One could take the second line and yet advocate a more cautious stance.
Yes, that was my point. The choice is not between bandits/police action and political movement/war. The paradigm and the implementation approach are not absolutely connected as your original statement implied. There are two levels of choice. First is a choice between bandits and political movement. Then, for the former, police action is the default. However, for the latter, there is a second choice among war with Iraq and some other unnamed actions. I didn't think it was correct to assert that the political movement paradigm lead automatically to war.
I'm glad we've sorted at least that much out. <g>
At least part of the disconnect we see between the Administration approach and reticents like me is that the process leading up to the start of the Iraq war seemed like a leap, a rush to judgment, almost a knee-jerk reaction. Those of us not ready to make that leap were naturally distressed by that. It may be that all other options were considered and deemed unfeasible. But that's not the way it came across, which partially accounts for the "cowboy" and "unilateralist" perception and other criticisms. The communication about the reasons for war was framed to rationalize and stir the true believers. The messages really resonated with them even as they further turned off the rest of us.
Nadine, if you look at the communication from the perspective of someone from a different subculture, someone not predisposed to send troops to fight evil around the world, it really looked just like the critics said. It looked arrogant and unilateral and predetermined. What was delivered was a justification that would resonate with those predisposed to follow the President into war. What was never presented was a rationale that would make sense to people like me. It seemed they didn't care what we thought, which further exacerbated the unilateralist perception.
Had the message been delivered that, while this was triggered by the heinous terrorist act of 9/11, after due study and deliberation it was determined that, sadly, there was no way to stop the terrorists without both draining the swamp and concurrently building a democratic future for the middle east, that the problem wasn't terrorism but islamism, hey, I would have bought it.
But that's not the message we got. They called it a war on terrorism. To any self-respecting cultural elite, terrorism is a behavior, an evil, uncivilized behavior. It isn't a political movement, it is a tool, which can be used by political movements. Of course we suffered cognitive dissonance when we're supposed to be at war with terrorists who might once again drop planes on our heads yet there we were putting all our energy into taking over Iraq. Not that Iraq wasn't a blot on civilization and better off out of business, only that the connection between it and terrorism on our shores was tangential. The Prez spent his energy trying to jury rig a weapons connection between 9/11 and Iraq when he should have been framing it as a war on Islamism complete with swamp draining and democracy. When we're faced with such cognitive dissonance, the natural reaction is to distrust competence or motives or both. Which is what happened. With a vengeance. Maybe they expected us all to react like true believers and buy their line, no matter how shaky. Maybe they're so imbued with their own way of thinking and so inbred that they really think that we would all understand their coded messages so that everyone who didn't automatically buy their line really was a fuzzy-headed leftie or a traitor or interested only in partisan advantage. Maybe the war on terrorism morphed into a war on islamism somewhere along the line and they didn't notice it until after the fact. Maybe that's why they never explained it to us. Or maybe they're just cowboys and unilateralists after all. The true believers think they know which. The opposing partisans and the professional pacifists think they know which. The rest of us don't know. What we know is that's we'd like to be treated with respect and have things explained in a way that make sense to us, thoughtful, serious, logically compelling, solemn. "Bring 'em on" may play great with the red team, but it's at best offputting to the rest of us.
I have not seen any opponents of Perle's thinking, whether from the Left or from the Realists at State, seriously acknowledge Islamism as a political movement and explain how they would approach the problem.
Maybe because they think we're fighting a war on terror. After all, that's what they've been told. |
