Month: July 2004

Follow-Up On “Terrorism: What Kerry Should (But Will Not) Say”

by

My response to commenter Herb Richter on this thread became so long that I decided to make it into a new post.

————–

Herb wrote:

Do you seriously believe that the terrorists would abandon months and months of planning because of a few statements by John Kerry saying that he would go after them as well?

I can’t prove that the terrorists would be deterred. However, I’d rather we didn’t run that risk, and it wouldn’t cost Kerry much to make such a statement. We are dealing with marginal effects here, not all-or-none. I think terrorists, on the margin, will be less likely to attack if we reduce the prospective payoff for an attack. One way to reduce that payoff is to eliminate any uncertainty about the harshness of our response.

As for your second point, I think it’s clear that the terrorists understand us in some respects but not others. They were, as you correctly point out, smart enough to plan and implement a large and tactically innovative attack on 9/11, yet they completely misjudged our response. I do not believe that we can predict reliably that they won’t attempt a Madrid-type attack on us. Indeed I am not certain that such an attack on us before the elections wouldn’t be effective in shifting votes away from Bush. I hope that it wouldn’t be but who knows. Given that Kerry is the only person who could state with authority what a Kerry administration would do, I think it would be prudent for him to make clear that a Madrid-type attack would not be effective. Subtlety and ambiguity on our part are not helpful in deterring an enemy who understands only explicit statements and forceful actions.

With respect to your third point:

While Al Qaeda may indeed perceive the Spanish election results as vindication for their tactics, should a democracy really let the fear of future terrorist attacks in other countries keep its citizens from ousting a government that it no longer trusts? If we no longer vote our conscience in an election because of how we think terrorists might perceive the outcome, democracy becomes a futile exercise.

The problem is that the terrorists are involved whether we want them to be or not. We no more have the option of ignoring how our domestic politics plays abroad than did Britons in 1940. Politics, as the famous aphorism puts it, is about the possible. Sometimes that means choosing the lesser evil. I don’t see why reelecting a flawed government that has a decent track record at waging war, as opposed to untested challengers whose alternative vision is, at best, indistinct, isn’t wise behavior for voters in a democracy.

Democratic politics means lots of people have a say in major decisions. Often the choices that voters get are between bad and worse, but the fact that the options aren’t as good as some theoretical alternative doesn’t make democracy a “futile exercise.” Nowadays the enemy gets a vote, too. Ignoring that fact won’t make it go away.

Bush & Winthrop – Choosing Life

by

Edgar Lee Masters gave us Lucinda Matlock almost a century ago. That plainswoman, dead at ninety-six and having outlived many of her twelve children, speaks to us from her grave: “Degenerate sons and daughters, / Life is too strong for you– / It takes life to love Life.” Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, published in 1916, arrived just a few years after the Education of Henry Adams , whose great power comes from his very listlessness, his lack of purpose. That we see as twentieth century. But that tough old broad, that wonderful character captured in but a few lines and spanning the nineteenth century – she, too, has something to tell us in the twenty-first.

It takes energy to love life; it takes life. Striding through the world, facing life is embracing what is. That requires a certain toughness, a certain honesty. But the cynicism of post-modernism doesn’t face reality. It breeds the cynicism that deadens energy. It is cynicism that simplifies, that disengages. Cynicism pins the other, struggling pinned and wriggling on the wall. The cynics sometimes fancy themselves skeptics; would it were so. Skepticism notes complexity, asks questions. A skeptic is distinterested but intellectually engaged. A skeptic doesn’t welcome despair but does ask us to doubt our illusions. A skeptic asks, Is it worth it? But to post-modernists, there is no worth, so nothing is “worth it.” So a young man’s response to the stoicism and heroism implied by the lines of firemen taking last rites as they entered the burning World Trade Center was that such men were “sick” and Michael Moore assumes no one could consider their lives – nor their child’s life – worth “saving Fallujah.” [Sorry about the mistake.] The assumption in both cases is not that of someone who asks, are the lives saved worth the loss? Nor is there a sense that loving life is loving another’s life – indeed, of loving the many others, the unnamed and even unknown others. No, such a choice only comes from greed or insanity or stupidity.

But this is the air through which we move; we have seen cynicism; we have seen Chicago. We aren’t surprised by the phenomenon Virginia Postrel noted, the last-ditch, crazy, projection – if George Bush is the problem, then we don’t need to deal with the real problem. Sometimes it seems as if a lot of grouchy teens were awakened by 9/11 and are irritated at the world for making them get up. And Bush, well, if we can pin him with a phrase, we don’t need to deal with the facts his very presence reminds us are true.

Read more

Quote of the Day

by

Melanie Phillips on Andrew Sullivan:

And this is surely why Bush is so hated by the left. For this hatred wildly exceeds the normal dislike of a political opponent. It is as visceral and obsessive as it is irrational. At root, this is surely because Bush has got under the skin of the post-moral left in a way no true conservative ever would. And this is because he has stolen their own clothes and revealed them to be morally naked. He has exposed the falseness of their own claim to be liberal. He has revealed them instead to be reactionaries, who want both to preserve the despotic and terrorist status quo abroad and to go with the flow of social and moral collapse at home, instead of fighting all these deformities and building a better society.