Posted on 02/13/2002 1:04:02 PM PST by f.Christian
See-no-evil crowd needs to get real
By Michael Kelley
Assume that George W. Bush is serious about projecting force around the world to eliminate the threat from states that meet three criteria: institutional hostility to the United States and to a liberal respect for life, liberty and law; support for anti-American terrorists; and a demonstrated hunger for weapons of mass destruction. Is this a good idea?
I would argue that Bush's new doctrine is as good as doctrine generally gets necessary and workable, although not perfect. The chief points for the axis-of-evil doctrine may be seen in considering the chief points against it:
It is "simplisme." It is simplistic, or simple-minded, as the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something, sniffed last week. C'est vrai. It is indeed simplisme to pick fights with evil regimes just because those regimes want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer and far more profitable path of shrugging one's shoulders in a fetchingly Gallic fashion and sending one's Jews off to the camps, as one's new masters request.
On the other hand, as the foreign minister might have noticed, the French may today enjoy springtime in Paris without the annoying sounds of jackboots all over the place, and the reason for that was the simple-minded determination of the British, the Russians and the Americans to fight the Nazis and to die by the millions, in order to make the world safe for, among other creatures, future French foreign ministers. Simplisme works. Against evil, it is the only thing that does.
It is a confusion between war and police work. This argument holds that terrorism is a crime (as opposed to the official belligerence of a state) and the terrorist groups we wish to destroy are criminal enterprises (as opposed to states), so war (which is between states) is wrongheaded.
Yes, terrorists are criminals, but they are in specific cases state-sanctioned and supported. The specific cases involve, as Bush noted, the states of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The state support of terrorism vastly magnifies its threat. Without the Taliban and Afghanistan, al-Qaida would have been an evil without a country fundamentally vulnerable, weak, baseless.
Terrorists supported and hidden by nations enjoy not only the wealth of nations but the protection of nations: They enjoy a shield of sovereignty that effectively puts them outside the law of other nations outside the realm of police forces and courts.
Only military force can pierce this shield (The Hague got Slobodan Milosevic in the end, but only because the U.S. Air Force got him first). It is not possible to end terrorism. It is possible to end the state support that raises terrorism's danger to levels that threaten other states. But only by going after the states: war, not police patrols.
Our allies will abandon us. However will we manage without the Saudi navy? Yes, they will abandon us until it is clear we have won. This will work out fine.
The Arab Street will rise in flames. The "street" in any given Arab country consists of 278 state-sanctioned mullahs already preaching death to the Americans and the Jews, five state-controlled newspaper opinion columnists preaching ditto, 577,000 state security officers making sure nobody says anything to the contrary and 73 million people who would very much like to be living in New Jersey. In Kabul, they cheered and kissed our soldiers. In Baghdad, they'd love to have the chance.
Ground troops, quagmire, body bags. Amazing, the power of cliché. Of the past six American adventures in force, four the Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan this year largely if imperfectly succeeded. In each success, doomsayers had predicted failure on the grounds that wars cannot be won from the air and cannot be won by superior technology.
And so they cannot fully. But they can be won enough when you have armed forces that are by an order of magnitude technologically superior to the armed forces of the rest of the world.
It is dangerous, expensive and may end in disaster. True. But what is the better alternative?
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This is all well and good, but the bridge clinton built to bring this evil to America---still exists!
We are wasting our time if we don't bring Reality into poilitcs and take liberalism out... Realatarian Party---now!
Our whole political--education--media system is primed--half cocked for tryanny--terrorism!
"Pulling it all together, what we have right here in our own country are all of the ingredients necessary for a totalitarian police state. We have a federal government that nobody in his right mind would trust, which lies to us incessantly, uses illegal force against its citizens with impunity, and collaborates with totalitarian dictators under cover of a massive propaganda campaign conducted by our supposedly free press. Our major information media are dominated by closet totalitarians who pay lip service to democracy while covertly promoting the interests of communist despots. The political opposition is made up largely of cowards who are so intimidated by our totalitarian propaganda media they are unable to offer effective resistance to even the most egregious violations of civil liberties by the corrupt Clinton regime. They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans. And finally, we have that which makes it all possible, a listless, docile, dumbed-down public who gape mindlessly at all of the above phenomena without the slightest glimmer of comprehension, and prattle the latest propaganda cliches dumped into their empty heads by the mainstream media."
"The Elian affair has truly given us a glimpse into the abyss of tyranny. The message that comes through loud and clear is that the system isn't working. The question that remains to be answered is whether we still possess the intelligence and fortitude necessary to fix it."
Edward Zehr(deceased...Nov--2001) can(not) be reached at ezehr@capaccess.org
Published in the May. 22, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly(defubct)
Copyright 2000 The Washington Weekly.
Sponsered by the Pacifist-Socialist Corp. a division of Ted "the Kook"Turner Industries.
A LOOK INTO THE ABYSS What Elian Tells Us About Ourselves
By Edward Zehr
"They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans."
"Oh no, the reader thinks upon seeing the subtitle of this piece, not another article about Elian. But this series of articles is only incidentally about Elian -- it's really about us and what is happening to us. The Elian affair is like a mirror that reflects our hidden face, the one we never identify with ourselves because we always imagine that it belongs to somebody else."
"For example, I get e-mail from people who have chanced to read one or more of these articles and drop me a cordial line or two just to let me know what a numbskull I am. After all, the way I tell the story is not the way they have heard it. If my version were correct it would mean that they have been grossly misinformed, and the implications of that are too terrible to contemplate."
"It would mean that in order to be properly informed they would have to stop skating over the surface of issues such as these, letting the anchor people do all the heavy lifting, and start doing their own thinking. But thinking can be kind of like work. Besides, a lot of people just don't quite have the hang of it. The raw material required to do one's own thinking consists of facts gathered from a wide variety of sources, not just the one that happens to materialize when the TV set is switched on."
"The "facts" presented by the mass media are typically folded into a smarmy batter of tendentious fiction calculated to elicit a response from the viewer that will be useful in advancing the hidden agenda which the presstitutes are paid to promote. The viewer, who does not comprehend that he or she is being manipulated responds emotionally, as though watching a soap opera or a TV series. After all, most people have a lot more experience responding emotionally to TV plots than they have at thinking critically and analytically. The script writer manipulates the emotions of the audience who respond in a predictable fashion. The viewers are being conditioned to react in a certain way. The leap from the semi-conscious emotional response evoked by TV "entertainment" to the conditioned response elicited by the politically motivated propaganda inserted into "news" presentations is a short one."
THE FACE IN THE MIRROR
"The black-shirted, brown-shirted and red-banner-waving totalitarians of the twentieth century missed the point on a grand scale. All that rough stuff is really unnecessary in building a totalitarian state. In fact, if overdone, it tends to give the game away. Goebbels was the one who had it right, not Himmler. Concentration camps are a drain on the economy. That doesn't mean that you cannot turn the occasional group of retrograde religious fundies into crispy critters if they offer sufficient provocation. (It adds to the entertainment value of the spectacle if you torment the kiddies with noxious gas for, oh say five or six hours prior to lighting the bonfire -- the imperial Romans knew about these things). After the flames subside it will all be seen as the fault of the fundies, of course. That sinister, shadowy countenance we sometimes catch sight of, however fleetingly, in the mirror is never our own...."
God put a face on it---reno gang...mo--aids/blood poisoning!
Cure---fresh air--sunlight--the Realatarian Party!
How about a drink---some water!
They park their big fat u-no-what's right in it!
Traitor(killing is ok)...
rights(murder-theft)
all doubts are more than reasonable(no matter how bizarre)--
plausibility of any doubt-desire-behaviour is infinite...
they could interject-use reality as a new criteria?
no crimes for enronrats...Clinton--Foster--Brown--reno!
Also, doesn't the constitution explain--define itself...
is open to any interpretation--opportunity--action--operations...even the whims of the USSC?
Could Realatarians help?
What is the world's shortest book?
The Book of French War Heroes.
Why did they discontinue fireworks at the Disneyland in Paris?
The French kept surrendering.
Tongue-in-cheek, ok? I am an admirer of Albert Camus (atheist though he was) and the Resistance fighters.
FOR SALE
French Army WWII Surplus Rifles
Never fired, only dropped once
1000s available
no crimes for enronrats...Clinton--Foster--Brown--reno...Gary dnc poster boy Condit/Chandra Levy!
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