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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Win Smith who wrote (43086)	9/10/2002 5:26:13 PM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

:^)It's really unbelievable. If I were Bush I would be steamed. First He says "regime change, war, I don't need no stinking allies, I don't need no stinking Congress, I don't need no stinking UN." Then he comes back from fund raising/vacation and says " I have not decided. " (a/k/a seems I can't go ahead with what I decided already/ shot my mouth off about) so "It starts here." By the way "I'll talk to Allies/Congress/UN." (wait for the speech on Thursday). "I hope the allies don't ask me about what is going to happen to Iraq after the regime change and I hope they agree to split all expenses." Things are not going his way. He is being undermined. "ANd that darn Al Keeda video had to come out just as I was controlling the news cycle and my Marketing (propaganda) plan was about to kick off at the Statue of Liberty. I wish Laura wouldn't have told everybody to turn off the TV. Let's go for Orange Alert. Rove says we do best in the polls and the votes when we have war issues. (Even though this regime change stuff hasn't been helping me.) Somebody call Karen Hughes. Nothing has been going right since she stopped finishing my sentences." :^)

To: Win Smith who wrote (43086)	9/11/2002 11:55:51 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

Kinsley is a liberal.

To: Win Smith who wrote (43086)	9/20/2002 9:04:26 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Deliver Us From Evil washingtonpost.com [ in which Kinsley reveals that although he lies to the right of Colin Powell on the war front, he hasn't totally gotten with the neocon program. Maybe all the years of playing the wimpy token liberal on all the tv shouting matches got to him or something. Previously posted in part by stockman_scott ] Of all the explanations for Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent alleged war on terrorism, the least illuminating is that it's all about evil. We didn't know or didn't appreciate that there is evil in the world. Now we do know, or ought to. In President Bush's "axis of evil" speech last January, the first item on his list of truths "we have come to know" after 9/11 is that "evil is real, and it must be opposed." William J. Bennett -- the Martha Stewart of morality -- takes up the theme in a quickie book, "Why We Fight," on a Web site (www.avot.org, AVOT being "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism"), and in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial page piece. "It took George W. Bush . . . to revive the language of good and evil," Bennett slobbers. Until a year ago, he avers, "terms like 'evil,' 'wrong,' and 'bad' " were not in "the lexicon." And even now, a fifth column of "pseudo-sophisticated intellectuals" is undermining America's war effort with nefarious suggestions that it might be more complicated than that. Bennett's evidence that the concept of evil is endangered is pretty thin. He scrounges up a couple of professors making moral-relativist noises about understanding terrorists as people and the possibility that America's own actions may have contributed to America's current dilemma. Neither of them is actually quoted as dissing the word "evil." My own impression, for what it is worth, is that concepts such as "bad" and "wrong" did pop up occasionally before 9/11 and that there has never in our history been a proposition from which fewer Americans dissent than, "Osama bin Laden is evil." Calling terrorists "evil" requires no courage and justifies no self-congratulatory puffing. It's just not a problem. But it's also not a solution. There are many groups of people, unfortunately, who would be happy to hijack four airplanes, fly them into crowded buildings and kill 3,000 Americans. In terms of malign intent, they all are evil. But only one of them managed to do it. The concept of evil tells you nothing about why -- among the many evils wished upon the United States -- this one actually happened. Nor does "evil" help us figure out how to stop evil from visiting itself upon us again. If the great essential truth about terrorism is that some people just hate the United States, the obvious next question is: Why? But that is precisely the question that offends the All-About-Evil crowd, because it leads in two unacceptable directions. One is toward psychology, trying to understand how a human mind could plot the deaths of so many innocents and gladly die in carrying it out. "Root causes" is what this kind of thinking is called in the context of domestic social issues such as crime and welfare, and conservatives regard it as a major liberal disease, with symptoms that include coddling criminals and forgiving sloth. If the subjective basis for terrorists hating America is off-limits for consideration, that would seem to leave the objective basis: Is it something we did, or didn't do, to them or theirs? But this violates the ancient conservative taboo against "blaming America first." So check and mate: Terrorism is evil, evil, evil -- gosh, it's evil -- and there's nothing else to discuss. This is an astonishingly philistine, know-nothing posture for a group of people (mostly neoconservative would-be muscular-intellectual types) who generally preen as the guardians of intellectual standards. They are so afraid of the fallacy of tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner that they fall right into it: In order to avoid the danger that understanding terrorism might lead to excusing terrorism, they put understanding itself beyond the pale. This is not just anti-intellectual but actually a hindrance to the war on terrorism. Blocking any deeper understanding of the terrorists' mentality and motives cannot be good for the war effort. Using the word "evil" to resist any more complex understanding of terrorism is doubly philistine because of what the study of evolutionary psychology is learning about how much of human behavior is hard-wired into our brains. Ordinarily conservatives are quite thrilled by the idea of a genetic basis for nearly anything, and eager to accuse liberals of refusing to face the truth. The whole subject appeals to their treasured sense of futility. In this case, though, it is conservatives who are hiding from science. Advances in our understanding of the brain do indeed pose a challenge to the moral concept of blame or fault or guilt or, yes, even evil. But the challenge is not necessarily insurmountable. (Robert Wright explores and explains all this in his wonderfully lucid book "The Moral Animal.") In any event, wrapping yourself in the flag and burying your head in the sand is not an appropriate way to deal with an unwelcome philosophical challenge. It may not be evil, but it isn't very nice.