Posted on 09/16/2001 2:17:12 PM PDT by KevinDavis
The national cry for revenge is shameful. We Americans are presumably a people who do not believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Yet many of our national leaders, most of the talking heads who have been babbling on television this week, and the mental defectives who repeat cliches on talk radio are demanding that we get even.
The desire to even the score is an understandable human reaction. Thousands of lives have been destroyed and thousands of families suffer from losses that will change their lives and in many cases ruin them. Yet no one--certainly not the president or any of those around him--is promising that we will avoid action that might lead to the death of more innocents.
Moreover, who are ''they'' with whom we must get even--30, 40, even a hundred fanatics? We must apprehend and punish criminals. Then what? Will we nuke Kabul or Baghdad? Will we blow Afghanistan from the 10th century back into the first? Will mass murder satisfy American blood lust? Do we want to become indistinguishable from our enemies? It would appear that many of us do.
The Pearl Harbor analogy is frivolous and dangerous. There is no militaristic enemy bent on conquering half the world. No mighty navy to sink. No brilliant air force to annihilate, no fanatical population to bring to its knees. We must capture a few terrorists, eliminate a couple of networks, improve our intelligence agencies. Indeed, if anyone is to be blamed for the tragedies in New York and Washington, it is Congress, which has not passed bipartisan legislation that would have improved our intelligence services. We hotly debate a dubious shield against missiles and skimp on funding to intercept terrorists. Perhaps the cries for vengeance we hear are a cover-up for that failure.
The too-easy use of the term "war" is scary. With whom are we to go to war? Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? How will we fight them? Will we send combat troops into central Asia? Does anyone remember that the Russians tried that and it failed? Those who prate about "war" seem eager to have one.
President Bush knows full well that his legacy as president will depend on how he reacts. There are two models on which he might reflect. The first is that offered by John F. Kennedy who, when everyone else had signed off on an invasion of Cuba, would not give the go-ahead to an impatient military and thus avoided World War III. The other is Lyndon B. Johnson, who did not stand up to the military and escalated the war in Vietnam. In the short run, restraint looks like cowardice. In the long run, it becomes a mark of greatness. In the short run, the use of overwhelming military power looks like decisive leadership. In the long run, it ruins a presidency.
There appears to be nobody around the president on whom one could count on to counsel restraint. For all of Bush's fervent piety when he demands that God bless America, he does not seem to grasp that the religion to which he subscribes teaches that vengeance belongs to the Lord, not to us.
Also, he might follow the example of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and other leaders and warn against abuse of Muslim and Arab Americans.
The media babblers are telling us that Americans have lost their innocence, that the country will never be the same. Such claims are nonsense. The serious fear is that the American government will sink to the level of our enemies, and that a revenge-hungry public will support them.
Uh, count me in on that.
Are you familiar with the concept of a 'normal distribution'? In any population, there are going to be lots of people around the mean, and fewer people as we move away from the mean. It's the standard "bell curve" that decribes how most characteristics are distributed within a population. When it comes to things like human psyches, no one has the slightest idea what causes somebody to be close to the mean, or far from it.
In any case, these guys are the outlyers on one side. On the other side you have Moslems who haven't faced Mecca in twenty years. When visiting South Carolina, they stop in at Piggie Park.
On the fundamentalist end, they won't let women out of their houses, they won't educate female children, they ban television and photographs, and they'll blow up centuries-old artifacts in the name of fighting idolatry.
There is a sufficiently large number of Moslems in the world that this small percentage of 'outlyers' still constitutes a population of several million. Many of these people are extremely ignorant. Several of the Mullahs who run the Taliban know the Koran by rote, but they can neither read nor write. It is possible that some of them do not even know that the world is round. They live in their own little Universe, a country of goat herders and opium growers. These are the people planning our destruction.
My mom is one of those. She's 88 years young. And mighty pissed off.
When I asked her this morning how this compared to Pearl Harbor, she quickly responded, "This is much worse".
In December, 1941, there was already a war going on and, according to her, most Americans knew that, sooner or later, we'd be in it. They just didn't know where, how and when it would happen. Consequently, September 11 came as much bigger shock than did December 7. Further, the Japanese attacked a military base, while the terrorists launched a wanton attack on innocent, defenseless civilians.
She summed up thusly, "We seem to have discovered a world full of cockroaches. And it falls to the United States to be the exterminator."
She also said that when the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, the "America Firsters" had the grace to shut up...and were never heard from again.
You ask questions as if you know the answers.
It's your turn. Go.
Why did they choose hate? Because, as you say, most Muslims are not this way.
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