Yes, I Know
Yes, I know Bin Laden and his ilk have regional goals and are reacting to specific American policies. But if phase one is chasing the West out of the Mideast, eliminating Israel and reducing the remaining Jews to a condition of medieval dhimmitude, imposing Sharia law across a wide swath of the world in place of the corrupt regimes that now rule the region -- what's phase two going to be? How long will it take for a renewed caliphate, sitting atop two-thirds of the world's oil, to remember the rest of those Quranic passages, the ones that talk about fighting the infidels without cease, by any means possible?
Yes, I know more Islamists hate us now than did before Bush went to war in Iraq. And more Nazis hated us in 1942 than 1940. The goal of a war is not to get yourself liked.
Yes, I know Iraq was poorly planned and worse executed by the U.S. administration. But it is addressing root causes, and once begun, it has to be finished and it has to work. I know John Kerry says he won't abandon Iraq; but I don't believe him. I read between his lines, and for him, every war is Vietnam, and his role in every war is to be the hero he felt himself to be, not in the Mekong, but back home in the Winter Soldier movement.
WMD were a near-universal point of agreement before the war. Saddam had everyone fooled. The Duelfer report only convinces me further that he was a threat to the U.S., short-term or medium-term. And he was an immediate crisis for a world order he was rotting away with his oil-for-food bribery. And he was a killer in his own land.
The administration comes late to the human rights justification and the neocon enthusiasm for spreading democracy. So what? The U.S. went to war with Germany in 1941 without making any kind of issue out of the Holocaust. That doesn't mean we're forbidden to mention it as a positive good that resulted from the fall of Hitler, and take credit for stopping the extermination.
As for the rest of it -- all those many matters in which I disagree with Bush -- well, here's what Ed Koch recently said about that:
[Courtesy of Roger L. Simon]
Bush wants to prevent gays from getting married? Bin Laden wants to hang them. Which is the problem that comes first, if you're a gay person?
The (reported) Michael Moore quip about lightning killing more people than terrorists, and all the moral equivalency about comparing the number of American deaths in Afghanistan and IRaq to the number killed by 9/11 misses the point of why terrorism repulses us.
Yes, I know more Islamists hate us now than did before Bush went to war in Iraq. And more Nazis hated us in 1942 than 1940. The goal of a war is not to get yourself liked.
Yes, I know Iraq was poorly planned and worse executed by the U.S. administration. But it is addressing root causes, and once begun, it has to be finished and it has to work. I know John Kerry says he won't abandon Iraq; but I don't believe him. I read between his lines, and for him, every war is Vietnam, and his role in every war is to be the hero he felt himself to be, not in the Mekong, but back home in the Winter Soldier movement.
WMD were a near-universal point of agreement before the war. Saddam had everyone fooled. The Duelfer report only convinces me further that he was a threat to the U.S., short-term or medium-term. And he was an immediate crisis for a world order he was rotting away with his oil-for-food bribery. And he was a killer in his own land.
The administration comes late to the human rights justification and the neocon enthusiasm for spreading democracy. So what? The U.S. went to war with Germany in 1941 without making any kind of issue out of the Holocaust. That doesn't mean we're forbidden to mention it as a positive good that resulted from the fall of Hitler, and take credit for stopping the extermination.
As for the rest of it -- all those many matters in which I disagree with Bush -- well, here's what Ed Koch recently said about that:
When I make these points to my fellow Democrats living in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio (the latter of which I will be visiting this week) they respond, "yes, but we disagree with the president on so many domestic issues." I, too, disagree with the president on every major domestic issue from taxes to Social Security. Yet I believe those issues are trumped by the overriding need to defeat international terrorism, the biggest threat to our freedom.
[Courtesy of Roger L. Simon]
Bush wants to prevent gays from getting married? Bin Laden wants to hang them. Which is the problem that comes first, if you're a gay person?
The (reported) Michael Moore quip about lightning killing more people than terrorists, and all the moral equivalency about comparing the number of American deaths in Afghanistan and IRaq to the number killed by 9/11 misses the point of why terrorism repulses us.
With its suggestion that profoundly abhorrent or nihilistic actions can be undertaken in pursuit of common, even universal goals, terror marks a kind of evil quirk or aberration in moral reasoning and a deep rebuke to the idea that human life makes sense. Many kinds of death -- illness, accident, natural disaster, military conflict -- do not threaten that idea. But the widespread fear that people might be used simply for the shock value of their damaged bodies, mutilated or destroyed for the sake of the (probably lost) cause of others we can neither understand nor respect, makes public and inescapable a fear that we generally keep to ourselves: that all the value, meaning, and purpose we try to realize in our lives can be abruptly negated, not for no reason -- a thought we can almost bear -- but for reasons so unreasonable as to represent a perversion of reason itself.
