Guin: The root of the problem is that they want us to stop supporting Israel, and give up our “great Satan” lifestyle (among other things). I’m not willing to do either. Now what?
lieu…damn. You raise some good points, especially
**
…hmmmm…
Fenris
Well, exactly! We should do whatever it takes to protect our national security. But “whatever it takes” is NOT going to be a solely military response. The US has to be willing to whatever it takes, in addition to a military response, to protect our security for as long a time as possible. If we want to do this correctly, we have to “understand the issues,” as Fenris put it.
Some radio commentator last week hauled out the hackneyed phrase, “we must be prepared to win both the coming war and the following peace.” Cliched as that may be, it’s still true. Forgive me if I am misunderstanding here, but I am getting the impression that you are equating the sentiment that we must carefully construct future foreign policy with “knee-jerk America bashing.” Now, I am most certainly not advocating an appeasment of the terrorists, or a general hand-wringing over past policies. However, I most certainly AM concerned that simply crushing a few terrorists without considering what long-range policies to implement afterward will lead to a lower level of national security, not greater.
I’m glad you mentioned Pearl Harbor. Certainly we should be as outraged now as we were 60 years ago, if not more so. But, after WWII, the US implemented the Marshall plan, which was arguably the most successful piece of US foreign policy of the 20th century. What will we do this time?
Fenris - you’ve shown the limits of my knowledge, and I apologize.
I agree 100% with what lieu said. THANK YOU!
The people who are saying “slow down, let’s get as much information as we can so that we don’t repeat past mistakes” are not against retaliation, do not support giving into terrorist demands, and are in no way apologists for terrorism. I hope you understand that, and I don’t understand why it’s being painted as “retaliate and defend national security” VERSUS “understanding.” Retaliation without understanding gets us nowhere.
But who is asking that we get ethical approval from madmen?
I frankly agree with your “rabid dog” analogy; I just don’t think it’s a good idea to torch a neighborhood because one of the houses has a rabid dog in the back yard. There are so many rabid dogs in that part of the world, Fenris; I would feel much safer if I was sure our administration fully understands how terrorism is spread, how it can be prevented and how we can get help from the very countries in which it is incubated.
If, in the process of eliminating terrorism we must change some of our policies, it would be quite odd to consider those changes some sort of victory for terrorists!
But Fenris…
WHY do they consider us ‘the Great Satan’?
WHY do they want us to stop supporting Israel?
MAGDALENE –
Why? If I agree with the entirety of the balance of your post (which I do not) and state that America has sucked in every way possible to suck in the Middle East (as if it is somehow more responsible for the region than those who actually live there), that changes the situation today how, exactly?
Is the action less worthy of retaliation? Is it excused? Or excusable? I do not give the single smallest SHIT why this was done. Why not? Because there is NO REASON, NO MOTIVATION, NO ACTION DONE BY US, that can excuse it or justify it. I do not care why they “feel the way they do.” Their feelings mean nothing in the face of the enormity of their actions. I do not need to understand their motivations to declare, unequivocally, that these actions cannot be tolerated and must be punished. Understanding their “motivations” would change that how? It wouldn’t change it at all.
I am not advocating bombing anyone, unless or until the perpetrators are known. I am not saying that people cannot navel-gaze about the Middle East to their hearts’ content. What I am saying is that linking the acts of killing thousands of people to any grievance regarding policy is a worthless effort at this point. It doesn’t change what has occurred. It doesn’t IMO change what must happen next – swift and comprehensive justice for the victims. Again, if policy changes one iota in the wake of this, then the terrorists have, to that extent, won a victory through their actions.
So when XENO asks “Is anyone so fucking foolish as to think our only two options are status quo or capitulation?,” I say, I am. In the immediate wake of this event, any deviation from the staus quo is a capitulation. Is anyone so fucking foolish as to fail to see the danger of establishing an apparent cause and effect between massive acts of terror and apparently consequent changes in foreign policy?
I disagree vociferously with those who say “In the wake of this, we need to reexamine policy.” Bullshit. If policy needs to be reexamined, then it needed to be reexamined before, for good and independent reasons other than acts of terror. I am not saying such reexamination is a bad idea; I am simply saying that I disagree with those who would link it to recent events, because I personally do not believe that acts of terror should be rewarded by prompting any change in activity or attitude on the part of the terrorized.
To me, it’s like getting punched in the mouth and then having people expect me to sit down to think about how I can change my behavior so you won’t punch me in the mouth again. Hogwash! You have assaulted me, and the initial and primary inquiry must be how you will pay for it. The inquiry of what prompted the assault is obviously secondary and IMO largely beside the point, because there is nothing I could have done to have merited it. I do not believe that refusing to inquire as to the motivations of the assaulter “is a prelude to further tragedy;” I believe it appropriately keeps the focus on the the victim and the responsibility upon the attacker.
These are emotional times and emotional subjects, so I for one would appreciate it if people could address what I did say, and not what I didn’t. For example:
:: Shrug :: I don’t know who said this. Certainly I never stated or implied that anyone had said it.
I didn’t say this, either. I do not equate policy decisions with patriotism.
Lieu:
I agree with you up to a point, but “understanding” should not be a priority, especially at this point in the situation. Let’s look at a very small-scale example: Let’s say an intruder breaks into my house. And he’s making his way toward the bedroom, where I am. Now I could be asking myself the following questions during this time:
Was his father an alcoholic?
Was he never taught right from wrong?
Does he have an abnormally high aggression level?
Was he an underprivileged child?
Was he a “have not”?
Does he have low self esteem?
But I won’t, and neither would you. Instead, 100% of my concentration will be spent focusing my eyes on my gun’s front site. 100%.
A similar attitude should be taken during war. I care not why my enemy is trying to destroy me. It doesn’t matter. The only thing I focus on is stopping him and demobilizing him; energy spent pondering “bigger” questions will only get you killed.
Let the academics ask “Why” afterwards. For now, our focus should be on our front site.
Blackclaw: From the same site you linked to, an article challenging your contentions.
I agree fully with xenophon and magdalene.
I don’t have as much argument with this as you might think - put me in the camp of people who think that it needed to be reexamined before.
I don’t blame America is responsible for fucking up everything in the Middle East. But I do think our habit of playing states off each other over the years has made us a convenient target for anger, while doing nothing to un-muddle the situation. I also don’t think this act of terrorism was in any way precipitated by something WE did.
But understanding who our enemies are and what they want will only help us in defeating them and in trying to create some semblance of stability in the aftermath. Don’t you see that? There is the short-term need to punish and eradicate immediate threat. What is the long-term goal for the U.S. and the world?
I am too exhausted with this whole thing to fight with people I admire and care about.
Building on what CRAFTERMAN said:
If you come into my house and murder my child, why you have done so is at best a secondary inquiry. Examining whether some action of mine might have prompted you to murder my child is an even less relevent inquiry, and runs the additional risk of sometimes appearing to be a defense of the murder. (“Well, if she hadn’t done X, he wouldn’t have murdered her child.”) At bottom, nothing I can understand about the motivation of the murderer will change the fact that he murdered my child, or change the fact that under any reasonable idea of justice, he must be punished for it. Since it changes neither what has happened nor what should happen next, it is largely pointless.
This is not an advocation of ignorance. You have murdered my child. If I do not care why you have done so, I am not advocating ignorance. I am under no obligation to attempt to understand those who seek to harm me – except to the extend LIEU correctly points out that knowledge of the enemy is power. But that’s not the position the rest of you are advocating; you appear to be arguing that we as a nation must sit down right now and try to “understand” why this occurred. As must be obvious, I simply disagree.
Amen. I think I’m taking a powder from posting for a while. Fenris, Jodi and Scylla, I meant no offense to any of you, and I’m glad this country (and this MB) has you in it.
MAGDALENE –
Of course I see that. But you now say “understand who they are in order to defeat them;” that is LIEU’s point, and did not appear to be what you were saying before. No, you trotted out every perceived grievance against the U.S. for the past twenty years, as if our being assaulted engenders some obligation on our part to do something, maybe a lot of things, differently. It is the implicit linkage of last week’s events to that reexamination and/or policy changes that I object to – not the reexamination/potential policy changes themselves. I simply would not do anything in the short term that could be construed as an “effect” of this terrorist “cause” – anything besides seek swift justice, that is.
Crafter Man, If I know nothing about the intruder and consider his actions resulted out of jealousy for my posessions, how am I to know to prepare for the arrival of his brother the next night who was misled into believing I’d raped their mother?
Guin
Two responses to your questions. First one’s my gut-level feeling and I apologize in advance for the flip sounding answer:
“Don’t know, don’t care. They’re outside the bounds of civilized discourse.”
A more serious answer though:
WHY do they consider us ‘the Great Satan’? (I’m not trying to be snotty by using the format below, it was just easier to arrange my thoughts that way)
A. Because they object to our "decadent lifestyle"
1. Our women have the freedom to dress as they please
2. Our performing artists have the freedom to create almost any art.
3. Our citizens have an unprecidented amount of freedom
a. Economic
b. Personal
c. Religous
d. Social
B. Because they object to the fact that we're not a fundimentalist Islamic
dictatorship
WHY do they want us to stop supporting Israel?
A. Because they don't believe that Israel has a right to exist
1. In the Middle-East
2. Anywhere
B. Because Jews (and Christians, and Buddhists and Hindus) are heretics
and *they* don't have a right to exist.
There may or may not be more to their reasoning, but what’s the point? The reasons I listed are deal-breakers. They won’t come to the table unless we’re willing to discuss the items listed and I refuse to support going to any table that has them up for discussion. We have irreconcilable differences and any discussion until one side or the other conceeds on the above points is futile.
Fenris
Since written words are so faulty in conveying context, allow me to clarify that I am not angry in posting or disappointed in anyone else who has posted here. I think that one of the dangers we as a nation must carefully avoid in the wake of all this is the implicit assertion that we must all agree in every particular – as if, if we don’t, then we are not on the same side – we are not all equally “good” Americans.
America has room for lots of opinions, and I will try to respect even those with whom I cannot agree, and I will never imply that disagreement equates to a lack of caring or a lack of patriotism.
I think there’s a larger level of agreement here than it may first appear.
Speaking for myself, of course understanding our enemy and his motivations is important and should be ongoing, in coordination with eradicating the imminent threat that this enemy poses to our national security and that of our allies, through whatever means is needed. Doing the former will help the latter effort to be more successful.
My problem is with those who want to do the former, and don’t seem to have much to say about doing the latter. Understanding our enemy, alone and in a vacuum, is ludicrous, in my opinion.
If you want to know who in my opinion is “American-bashing,” it would be those who, in response to thousands of their fellow American citizens being slaughtered, tick off America’s foreign policy failings. And don’t say much more. Who give tepid, qualifying statements of their opposition to what happened Sept. 11, then go into their diatribes about what a terrible, hypocritical country America is.
Thank you for the link.
I still maintain that the Iraqi government intentionally causes the effects of the sanctions to be much harsher than they would be otherwise.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/oilforfood/2001/0201.htm
Iraq shows visitors exactly what it wants them to see and simply blames all of the misery on the US. Powell’s attempts at easing some of the sanctions were dismissed out of hand by the Iraqi government.
I place my full support behind Jodi.
LIEU asks:
Surely you are not saying that America is so clueless that we collectively believe the motivation for this attack was one thing (anger over Middle Eastern policy), when in fact it was really something else altogether (anger over rain forest deforestation).
We all know in the most general of terms why this was done. What I and some others object to is the idea that we as a nation must examine our actions, and think about changing them, in the wake of this and because of this. So the analogy would be that you know perfectly well that the intruder was coming after your possessions, so you try to think of what you possibly could have done to engender that jealousy – as if, in the end, that matters in the least when the end result is the same – you were robbed and assaulted.
xenophon:
Actually, they’re an excellent example. Rome only fell when it became decadent and stopped obliterating its enemies internal and external. Then it in turn was obliterated by its enemies.
If you disagree, why don’t you ask a Carthaginian what they think about it.
Olentzero:
Are you seriously suggesting that pounding an enemy into nonexistence doesn’t solve the problem with that enemy?
Are you proposing vengeance from the grave?
From your limited base of examples, you grant me the Confederacy, but say that didn’t pound Japan and Germany into nonexistance?
We pounded the axis powers at least as hard as the Confederacy, and probably harder. I got news for you as well. We obliterated them. The fact that the islands of Japan, and a country by that name, populated by people called “Japanese” are in existence, does not dispel the fact that we completely pounded our enemy into nonexistence.
The Japanese armies, navies, and most of the Damn cities ceased to exist, along with a good percentage of the population. When they surrendered, we occupied their island with our forces and remade them in ouir own image.
The Japanese enemy was pounded into nonexistance. What was left were Japanese people. Same for the Germans.
You also present examples where we did not obliterate them, which tells us nothing about cases where he have, and is therefore a useless example.
I doubt the Aztecs or the Branch Davidians would disagree.
Jodi, Crafterman, your analogy works for individuals, certainly.
But how does it apply to nations and multinational movements, that will persist on after individual perpetrators are punished?
If the man sneaking into your house were part of a larger group that planned to sneak into your house and attack you every week for the forseeable future, wouldn’t you want to devote some time to investigating the group as a whole and what the hell they want with your house so you can better defend yourself and better track them down? What if this group were linked with other groups who swore to continue the intrusions as part of their mission statement?
It doesn’t remove the need to punish the intruder or the group, it doesn’t remove the need to act swiftly to prevent further intrusion. I do not suggest that you will be “sitting around and navel-gazing” while attacks continue, I simply suggests that there is more to “intelligence-gathering” than name, serial number, longitude, and latitude.
I know my post can be seen as “America-bashing” (and a at a “time like this” that’s unpopular and probably doesn’t help my arguments). I “trotted out the grievances” for one reason - I keep getting that fucking 1973 Gordon Sinclair speech about how much good America does in the world, and running into wide-eyed folks who ask “why would anyone hate us? we’re the good guys, right?” Not everyone in the world thinks of us as the good guys. Not everyone in the world should or HAS to think of us as the good guys. Our self-image is that we always wear the white hat, but in some parts of the world our actions have spoken otherwise. There are people in the world who feel that they’ve been fucked over by the United States, and some of them have reason. You can argue that they are manipulated by their leaders, that they don’t know the whole story, that they are blinded by prejudice and hatred, but to many people in the world the U.S. is seen as the promise of freedom and justice for everyone except themselves.
Maybe we had good reasons for doing everything we’ve ever done that are or were clearly in the national self-interest at the time, and if given the choice we would do them all again. As a U.S. citizen, I support and understand that. I’m also lucky enough to live in a country where I am free enough to say “yeah, we might have fucked up back there. Once we’ve dealt with the immediate threat, let’s see what we can do to not fuck up again.”
Or at least to debate the prospect freely with my peers in a forum such as this.
Disagreement with American foreign policies do not translate into any justification for Tuesday’s attack. However, if we blindly pretend that anti-American sentiment in the world doesn’t exist, or has absolutely no basis, we cripple ourselves in dealing with future threats.
Does that make sense?
I link “understanding” with retaliation because knowing your enemy is the only way to defeat him. Understanding is also the only way to avoid repeating the mistakes in the future. It doesn’t mean backing down from policies that we believe in or capitulating to terrorists.