — that is used to shame us into restraint by those academics and pundits who revel in the fashionable refusal to judge one view of civilization over another.

But let us not continue under the delusion that restraint is the safest policy. Restraint is what ultimately made possible the murder of 5,000 Americans. Eric Dennis GS Chemistry Department