Since then, the United States has pulled out of almost every country in which American lives have been lost, from Lebanon in 1983 (when 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in an Iran-assisted terrorist attack) to Somalia in 1993 (after 18 soldiers died in the failed relief operation chronicled in "Black Hawk Down"). Bin Laden has pointed triumphantly to both of these examples, as well as noting America's total failure to respond to the deadly terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 or the deaths of 17 Americans in the terrorist bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden in October 2000.
No wonder he and Zarqawi enjoy distributing morale-boosting videotapes to their admirers, assuring them that an American bug-out in Iraq is simply a matter of time. Who, on the basis of 40 years of history, can say they are wrong?
In a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal on May 2nd, Shelby Steele, a noted African-American research fellow at the Hoover Institution, offers an explanation. He points out that, far from utilizing its full power against its recent enemies, the United States has consistently "practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war," carefully making "a little room for an insurgency" -- a sort of "space for the enemy." He argues, "The collapse of white supremacy -- and the resulting white guilt -- introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past," which "makes our Third World enemies into colored victims." In the very act of defeating them, we "lose legitimacy."
This mechanism is one of liberalism's deadliest contributions to the weakening of America. Steele suggests that only by shaking off the incubus of "white guilt" can the United States "once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems."