May 15 2006
We Are Not At War!
Democrats have crafted a new plan – call it Kerry Konfusion 2.0. They are going to claim there is no reason to be infringing on civil liberties becaus, catch this, there is no war!
In response to a video clip of Senator Jon Kyl (Republican of Arizona) making the sensible point that it is “nuts” in a time of war to be disclosing our intelligence sources and methods, former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that “we are not at war.” While he acknowledged that there are serious threats, he suggested that it was fear-mongering to talk about being in a war, a practice used to justify otherwise insupportable infringements on the privacy and equanimity of Americans.
So there is no war going badly in Iraq? Glad to hear it. And Al Qaeda must have surrendered their Jihad and I just missed it. And that explains why McCarthy and others leaking our national security details is OK – we have no enemies. There’s a winning slogan for November: “War? What War?”
Let’s see. Osama issues a formal declaration of war. Al Qaeda hijacks planes and uses them as guided missiles to take out two skyscrapers and one side of the Pentagon (and even more of some heroic Americans hadn’t stopped them on Flight 93 and possibly yet more if a savvy pilot handn’t made a decision on United Airlines Flight 23 in Newark that prevented the flight from departing). And we are not at war? I think the correct phrasing is the Democrats are not at war, but there certainly is someone at war with US!
Actually, this has been a sub rosa theme all along as the opposition tries to hamstring the President by fighting all reasonable efforts to protect us. They go along with the programs on which they’s been privately briefed then turn around and publicly attack them, charging these very measures are evidence of an “Imperial President.”
At war indeed. Actually two of them. There’s the terrorism war abroad and the culture war at home, the former being foungt mainly by the right and the latter mainly by the left.
The problem with our passivity in the ‘culture’ war is that it allows the left, by winning the war at home, to lose us the war abroad.
A friend of mine just made the case that we are not at war because:
a war waged against a people isn’t war… it’s genocide
a war waged against an idea isn’t a war… it’s futility
a war without a goal isn’t a war… it’s an atrocity
I answered him, but probably not well. Stuff like that completely flummoxes me. How would you respond.
It depends on what your friend is talking about. The wider war on terrorism is fought on many fronts. Much of it has more to do with creating conditions that undercut the terrorists ability to radicalize people into committing horrible acts of murder than actual fighting.
If you were talking about Iraq in particular, we are currently in Iraq under mandate of the UN Security Council at the request of the Government of Iraq. Leaving would result in more deaths. Most deaths in Iraq are politically motivated and are Iraqis killing Iraqis. There are Al Qaeda backed Sunni groups killing Sunnis who seek to work within the political framework and killing Shiites in order to attempt to stir up sectarian strife. There are Shiite groups backed by Iran that are killing Sunni groups in efforts to “ethnically cleanse” certain neighborhoods and killing other Shiites who are members of opposition political groups. The major roadblock to order is the slow pace of forming a government. The primary source of that currently is one small Shiite party demanding that they retain control over the oil ministry that they had been given control of in the interim cabinet. They have left the process of cabinet selection because the oil ministry was to be given to someone else. So what we have now is political infighting causing various factions to kill activists of other factions as they jocky for power. If you look back at Iraqi history, this is a pattern that has been typical in past periods of government change.
Thanks, and he was talking about the war in Iraq. I reiterated to him that we went to Iraq in response to the violation of Saddam to our treaty. It wasn’t a war against “a people”. I sort of skipped over the ‘idea’ part because I didn’t get it, and ignored the “atrocity” party because I found it so foolish.
We went into Iraq because we had documented various stores of WMD after the first Gulf War. Inspectors left because the Iraqis weren’t cooperating. After 9/11 and in particular, after the anthrax attacks in the US through the mail, we decided that we needed inspectors back in there. When we went back, previously documented WMD stocks were gone. We asked what happened to them, Iraq said “we destroyed them”. When pressed for details such as “when, where, how” they stonewalled. They prevented inspectors from speaking alone with technical personnel who would be in a position to know what happened to them. All the way up to a few days before the invastion, Saddam had the opportunity to avoid the entire thing by simple allowing the inspectors unfettered access. His refusal to do so certainly gave the impression he was hiding something. Based on what a couple of ounces of anthrax had done in the US, we couldn’t allow there to potentially be several pounds of the stuff “floating around” under dubious security. Other WMD such as chemical agents were known to exist when the other batch of inspectors left. They were also missing upon return. The artillery shells that we knew to exist that could be filled with chemical or biological agents are still missing. We knew these existed, they were inventoried and sealed by the original inspectors, they are now gone. We really have no certain proof of the disposition of these items and will likely be the subject of speculation for years.
What You See Depends on Where You Stand…
Psychology and Psychoanalysis tend to be retrospective sciences and arts; we are often fairly good at teasing out the multiple strands of tendencies/wishes/impulses/inhibitions/ego controls that contend with each other and from which emerge symptoms an…
Not in a war?
When faced by a mortal “non-war” (therefore criminal) threat, the law enforcement model applies. Try to arrest the bad guys. Give them every reasonable chance to surrender, so they may be taken into custody and read their rights.
In a war, you kill the enemy.
Which approach to dealing with terrorism do you think the American people are going to prefer?