I've once already made the mistake of taking Maurice's sledgehammers from the left seriously, but I'm going to take this one seriously as well. I must confess that I haven't followed the political discussion on this board, so I haven't read whatever was written that got our Kiwi friend in such a lather. The nature of the sentiments he expresses are nonetheless easily recognizable, shopworn, and, to the extent that he actually believes what he writes, delusional.
1.Some argue for in the extension of the full measure of constitutional rights to foreign combatants of an army that claims as its righteous duty the wholesale slaughter of American men, women and children (when in our system of military justice not even our own servicemen and women have such rights). This point of view has even a scintilla of moral force only because of the dark, but wholly unrealistic, scenarios they allege if we instead use the truncated procedures of a military tribunal. Playing on the stereotype of the US Military popular at Berkeley during the 60s, the suggestion is made that the quality of justice to be administered in these tribunals will resemble that of a KKK lynch mob.
2.To feed on such fears,Maurice will, of course, find great and foreboding significance in the fact that some wacko here or there murders an innocent fellow American of Middle Eastern ethnicity,or tries to bomb a mosque, and absolutely no significance in the fact that our law enforcement agencies, with the overwhelming support (even insistence) of the American public, have vigorously investigated such incidents as they have occured, and that every known perpertrator of such acts is now in jail and awaiting trial. If you see the American public as a rabid and vengeful mob,its easy to see that tribunals run by the American military will have similar characteristics.
2. Returning to the real world for a moment, what we find instead is a military exercising tremendous restraint to avoid the death of innocents; a military that has spent billions building characteristics into its weaponry to attack with great precision an enemy that intentionally mingles among the population, so that civilian casualties can be kept to an absolute minimum. I'm not a military historian, but is there any parallel to such efforts in the entire recorded history of warfare? Our military does not act in this way because its members genetically possess some sort of ethical or moral superiority. Neither does an American public that demands that its military do no less. It is, however, because American institutions create an environment that is most hospitable to good ideas winning out over bad ones. It is these same institutions that allow a virtually limitless number of ethnic groups and cultures to more or less peacefully coexist with one another under the same democratic umbrella all the while the left likes to portray America as the birthplace of racism.And it is these same institutions that will prevent military tribunals from administering cowboy, lynch mob justice.
3. All of which brings us to Maurice's poke that America wants to "take over the world".Well, there is a sense in which I believe we would like to do so. I think we would like for our ideas about freedom and enlightened captalism, and the opportunity and consequent optimism that infuses the American psyche, to become prevalent worldwide. When this happens tribalism and hatred and leftist sloganeering (which simply preys upon the petty jealousy, vanity and insecurity of the impoverished, leading them to believe that the wealtier nations have created their miserable condition, when in fact these nations provide them with the blueprint to bring an end to their suffering) gives way to progress, and an objective and informed view of the world. A prosperous and engaged world, not a subjugated world, is what America wants. The emotional "pride of authorship" of the left is a major obstacle to the realization of such a world. These attitudes are to the mere antics of the GSM crowd as myopia is to 20/20 vision.
4.A superpower bent on "world domination" would not emerge victorious from two world wars, and then simply return home to till its own fields, and demand of its former enemies simply that they behave themselves, and pose no further threat to the peace and stability of the world.
5. Maurice, since you find American power to be such a threat and so distasteful, I have two questions:
(i) Can you name another country on earth that you would prefer to see in the possesion of such power in place of America?
(ii)Do you really think that the world would be a better place if the nations unfriendly to America, rather than America itself, possessed such power?
6. If it is within your capacity to reason, and not merely to rant; if it is within your capacity to consider the big picture, and not merely the carefully selected picayune abberations of minutiae, how should we have reacted differently to September 11? What have we done, or are doing, with which you seriously finf fault?
Best regards. |
