King Sparta
Despite what you, and other people of good sense, might have thought of Savimbi,
Jeane Kirkpatrick toasted him as "one of the few authentic heroes of our time," and President Reagan described him as Angola's Abraham Lincoln. I expect they both knew better, but this is exactly the type of empty Cold War rhetoric that made us so many enemies among the oppressed.
Harry
You did misinterpret what I said, but the problem is not your reading but my writing. I seldom participate in forums like this, and I'm always afraid I'm breeching etiquette by writing too much. Apparently, in my attempt to address several different issues in the same message, I created some serious misimpressions.
The destruction of the World Trade Center and the slaughter of 3000 innocent people was a heinous atrocity, one of the worst in our nation's history. There was never any question that we had to make every effort to capture and punish those responsible. I believe the administration's response--sending troops to Afghanistan to destroy the terrorist havens and capture its leaders--was sound and appropriate. And it was equally sound and appropriate for us to (belatedly) lend our wholehearted support to combating organized terrorism worldwide. These are evil, fanatical people, and we've got to do our best to root them out and stop them. Harry, I grew up in and around New York. I still have friends and relatives there. This attack hit me hard personally, and I have no compassion for, or illusions about, those responsible.
Here's what I object to.
1. The declaration of war that goes beyond the symbolic and is indeterminate and indiscriminate in its scope. With whom are we at war? Al-Qaida? Fine. Let's go get them. Hamas? Islamic Jihad? The IRA? The 12 year old kid being "educated" in a distorted version of Islam in a Saudi school? The Basques? Anybody we don't like or who doesn't like us? In the old days, we would have sent an expeditionary force to catch and punish the bad guys. Instead, this administration is playing to our worst instincts and fears and opening the door to blind hatred. It scares me.
2. The use of this declaration of war to suspend individual liberties and throw a veil of secrecy over all the administration's actions. It scares me.
3. (different topic) Someone suggested that this "war" is different from previous engagements because the enemy might be out next door neighbor. I'm afraid I responded to this more passionately than necessary. Harry, I've gathered from some statements you've made that you've blown out more than a few birthday candles. So have I. And I've lived through a wide variety of "enemies among us." Back in the 1930s. as a kid growing up in an east coast Little Italy, I knew we were considered to be "different" and not quite American. When the war broke out, I quickly realized how distrusted we were. And I saw the people in Germantown being treated the same way. And we're all aware of what we did to the Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Then there were saboteurs among us (maybe our next door neighbor). After the war it was the communists who were living among us, etc., etc.
4. (another topic). I think this is where I really misled you. I let my annoyance with the "enemy within" attitude slide into my greater annoyance with the obsessive fear of danger that seems to have gripped the American public. We seem to have become terrified of everything, from household germs to divergent opinions. We seem to be constantly running scared from shadows. But by pointing out that our risk of personal injury from terrorists is tiny, I did not mean to imply (as you apparently think I did) that we should ignore them. Because as individuals, we have little to fear from them does not mean that we shouldn't do whatever we can to find them and stop them. But I'm annoyed when I pull into a motel and am greeted by a sign that thanks me for traveling, as if I've done something brave. And I'm annoyed by people who are afraid to step on an airplane. As zevele 10 will confirm, people who live with a real threat of terrorists know that if they bomb the market on Monday, you had better be there with your shopping bag on Tuesday. There is no point in sending troops to capture them if we are going to cringe in fear from them in the meantime. They've already won.
5. (another topic) In response to several messages about anti-American sentiments throughout the world, I tried to confirm that I have seen such sentiments first hand and that they are not always unjustified. Here I think my attempt to be brief did me in.
I've seen two distinct types of anti-Americanism. One I'll call envious resentment. This is common in Europe. It was directed at the British in the glory days of their Empire, at the French when they ruled the roost, at the Turks during the Ottoman years. It's a resentment born of objection to the political, cultural, and economic influence a strong nation has on the life of a weaker one. Europeans are very familiar with it. They've lived through many variants over the centuries. In the case of the US, however, the resentment is accompanied by an increasing sense of betrayal. In the eyes of Europeans, especially since WWII, we were supposed to be better than the rest, and we're turning out to be a major disappointment. These people don't really hate us. But they are angry and disappointed at the way we've turned out.
On the other hand, our myopic support of oppressive regimes and tyrants during and after the Cold War has bought us real hatred among those who were oppressed, and in recent years this hatred has been spread to other oppressed people by those, like Bin Laden, who hate us for their own reasons. I see this as a really serious problem in the fight against terrorism. The numbers are large, and growing. There are tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of uneducated, poor, and desperate people out there who have come to see us as their enemy, and they constitute a huge pool of potential recruits for terrorist groups. The question is do we extend our "war" to include these people, or do we try to win them back? We seem to have opted for the former course. and I think it could be a disastrous mistake.
Does that help?
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Topic: A few off-topic thoughts on government (Read 18777 times)