Today’s news went without much notice that Bill Clinton, a former American president who had known opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden before 9/11, admitted to an Australian audience hours before Bin Laden’s 9/11 plot was executed that he rejected the chance to kill the chief jihadist.
With Israel, which has refused to annihilate its enemies since it was created by the United Nations in 1948, being maligned for killing civilians in an unending conflict with Hamas, coordinated movements of illegal aliens into the U.S. and communicably diseased missionaries being returned to the U.S. in the name of family values, the former president’s declaration of self-sacrifice is more evidence of the past as prelude.
To paraphrase Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead, the entire West is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing and, with America on what I personally think is the verge of breakdown, collapse or implosion, there is less time and therefore more urgency and complexity in distinguishing right from wrong as America descends into fascism. For example, there may be a rational case to be made, as Tucker Carlson recently pointed out, that Israel’s incursion is not in its self-interest. Or that illegal aliens should be welcome in the U.S., as Yaron Brook argued against Leonard Peikoff. Or that infected Ebola patients should be admitted to an Atlanta, Georgia hospital. All of that to some degree presupposes a relatively free republic out of imminent danger and I think those positions should be examined. Reasonable people may disagree.
But the case for killing a primitive Islamic chieftain that ordered the 9/11 attack prior to assault is unequivocal and Clinton’s statement (captured in an audio recording, according to Sky News Australia) explicitly confirms – particularly to those waffling conservatives that defend Reagan and Bush presidencies and Democrats who equivocate, too – that the U.S. government chooses to sacrifice its own people, both civilians and military, for the sake of helping others:
I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden … He’s a very smart guy. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. And I nearly got him once. I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan [sic] and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”
In short, President Clinton chose to spare 300 Afghans presumed to be innocent rather than eradicate the Islamic terrorist whose plot to mass murder 3,000 mostly American innocents at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and at other targets would be executed within hours of his altruistic statement. Here is his morality of self-sacrifice, shared by U.S. leaders then and now, from Reagan who failed to eliminate Islamic terrorism and instead abetted it, and Bush, who squandered the post-9/11 goodwill, to today’s empty president, Barack Obama, who actively seeks to destroy the United States in every meaningful sense and on every level. Remember this and that the American people generally support these views and presidents, too, if and when your flesh is burning from an Islamic terrorist attack or you hear the screaming jet engines or missile, though by then it will be too late.
Clinton, as I wrote in a roundup of DVDs about the 9/11 attack (read my report here), had plenty of opportunities to stop 9/11 before it was activated, including on February 12, 1999, the day that the U.S. Senate voted to acquit Clinton on charges related to the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, when he cancelled a military operation to attack Osama bin Laden because the terrorist was in the company of an Arabian prince whom the Clinton administration wished not to harm. Clinton’s choice came after his administration had asked which bin Laden camp tents were used as mosques, so as not to harm Moslem terrorists in prayer. Bin Laden began planning the 9/11 attack shortly after the aborted mini-strike.
In other words, time and again – and it’s done by conservatives, too – the U.S. government chooses to put the lives of others above the lives of Americans, a distinctly Judeo-Christian ethic (which Israel practices to its own doom, too). America’s enemies, by external or internal attack, demonstrate a faith-based drive to wipe out the West at any cost, destroying that which is most sacred to Americans, whether the tallest buildings, women, children or treasured institutions. This means Americans can count on being sacrificed and destroyed. Note the callous, dismissive, unthinking whimsy with which the former president’s last line before jihadists destroyed the World Trade Center was delivered – “so I didn’t do it” – and know that this casual dismissal of the primacy of a single American’s life applies to you, here and now. This willful disregard for American life is what must be utterly rejected. It must be met with the clear, moral case for egoism and with the conviction that life is, as Rand wrote, the ultimate value. When forced by those who seek to destroy the West to choose between the civilians they place in harm’s way and Americans, America and the West must always and with reverence for life be willing to choose to eliminate that which the enemy holds sacred and do so without a millisecond of doubt.
History shows that Atlanta, Dresden and Hiroshima among other places of mass destruction and enemy civilian loss of life led to periods of great unity, peace and harmony. The Bushes, Clintons and Obamas and their followers who seek to sacrifice Americans, as Clinton essentially chose to do before 9/11, are wrong. The argument for egoism as against altruism tells us why.