Can a redneck be a Likudnik?

I just finished the latest American Conservative and don't understand why they have decided to stake everything on a blame-Israel position. I'm also wondering why they feel the need to echo the weepy left when making their anti-war case.

Taki hits two of the left's themes in his column.

As the sister of a victim of 9/11, Colleen Kelly, poignantly put it, “My brother was not killed by a weapon of mass destruction, nor poison gas nor by a nuke. It was 19 boxcutters that did it, and unless we address the reason these people hate us, we will never be safe.”

This treats 9-11 as though it was just an over-aggressive attention-getter. It presumes that their hatred has a reasonble basis, that we made some error and that as we correct our ways they will leave us alone.

None of our foreign policy errors can justify the atrocities of al Qaeda and the group which carries them out has no right to a hearing.

Plus, it is just not our errors which drives Bin Laden's killers. Often it is the things we do right-- our freedom (evidence of corruption) and our unwillingness to engage in atrocities (evidence of weakness).

And maybe, the problem is one of the killer's own pyschopathology. From David Gelernter:

We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment. To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt. The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals. "Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child? Because the authorities are offering me great sex--and, after all, I don't get many opportunities."
So the killers hate us in the same way Ted Bundy hated women. The hatred is not the fault of the victim.

Then Taki repeats the old canard about violence begatting violence:

Baghdad will fall quickly, Saddam will die amid the rubble, and the Arab world will sink into despair, grow still further in hostility towards the United States, and terrorists the world over will find thousands of young men ready to die as long as they take an American with them.

Yeah, Saddam was going to give us a bloodbath in 1991, and then the natural warriors of Afghanistan were going to stop us in 2001, and if we overthrew the Taliban surely al Qaeda would launch all-out attacks.........

I am all in favor of accurate assessments of the enemy, but at some point this stuff sounds like the ghost-stories we use to scare little kids. There just aren't that many psychos and patsies willing to kill for Saddam. (If there were, they would already have blown themselve up in Israel).

In the same issue, Robert Novak reviews David Frum's book. Novak (big surprise) doesn't like it and accuses Frum of being more pro-Sharon than pro-Bush. As evidence, he offers this:

Insensibly, the book becomes a brief for Sharon’s Israeli policy. Bush may have decided in favor of a Palestinian state, but not Frum. “One of my speechwriting colleagues put it nicely: ‘Let’s see: they kill six thousand Americans [the best estimate of the casualties at that time], and we give the Palestinians a state. If they kill six thousand more Americans, do we give Palestinians twice as big a state?’“ If Frum purported to present Bush warts and all, Sharon was wart-less. Could Bush, Frum asked, “condemn Israel for doing in the West Bank exactly what he was doing in Afghanistan?

Yes, well, Frum has a point doesn't he? Why are we willing to ignore and forget how the Palestinian street celebrated 9-11? Why did we automatically think we needed to address their concerns? Most importantly, how can we say that Arafat is with us, not on the side of terrorists? His whole career is based on terrorism. Frum did not draw that line in the sand, Bush did.

This country still needs a good paleoconservative bi-weekly. I really hope that Am Con can grow up and be that. But I'm beginning to think that is impossible.