Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------------------------http://www.tompaine.com/news/2001/09/12/index.html
TomPaine.commentary
OP-ED PAGES TROT OUT THE WHITE HAWKS
AUDIO and TEXT Nina Burleigh has written for The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and New York magazine. As a reporter for TIME, she was among the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War.
The morning after the worst terrorist attack in the history, the nations' great editorial page editors have offered up the wisdom of a group of middle-aged white men whose claim to fame is that they lost the Vietnam War.
And on a day when every television and newspaper hack around the country was proclaiming "a new era" in national defense needs, the Washington Post, the paper of record in the national capitol, solicited the wisdom of a pair of Nixon administration chicken hawks. The New York Times gave readers the advice of its resident ex-Nixon speechwriter.
It is not impossible to find smart people in this country with new ideas about terrorism and how to go about fighting it. One of them is Jessica Stern of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, formerly with the Clinton Administration National Security Agency. Stern spent the last several years interviewing the men and boys in Pakistan whose most fervent dream is to die the sort of death the hijackers died yesterday. Stern and others like her have taken the time to learn a little Urdu and face the enemy on enemy ground, to find out how he thinks and perhaps learn ways to foil diabolical plans.
Yet rather than seek the ideas of young, and possibly female, experts with new ideas, Washington Post op-editors give column inches to Nixon administration Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Nixon speechwriter George Will. The Post editors are apparently time-warped by the soothing sounds the failed patriarchs of the past: Former Nixon advisor Donald Rumsfeld, and former Nixon administration bureaucrat Dick Cheney, our vice president "in charge of the government," as network television reassuringly put it, while President Bush officially went missing when Manhattan's towers crumbled.
Kissinger, Will, Safire, Rumsfeld, Cheney -- the names of middle-aged and well-fed white guys who lost the Vietnam War to precisely the same breed of committed, angry brown men capable of living in deprivation as Osama bin Laden. Their conventional wisdom then, as now, was to attack the state that harbored the network, with American boys sent in to fight a jungle war against an invisible, committed enemy.
For the Post and Times to trot out these failed policy makers on this terrible day-after is evidence of profound reliance on outworn thinking to address dangerous new territory.
To paraphrase our president, 'God help us.'
This is Nina Burleigh for TomPaine.com
------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down
==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
