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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (333710)	12/25/2002 7:57:05 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

Inept but Entitled to Her Say Wednesday, December 25, 2002; Page A28 THERE IS POLITICAL criticism, there is political attack, and then there is political political correctness: the massive overreaction to perfectly useful ideas that have been badly stated or misinterpreted. There is a danger, for instance, that people will become afraid to criticize any aspect of American foreign policy, lest they be branded "anti-American." That, at any rate, is the conclusion many will reach after reading of Sen. Patty Murray's experience. Sen. Murray's (D-Wash.) crime, it seems, was to make an ill-worded and rather silly speech last week to a high school in Vancouver, Wash., that was then excerpted by the Columbian, a newspaper in Vancouver, Canada. In a normal week, the Columbian's Web site receives 60,000 to 70,000 visitors. The day following the paper's story about Sen. Murray's speech, it had 230,000 visitors. As the Web site put it, "There are top stories, and then there is Patty Murray." Other Web sites, Web logs and talk shows picked up the story, and by the weekend, the chairman of the Republican Party in Washington state had publicly questioned Sen. Murray's patriotism. What did Patty Murray actually say? According to the Columbian, she said that Osama bin Laden has "been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. . . . How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?" Sen. Murray got a few things very wrong. Osama bin Laden spent a lot more money on terrorist training camps than on day-care centers; the senator appears to have confused him with the fundamentalist charities that have won so much support for the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas on the West Bank. Nor did she seem to have considered the possibility that the "bombing" of Afghanistan and Iraq might also, in the long term, be in the interest of the Afghans and the Iraqis. Nevertheless, there is a deeper point that Sen. Murray, with extraordinary ineptitude, seemed to be trying to make -- a point that is worth preserving: At the very least, it ought to be possible to discuss America's image in the Islamic world, and the kinds of mistakes the United States has made there. For decades, American governments have spent remarkable amounts of money in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, relatively little of which is visible on the ground. Yet if successive American administrations had identified the United States more closely with good works in the Middle East and had tried more assiduously to explain American values, then American relations with the Islamic world might look different today. Or they might not. Either way, this is a point worth debating, and no one should be called "unpatriotic" for bringing it up. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com