People love to use the FDR analogy of lending your neighbor your garden hose to put out the fire at their house, before it spreads to yours.
“People love to use the FDR analogy of lending your neighbor your garden hose to put out the fire at their house, before it spreads to yours.”
We Must Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have to Fight Them Over Here:
Matt Purple
Jan 15, 2021
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about language. Given that I’m a writer, that’s no more unusual than a carpenter mulling his tools or an electrician daydreaming about copper wiring. But in the wake of the riots at the Capitol, it seems like a good time to reexamine some of the staples of our political vocabulary. I argued yesterday that the right should take fresh looks at the terms “radical chic,” preferably in front of a mirror, and “establishment,” so devalued it barely has a definition.
Now let’s consider an even more worthless cliché: “we must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” This brain injury-inducing line has been a fixture of neoconservative argument since 9/11. It means exactly what it says: if we don’t kill Islamic terrorists in their own countries, we’ll wake up later this week and find them standing on the veranda, fingers perched menacingly over detonation buttons. One day, I imagine Lindsey Graham retiring from the Senate and opening up a little country store with framed samplers for sale embroidered with that maxim.
Except now the “over there” has become the “over here.” A mob of our own countrymen has pulled off what all the Salafists and Wahhabists from the Bosphorus to Bangladesh never could: an infiltration of the very cradle of American power (not the Pentagon, but you know what I mean). According to the Costs of War project, we’ve spent $6.4 trillion on the war on terror since 2001, a number that includes the projected price tag of caring for our many veterans who have come home bleeding and broken. We’ve wrecked Iraq, kept Afghanistan in a violent stasis, expanded the bombing across Northern Africa. We’ve learned to loathe the strange black flag of jihad, only for the most traumatizing attack since 9/11 to come flying the stars and stripes. That isn’t just a bitter irony; it calls into question 20 years worth of policy. We’ve fought them over there, only to miss something very dark brewing over here.