timberlandko wrote:KAra, to start with your last question, the nature of the threat presented by organized but stateless terrorism calls for a pardigm shift in the way of thinking about the justification for war. In 1938, FDR said, reference Germany, "You don't wait for a rattlesnake to strike" ... and I find that perfectly valid 65 years later.
....except when that rattlesnake is an imaginary one, with imaginary weapons of mass destruction, an imaginary capability of striking the United States, and imaginary terrorist connections to Al Qaida.
I'm tiring of these constant comparisons to 1930's Germany. There is simply no basis for comparison between the two, except at a level so broad that it removes any meaning. Is elaboration on this point even neccessary?
The German military became increasingly powerfull during the 1930's. On the other hand, the Iraqi armed forces has the military capacity of a pack of little green plastic soldiers you see at the checkout aisle of the local grocery store.
There is also a small discrepancy in the fact that the Germans
invaded a couple of nations before we attacked them. While on the other hand, Iraq hasn't invaded a nation since 1991, and hasn't give us any reason to believe that is going to change any time soon.
The list goes on and on and on....as I'm sure you know.
Quote:Patronizing, huh? Yeah, I s'pose I do come off that way sometimes ... prolly more than I realize. Still, I do have, and frequently mention, objections to many of the policies and actions, or inactions, of The Current Administration. I take issue, however, with criticisms I cannot consider intellectually valid. I was niot at all happy with the way the attack on Saddam's regime was marketed. I'm not at all happy with the current situation either in Iraq or in Afghanistan, but I do see progress being made, even if I wish it were at once more substantial and more timely, and that it received more ballanced, less emotional, sensationalist, "The Sky Is Falling" media coverage. This is a real war. We did not start it, and it started long before 9/11. It will go on for years to come, and nobody in authority has said or promised anything other than a long, dangerous, arduous task lies ahead. This is a war we cannot contemplate losing. Regardless how or when it started, regardless how we got here, we're here, and we're in it to the finish, one way or the other. The object is to render the opportunity cost of terrorism as a political tool untenable.
First of all, I would take issue with the statement "This is a real war. We did not start it..." Perhaps for Afghanistan, the argument could be made that the Afghan goverment - either through inaction or outright support - was partly responsible for Al Qaida's actions on 9/11. However, I would be interested in seeing you explain how Saddam Hussien 'started' this war.
Secondly, I strongly disagree with your belief that the War on Terror is a real and justified war. I do not think our ultimate objective can be achieved through military action. To put it simply, you cannot launch an expansive military campaign against terrorism without contributing the the very sentiment that gave rise to terrorrism in the first place. Consider what Lewis Lapham had to say on the subject:
Quote:The attacks on the buildings in Virginia and New York were abominable and unprovoked, inflicting an as yet unspecified sum of damage and an as yet incalculable measure of grief, but, as Michael Howard observes elsewhere in this issue ("Stumbling into Battle," page 13), they didn't constitute an act of war. By choosing to define them as such, we invested a gang of murderous criminals with the sovereignty of a nation-state (or, better yet, with the authority of a world-encircling religion) and declared war on both an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.
Like an Arab jihad against capitalism, the American jihad against terrorism cannot be won or lost; nor does it ever end. We might as well be sending the 101st Airborne Division to conquer lust, annihilate greed, capture the sin of pride. Howard regards the careless use of language as "a very natural but terrible and irrevocable error." If so, it is an error that works to the advantage of the American political, military, and industrial interests that prefer the oligarchic and corporatist forms of government to those of a democracy.
