I thought I would analyze Gary Kamila’s essay on the “real lessons of 9/11.”
Essentially, the article epitomizes systemic denial and appeasement from the Left: the false accusations, concocted evidence, and convenient forgetfulness. In their perverse, twisted reality, President Bush is actually King George, purveyor of fear and civil rights usurper. On the other friend, Islamic terrorists are actually noble freedom fighters, waging a heroic struggle against Imperial America.
Before reading Kamila’s column, be sure to take a few deep breaths, for it will attack every sensibility. Upon first read, the fires of anger were stoked. But upon second read, I approached the article with annoyance; Kamila’s words typify the deranged views on the Left.
The bottom line is this: to this day, Islamic fundamentalists profess their hatred for the West, openly declaring their desire to 1.) destroy Western Civilization; 2.) create a pan-global Islamic caliphate. Yet, the Left sees the George Bush administration, in partnership with Christians and Jews as their true enemies.
Noted Middle East expert Daniel Pipes states the following, to which Kamila and his Leftist ilk completely embody:
“This negativism reflects twin realities: Islamism (outside Iran) is waxing everywhere, while the civilized world is making profound mistakes — blaming itself for Muslim hatred, underestimating and appeasing the enemy. Several trends:
- Governments negotiating with Islamist terror organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
- Leading institutions (the press, the academy, etc.) accepting non-violent Islamists as part of the solution.
- The left making common cause with Islamism against their capitalist/Judeo-Christian opponent.
Here are some specific talking points that deserve comment:
“(President Bush) has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about
Point number ONE in Kamila’s essay is this as noted in the last sentence of this paragraph: the Islamic terrorists’ threat is “greatly exaggerated.” Conveniently, he forgets the endless threats and open declarations, while looking the other way when car bombs, suicide bombers, etc. PRIOR TO THE IRAQ WAR, exploded in
“Gen. Petraeus, Bush’s mighty-me, will insist that we’re making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we’re kicking ass" in
Where does Kamila base his assertion that Petraeus is nothing more than a Bush-lackey? Which evidence does Kamila cite to affirm Petraeus as nothing more than a “yes man?”
“Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the
Kamila’s statement epitomizes the Left’s position that the war on terror is merely a bumper sticker slogan. For them, 9/11 was a freak occurrence; terrorists are misunderstood.
“Bush’s, and
“Bush’s America responded to 9/11 by lashing out. We chose vigilantism over justice, instinct over reason. Bush demanded that America play the role of the angry, righteous avenger, and America followed him. But we were not taking vengeance on the guy who attacked us but on somebody standing on the corner. The war was like the massacre in Haditha on a global scale.“
“Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.“
In the Left’s twisted world, they would rather fall to a knee and bow a head to their Islamic master, although they either don’t know it yet or won’t admit it. In their minds, we can negotiate with those with whom we might disagree.
What they don’t comprehend, for example with Iran, is that we are dealing with a madman (Ahmadinejad), somehow who wishes to expedite the arrival of the apocalyptic imam while opening professing his desire to annihilate Israel.
How is it possible to reason with someone who is unreasonable? How is it possible to negotiate with a group, person, etc, so consumed with religious fervor that they are willing to not only kill themselves, but take innocent people, including fellow Muslims, along for the ride?
Here’s the full article:
Sept. 11, 2007 | Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It’s no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus’ "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.
Petraeus’ evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we’ve been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush’s mighty-me, will insist that we’re making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we’re kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.
So let’s forget the absurd debate about "progress" and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam’s Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions — not just about why we can’t bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.
The real reason that Congress cannot bring itself to end the war in Iraq, and incredibly, may be prepared to start another one in Iran, has little to do with benchmarks or body counts. The real reason is that even after the Iraq debacle, the American establishment — meaning the government and the mainstream media — has not questioned the emotions and ideology that drove Bush’s crusade.
Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a "war on terror," of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the "front line." The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush’s "war on terror" was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead. The establishment has now turned against the Iraq front, but it has not questioned the "war on terror" itself, or the assumptions on which it is based.
Bush’s, and America’s, response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed for two reasons: It was atavistic and instinctive, and it was based on a distorted, ignorant and bigoted view of the Arab/Muslim world. These two founding errors are qualitatively different: The first involves emotions, the second ideas. But mixed together, they created a lethal cocktail. The grand justification of "spreading democracy in the Middle East" merely provided a palatable cover for vengeance and racism.
Bush’s America responded to 9/11 by lashing out. We chose vigilantism over justice, instinct over reason. Bush demanded that America play the role of the angry, righteous avenger, and America followed him. But we were not taking vengeance on the guy who attacked us but on somebody standing on the corner. The war was like the massacre in Haditha on a global scale.
There’s a reason why Americans responded to Bush’s demand and why Democrats have been afraid to challenge it. It’s biological hard-wiring — after you’re hit, your instinct is to hit back. For conservatives, this instinct is not only natural but necessary. Hence the endless right-wing denunciations of war critics as wimps, girly-men and appeasers.
Gender images play a significant role. The right wing embraces a cartoonlike image of masculinity because it believes that only an alpha male can protect America from its enemies. (In a recent essay in the New York Times, Susan Faludi argued that such retrograde gender images have been used to construct the American self-image from the earliest days of our presence on this continent.) This is part of the reason that Bush has put forward Gen. Petraeus as the cheerleader for the war. Petraeus is the ultimate alpha male, right down to his rigorous workout routine. In the Hobbesian world of the conservative imagination, the big club rules, and he who puts down the club will be brained by another unfettered troglodyte, be it a communist or an "Islamofascist." Nature is red in tooth and claw, and those who dream of transcending nature or transforming it will be destroyed by it.
The fetishization of the "natural," of which instinct is only a part, is key to conservative thought. In the early ’60s, conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan defended the right of individuals and states to practice segregation because that decision was instinctual and organic. They saw the federal government’s attempt to outlaw segregation as artificial and coercive.
Of course, instincts play a vital role in human life: They underlie virtually all of our thoughts and actions. To ignore them is to fall into a deracinated world of sterile rationality. Lashing out is sometimes an effective way to defend yourself. But instinct is atavistic and often self-defeating. Higher-level mental functions came into existence to control and refine it. Both individuals and states have learned that they should not base their reactions merely on animal instincts. That’s why law arose: to prevent every injury from turning into a destructive and endless feud. Retribution is a legitimate motive for punishment but only to a point. It is limited by the higher concept of justice. Justice not only prescribes the extent of the retribution that is morally acceptable, but insists that the context of the crime, including the criminal’s history and state of mind, must be considered before meting out punishment.
Democrats have effectively challenged the reign of nature and instinct in the domestic realm. But they cower when it comes to war. They are afraid to criticize the irrational, instinctive nature of Bush’s "war on terror" because they believe their political Achilles’ heel is the perception that they are "weak on national security." They are afraid they’ll be seen as wimps. Beaten down by Republican propaganda that asserts that America’s only choice is between the GOP’s macho John Wayne and the Democrats’ dithering Hamlet, they pathetically don their cowboy hats and tank helmets, a tactic that actually reinforces the very image of weakness it is intended to dispel. Unchallenged by the Democrats, the right wing’s master narrative about American power and the need to carry a big stick has carried the day.
Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.
We attacked Iraq because of 9/11.That is the scandalous and surreal claim that reveals our fatal emotional-ideological flaw. Anyone who knew anything about the Middle East knew that Saddam Hussein, a secular tyrant, had nothing to with 9/11 or al-Qaida. War defenders like to claim they were "misled by bad intelligence" into thinking Saddam had WMD. But there was no new evidence that Saddam posed a threat. He was the same old Saddam. He only became frightening in light of our prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, despite the appalling effectiveness of the 9/11 attacks, it was clear that al-Qaida posed no existential threat to either America or to the Middle East. As the invaluable analyst Juan Cole has pointed out, apocalyptic Salafi jihadists like al-Qaida were an isolated and weak force within the Arab-Muslim world — or at least they were until Bush invaded Iraq.
The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won’t stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush’s die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.
What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we’re prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East — and that they’re Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.
America’s anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice has several causes. One of them derives from America’s powerful identification with the one state that has always been at war with the Arab-Muslim world: Israel. For the establishment, it is axiomatic that America’s and Israel’s interests are identical, and that enemies of Israel must be enemies of the U.S. America has always identified more with Israel, the plucky underdog and home to Holocaust survivors, than with the Arabs and Muslims who threaten it. Since this view is held by right and left, Democrat and Republican alike, and criticizing it leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, it is difficult to challenge it. This is the reason why there has been almost no discussion in Congress over Bush’s saber-rattling with Iran: Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy, and that fact trumps all other considerations.
America’s Israel-centric stance has helped determine the way we see the Arab-Muslim world, but it isn’t the only factor. The rise of radical Islam, with its cult of martyrdom and terrifying terrorist attacks, exacerbated America’s existing prejudices, flattening out the Arab-Muslim world into a monolithic entity. Our almost complete ignorance of Arabs and Islam, their history and the actual grievances that they have against the West, contributed to this flattening. Oil plays a role. But perhaps the most potent explanation of all is simply the fear of the Other: Islam is not in our cultural tradition, it stands apart, it’s mysterious and ominous, and it is all too easy to project our fears on it.
One sure sign of cultural bias is the presence of high-flown concepts. Mission civilatrice, the White Man’s burden, is inevitably accompanied by lofty rhetoric. Iraq was all about Grand Theory.
One of the neocons’ main goals in invading Iraq was to "remake the Middle East" — a weirdly grandiose, imperialist concept of the sort that doesn’t apply anywhere except with Muslims. Only in the Middle East do lofty historical generalizations about why a world culture went wrong — like those of the right-wing Arabist and White House favorite Bernard Lewis — provide the intellectual underpinnings for unprovoked wars. Yes, the Arab-Muslim world has some serious problems, and yes, only a politically correct pedant would forbid all cultural generalizations. But when you go to war on the basis of those generalizations, you cross the line into colonialist prejudice.
The most lofty, abstract generalization of all is the insistence that this is a war of good vs. evil. "They" attacked us not because they had grievances or for any reasons that exist in the sublunary realm: They attacked simply because they were evil. Saddam would do the same because he, too, like Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, was evil. The "war on terror" is a crusade, a Holy War, whose essentially theological nature was summed up by the title of Richard Perle and David Frum’s book, "An End to Evil." And once you’re dealing with "evil," niggling distinctions — between Sunni and Shiite, or secular and religious, or whether the country you want to invade had anything to do with attacking you — can be dispensed with.
The failure of the American establishment to question such ideas, and its willingness to sign off on a war based on them, amounts to a kind of de facto bigotry: Kill one Arab, send a message to the rest of ’em. Attacking Iraq because of 9/11 made about as much sense as attacking Mozambique after the Watts riots. If we had done something that insane, we would be accused of being racists. We wouldn’t be able to shake the accusation, no matter how much gobbledygook apologists came up with about bursting a "terrorism bubble" or the "pathologies of black culture." But when America did something equally insane and attacked Iraq in response to 9/11, no one accused it of racism. Instead, we got a lot of sophistry about "Islamofascism" and other Aquinas-like attempts to make 99 virgins dance on the head of a Baathist.
Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.
Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation’s defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America’s moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.
All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin."
crossposted at The Twin Cities Conservative
“surgically defeat them”
uh, yeah…
ignoring that the effort to get UBL has never ended,
ignoring that this it is IMPOSSIBLE to “surgically” defeat the tens of thousands of Al Queda and other Islamic Holy Warriors that have been killed/captured in Iraq and Afghanistan
ignoring that the real purpose of the essay is an anti-Bush rant, and he’s a second term lame duck (ie,there’s no reason to campaign against him/there’s nothing to be accomplished by it)
And finally ignoring the idea reality that those who have sought to replace GWB (be they a Democratic Presidential candidate or a Democratic Congress) have utterly failed and never once presented anything remotely close to an idea on how to “surgically defeat” Islamic Holy Warriors
…ignoring all those simple and obvious examples of either incompetent writing or greatly competent writing from an incompetent mind, I present an edited version of the conclusive paragraph:
Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation’s defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Since the attacks, the US government has used all of its resources to fight Islamic Holy Warriors. Tens of thousands of these Islamic Holy Warriors have been killed and/captured in Afghanistan and Iraq by working with our closest allies. Thousands more have been killed or captured by our allies with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan at the top of the list. Nearly a hundred Al Queda plots to repeat or mimic the 911 attacks have been thwarted by the close cooperation of American and allied intelligence services as well as law enforcement agencies here in the US. The Middle East-which was seeing bus bombings and terrorist attacks from Morocco to India almost daily is still an uneasy place, but it is no longer ready to explode as it was on Sept 11 when Palestinians danced in the streets in praise and support of the attack on 50-100,000 American civilians. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much less than it was since tens of thousands of Islamic Holy Warriors have been brought to justice one way…or the other.
I just don’t have the energy today to read a bunch of tripe from some deranged loon like Gary Kamila.
He should just be put out of his miserable existence, like a dog that needs to be put down. He (like most Libtards) is a pathetic human being.
Kamila’s rant, as that is really all it is, is your standard, typical Leftist rant. While he tries to answer the call that the Left constitutes of nothing more than a bunch of wimpy appeasers, he basically recites the same tired Leftist talking points. Anyone with a little bit of common sense can and should his diatribe for what it is: propaganda. UNFORTUNATELY, I don’t think you can put the words “Left” and “common sense” in the same sentence. Rather, a lot of people on the Left have become so diluted with misinformation that reasoning is impossible.
I thought it was funny that he compared Bush’s “war on terror” to nothing more than fear-mongering. But, what does the MSM do? If Bush is feeding us lies? What the HELL is the MSM feeding us?
I’m reminded of a little tiny comment in Gen P’s report yesterday. Interestingly enough, it seems to be the only “shortcoming” that opponents of the war aren’t highlighting. He said that perhaps the greatest area of increase in Al Queda’s abilities is in cyberspace, and a concerted effort is needed to counter that Islamic extremist effort. Gee, given that UBL is parroting far left talking points, that almost all terrorists caught in thwarted plots here in the US are Dems or subscribe to the far left dogma…it seems oh so unusual that the left wouldn’t be all over that Petraeus point [/sarcasm off]
“Finally, in recognition of the fact that this war is not only being fought on the ground in Iraq but also in cyberspace, it also notes the need to contest the enemy’s growing use of that important medium to spread extremism.”
“regional, global, and cyberspace initiatives are critical to success”
Does anyone think the Islamic holy warriors are hacking to get into the Pentagon (oopsie, sorry, that was the People’s Republic of China-not Al Queda)? Hmmmm, what could Al Queda’s media council be doing on the web? I’m stumped. Ya think they go to Kos or LGF? DU or FR? Do they email talking points to Fox or MSNBC? Kucinich’s forums or Ron Paul’s?
I don’t like Kamilla’s arguments, they are reactionary, and hateful, but Kamilla’s stupidity does not make Daniel Pipes Correct. There is no evidence that there are many muslims willing to leave home and family to kill westerners, if there were, we would have already lost in Iraq.
The real problem is, that the natural conclusion of following Pipes’ strategy is an all out War with the muslim world, on the level of WWII, or even greater. You can’t occupy them, you can’t negotiate with them (Pipes says all negotiations are a muslim delay tactic. ) all that’s left is to kill them until they submit – I have seen Israeli’s carrying posters that read, “No Arabs, No Terrorism.” I have to reject Pipes’ strategy for this reason.
What Would the greatest general, Sun Tzu Do ?
He says – Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans;
the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces;
the next in order is to attack the enemy’s army in the field;
And the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
Well we are essentially doing what Sun Tzu says is the worst strategy, essentially beseiging walled cities, in Iraq.
We should instead be trying to balk the enemy’s plans. To do this, we would need to be non-interventionist (as Ron Paul points out), and humanitarian and open towards moderate muslims, and dismissive of Bin Laden and his radicals. Initially, we should have attempted to do everything possible to eliminate bin laden early on.
Now we should be doing everything possible to eliminate the fear generated from his propaganda, and to factionalize the muslim world. Pipes and others fan this flame of hate, without really much evidence, and help the muslim world to coalesce. How can the moderates in Iran gain any strength, when we keep threatening their country ? I’m sure Muslim moderates are called Cowards, traitors, and defeatists. Any many potential moderates, driven by fear of the US, move to the extremist for security.
This division between west and east, the suspiscion and confrontation is just what Bin Laden had in mind.
We should follow Sun Tzu, and Ron Paul, and Balk the Enemies plans, and prevent the juntion of his forces.
While your comments were well-stated, I can’t agree with everything you’ve stated.
1.) The real problem is, that the natural conclusion of following Pipes’ strategy is an all out War with the muslim world, on the level of WWII, or even greater. You can’t occupy them, you can’t negotiate with them (Pipes says all negotiations are a muslim delay tactic. ) all that’s left is to kill them until they submit – I have seen Israeli’s carrying posters that read, “No Arabs, No Terrorism.” I have to reject Pipes’ strategy for this reason.
My reaction to that is: who fired the first volley? Was it the Iranian hostage crisis? The marine barracks attack in Lebanon, circa 1983; was it a hijacked airliner here, a hijacked airliner there? Was it Somalia? Was it Kosovo? The Cole?
My point is this: WHO has staked the flames of this potential war? The West? The US? I would contend that it’s militant Islam, without a doubt.
2.) We should instead be trying to balk the enemy’s plans. To do this, we would need to be non-interventionist (as Ron Paul points out), and humanitarian and open towards moderate muslims, and dismissive of Bin Laden and his radicals. Initially, we should have attempted to do everything possible to eliminate bin laden early on.
So are you saying that we should ignore radical Islam (when you say be dismissive)? Do we put our heads in the sand, cover our eyes, etc, when our allies are victims of suicide bombers?
3.) Israel has been the scourge of Islam for 60 years. But the talk they are persecuting the poor Palestinians, is pure nonsense. For all the bluster that they are committing genocide, the Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank has grown 100-fold. Furthermore, Israel is surrounded by all sides with people who hate their guts and wish to annihilate the Jewish people. The Palestinians have become the scapegoat in the Muslim world, yet in reality, Muslims in Indonesia, Iran, Sudan, etc could care LESS about them. Why is that a majority of Palestinians carry Jordanian passports? Because many were expelled from Jordan as well.
FINALLY, the Jews is ANYONE, have more of a right to that land that the Palestinians. Judaism predates Islam by thousands of years. Frankly, they were there first. Yet, displaying their lack of tolerance, the militants refuse to recognize their existence or their right to that land as well…
I expect this kind of garbage against Gen Petraeus by people who have never served the country in any way, have not and will never serve in a war (too much yellow dog in them). This is the kind of people that hide and watch their own family being killed and never lift a finger to help. But their wounded ego (knowing they are cowards) combined with BDS makes them think they can get away with slandering those who serve. Insanity and confinement isn’t far away.
Pure Ron Paul nuttery. Clinton tried all that, and we lost 4000 American lives. How large must the attack be until we defend ourself? A dirty bomb maybe? A real nuke? 10,000 dead?
We’ve tried to dismiss the enemy and they continue to attack us. This country has been the most humanitarian country on the face of the planet, and they still attack us. Not defending oneself, sticking your head in the sand is just plain cowardice and a foolish.
Clinton was ineffective, but was far from non-interventionist. He passed the regime change act, calling for Saddam to be removed, enforced sanctions and the no fly zone in Iraq, shot missiles at bin laden, etc.
We have been intervening in the middle east since WWII. We have been squarely on the side of Israel since the 67 war. Hign profile Terrorism against the west started soon thereafter, remember the munich olympics ?
We have not been balanced in the middle east, since Eisenhower – when he stopped the Israelis, Brits and France from taking the suez.
This is probably more true today than when Mill wrote it.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic
feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much
worse. The person who has nothing for which he is
willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his
own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has
no chance of being free unless made and kept so
by the exertions of better men than himself”
– John Stuart Mill
Liberals aren’t worthy of the blanket of freedom that we (the military) provide them, but we do it anyway.
They are coming, are you prepared?
Are you kidding me? Clinton bailed out of Somalia, DIDN’T intervene in Rwanda or the Congo, took almost no action after the Cole was bombed as well as our embassies? Furthermore, the way he and his administration dealt (or DIDN’T deal) with bin Laden is an affront to this country.
I honestly feel that it will come to the need for an all out war ala WWII, before this is put to an end. The question becomes, how will we do it? During WWII, the people supported the war effort. I haven’t seen that happening since Vietnam. During Desert Storm, the “anti-war” movement didn’t get much time to come together. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist. My buddies and I wouldn’t have cared any way, as we don’t get our orders cut from that crowd.