NO APOLOGY

The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world.

Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as Capt. Nathan Brittles as a retiring Cavalry officer facing an Indian attack (The New York Times’ review at the time called Wayne’s performance “Oscar-caliber”). The memorable line is the advice he gives to a junior officer. It’s listed by Guinness as one of the top 100 film quotes of all time:

Never apologize, son. It’s a sign of weakness.

It turns out that there is a growing number of aficionados of “SWAYR” who have bought the DVD at Amazon and taken this line to heart. What’s interesting about them is that they work at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Bush White House.

Their numbers are small, but they are seriously sick and tired of squishing-out to the hadjis (the nickname our soldiers give the Moslem terrorists in Iraq and their sympathizers – pronounced “hah-geez,” referring to the Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca called the hadj). These sympathizers now include not just rioters on Pakistani streets but Newsweek magazine and Amnesty International.

“The more we kiss the hadjis’ tushes, the more they denounce us and the less they respect us,” one of them told me. Just take a look at the DOD’s procedures for the handling and inspecting of detainee Korans . You won’t believe how impossibly respectful and careful they are. What good does this do us? All we get is lies, lawsuits, and riots in return.”

The goal of these folks is to eliminate any “We’re sorry” message in State Department cables and communiqués, National Security Council analyses, and Pentagon press briefings – and inserting in their place, however subtly worded in diplo-speak, the message: “If you don’t like it, stuff it.”

Thus they were overjoyed this week when President Bush in his Rose Garden press conference contemptuously dismissed the Amnesty International accusation of Gitmo being a Gulag as “absurd.”

So they are focused now on gaining recruits within the White House speechwriters shop. They’ve asked for something like the following statement in an upcoming major presidential address:

“I want to make it very clear that neither this Administration nor the American military nor the American people owe an apology whatsoever to the religion of Islam and its believers. The American people have every right to take enormous pride in the respect which our military treats believers in Islam, and in the fact that the American military is not just the most powerful but the most humanitarian fighting force in the history of humankind. It is the Islamic terrorists and their followers who owe us an apology for making war on us, and owe an apology to their fellow believers in Islam for making war on them.”

Even the suggestion that the President make such a statement causes catatonic shock in Administration squishes. But the SWAYR folks are determined. They’ve even sent the DVD as a present to their boss. No apologies, Mr. President, they’re telling him, no weakness.

So cross your fingers he takes the movie and the message to heart. The day the President of the United States announces that Moslems owe an apology to us and not the other way around will be the day we truly begin to win this war.