Posted on 10/16/2001 11:30:17 PM PDT by MadIvan
WE are losing the propaganda war. That is the smart thing to say at the moment. While we are sending bombers and missiles to Afghanistan, the Taliban are broadcasting pictures of injured children and conducting journalists around bomb sites that were once (it is claimed) poor villages - and they are winning on points.
Our Government has been so concerned with the business of war abroad that it has failed to keep up the verbal fight for understanding at home. As a result, so they say, the public is losing confidence in what this action is supposed to be about.
Really? Does our lack of self-belief go as deep as this? Was it unforgivably slipshod of the Prime Minister and his famously competent media managers to take their eye off the ball and allow us, in that brief moment of radio silence, to go wobbly?
Perhaps it is true that Tony Blair was too enamoured of his starring role on the world stage to remember that the audience at home needed to be nursed through its confusions. Maybe. But then again, he might just have assumed that it went without saying that the murder of some 5,500 innocent civilians required reciprocal action.
He may have thought (apparently wrongly, according to the new wisdom) that - whatever the complexities of the project - the justification for a military response to this outrage was self-evident. If so, he seems to have underestimated our capacity for moral equivocation and our immediate inclination to distrust our own leaders.
I suppose this is largely the fault of my generation. Ever since the 1960s, the default mode for educated Western people has been contempt for their own political institutions, particularly when they become involved in any military intervention. Every generation wants its own Vietnam.
But let me tell you, as one of the undergraduate cohort at Berkeley who invented the student revolution and spent much of her youth protesting against American action in southeast Asia: the war against Taliban terror is no Vietnam. And not only because the Vietcong never flew planes into American buildings. One of the reasons that compelled many of us to march against the Vietnam war was that the regime that America was propping up in South Vietnam had reneged on its promise to hold democratic elections (because it feared that the Communists would win).
It was the belief that America was being hypocritical in its supposed commitment to democracy that fuelled a great deal of the outrage among idealistic young protesters, long before the use of napalm made the war seem utterly grotesque. We thought we knew what America was supposed to stand for: democratic freedom, even if that meant that people made political choices of which it did not approve.
Islamic fundamentalism itself - let alone Osama bin Laden's maniacal version of it - holds no brief for democracy. It is oppressive, not in the glib contemporary sense, but in the strict technical meaning of the word. It is opposed to virtually every single human liberty that people who profess to be liberals believe in.
Of course, it is disturbing to see a large, rich country attacking a small, poor one. But it is the poor country (or those whom it protects) that has declared war, and done it in the most iniquitous way it is possible to imagine. There can be no confusion about who the good guys are in this. It is a war, as much as the one against fascism was, between open and closed societies, between freedom and totalitarianism, between enlightenment and enforced ignorance. If we cannot keep hold of that fundamental principle, then we are truly lost.
But self-loathing has become a reflex: a fist that automatically punches the body to which it is attached unless it is firmly held down. And holding it down requires constant reiteration of the basic truths that Mr Blair seemed to think he could take for granted.
First, bin Laden and his psychopathic outfit are evil figures of comic book proportions. They have been compared to the nihilistic enemy of James Bond, but they are more like the incredible, diabolical characters in a Superman adventure who threaten to destroy the planet if they cannot achieve their ends. Second, they have made it clear that they will not be stopped or deterred by anything short of their own destruction - undermining Western support for Israel being only the first small objective in their war to the death with the infidel.
What of the practical difficulties? Who are we fighting and how do we find them? Does raining down fire from the sky accomplish anything but the degradation of an already suffering population? It is bewildering and unconventional. Yes, all that is true. But if you say that fighting isn't a solution, all that I can reply is: "Fine. What do you suggest?" Negotiation? What shall we negotiate? Our support for Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East and thus throws up some awkward governments whose policies we may not like but whose democratic legitimacy we must recognise (see above moral lecture)?
If bombing is not the answer, what's the question? Destabilising a government that harbours terrorists who commit mass murder seems like a perfectly comprehensible war aim to me, especially if that government is replaced by a democratic system of even the most fledgling kind. If those who are now tormented with doubt about this action and its consequences really want to see an end to the horrors of warfare, then they must support the spread of those forms of political organisation that make people least inclined to go to war: liberal democracy and free market economics.
Having a voice in government and a stake in the future through the right to own private property (with the dignity which that imparts) is what the West has to offer, and what it must consistently defend. So long as our governments are doing that, their case should stand transparently on its merits.
The present situation is entirely different. The goal is different, the means are different, and the outcome will be different. The filthy little rats responsible for NY & the Pentagon are going to get what's coming to them and that's the reason we're doing what we're doing. This time there's a good reason and whether anybody wants to be saved isn't the point. I want OBL and his pal's heads stuck on sticks on the front lawn of the White House so the world can see what happens to people that do what they do. No BS about saving the world for "democracy," simple retribution. If anybody gets "saved" in the process so be it. If not, I don't care.
This ain't Viet Nam, Viet Nam and Afghanistan have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and I wish people would stop bringing it up.
You and me both.
My point is that I don't need to see the bloody gore. I know what we are doing to them, and I will never forget what they have done to us.
My fear is that after the Gulf War when we watched it on the the news live, we are expecting more. We are not going to see the same thing this time around. We don't have Peter Arnet cowering under a bed holding onto a quivering Berni Shaw.
Will we have the "Luckiest man in Iraq" this time around? I doubt it. All we have for now anyway is the memory of 9/11, and the images from ground zero as they pull the bodies from the wreckage.
That should be enough.
Pro~Libertate!
Btttt. It goes like this:
(1) Sanitizing the conflict, i.e., it's about "just a few terrorists";
(2) Start to compromise and talk about including "moderate" Talibans in a new Afghanistan government;
(3) Weak-kneed responses to purported civilian casualties;
(4) Including and recognizing the sensibilities of Islamic terrorist states in your decision-making;
(5) Start talking about a Palestinian State (as a reward for terror);
(6) Talk about removing the Tiananmen Square sanctions against China as a "reward" for China's role in the bogus coalition against terorrism;
(7) Telling India how to conduct its affairs with Pakistan because it might jeopardize the blessed coalition (puke).
I'm too tired to continue.
No matter how few or how many of our young men go into and come out of the meatgrinder, as long as Congress refuses to declare war and then get out of the way so that the soldiers can fight, this will be another undeclared conflict like Vietnam which will provide all the opportunites of treason for fun and profit that Congress enjoyed during the last one.
The President mentioned some lessons we learned from Vietnam. I didn't hear him mention the one that really matters, though. The lesson that matters is that an undeclared war is a disaster. Every single one we've had inflicted on us by politicians has been a disaster.
We need to be ANGRY to win this war!
Damn straight! I have even been unable to locate such video on the internet. I am sure there are multiple sources.
The picture that got to me yesterday was one where the people were hanging out the windows, it was grainy, but you could make out one person holding out a little baby, trying to let him breathe... Devastating image..
The standard explanation for the former is respect for the families of the deceased. I'd suggest writing them suggesting that they show exactly the same respect for the relatives of any and all civilian casualties in Afghanistan, unless they want to be racist and colonialist.
right...and can you name them? Who are "they", the terorists? Hunting terrorists until further notice is not much of a "war" goal.
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