Re: FW Noam Chomsky in The Guardian Sept. 9

[Ed Weick]

I agree with you, Ed, that the chances of a clean military “surgical strike” are immature and there will be a huge and sustained backlash if victory is not quick and followed by key changes in the region.  Let’s hope we are wrong.  That’s why the stakes are so high in this adventure, and I for one am not confident that the Commander in Chief has a stable commitment to the long program.  From what I’ve read about him, forget dyslexia vs dysphasia, he has a short term attention span that is tied more to the business bottom line than the development of long term projects and that is exactly what scares our allies.   Iraq is not Kosovo, it is not a conglomeration of failing post-communist states, though there are some similarities.  Eastern Europe is not teeming in fundamentalist rants against the Great Satan.  They want to join the Great Satan in economic recovery and expanded personal opportunities.     I agree that Kosovo is not Iraq, but Eastern Europe has its own ancient hatreds and divisions and I don't think we're quite done with them.  A few Eastern European countries, noteably Poland, Hungary and the Chech Republic, are ready to join greater Europe because they always saw themselves as part of it.  A few others have historically leaned toward Russian Pan Slavism.  I think that much depends on what Russia does vis a vis the European Union.  It may also depend on how minority populations, including Moslems, feel they are being treated.  Chechnya is not a good example of how to deal with minorities.  It would not be surprising if what is going on there and whether the west continues to turn a blind eye is being watched closely.   While there are very good arguments for regime change in the Middle East, they have not been delivered by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld in a way that makes it clear and unequivocal; what we know of their plans seem obtuse and haphazard, and there has been no visionary voice.  Bush is too encumbered by his Hamlet baggage to have the pure motives of a mythical hero and Americans are reluctant to mobilize without a righteous cause.  I don’t think we are ready to become Darth Vader when we still think of ourselves as Luke Skywalker.    I've not seen the most recent Starwars movie, but I believe that it deals with Anikin Skywalker as a young and promising man, long before he becomes Darth Vadar.  Yet, somewhere within him are the seeds of Vadar!  I think we are all a little like that, even Canadians, who are normally clean nosed and holier than thou, but who can be very, very ugly.  Give normally decent people a chance to be ugly, and more often than not they'll demonstrate a capacity for it.   A cynical aside: There has been so much attention paid to the widows and survivor families of the 9/11 attacks and such a sea change in popular culture about death and grief (largely due to the school shootings) that I speculate an aversion to body bags is not the worst claim to notoriety we might have in the annals of history.  We lost 300,000 in WW2, I believe, and there was not this glorifying culture of death about it, but following on the tremendous commercial success of The Greatest Generation (which is deserving) and its offspring, there may be media forces at work that are manipulating popular sentiment contrary to recent assumptions. Furthermore, I don’t buy this Us vs Them that is solely based on the oft-mentioned reasoning that “they hate us because we stand for liberty”.  That’s at best a half-answer, but primarily a wimpy distraction from the global historical record and the continuing oppression and dysfunction in many of the ME regimes.   Perhaps I’ve learned too much listening to panel discussions and interviews with voices from the Middle East on Lehrer Newshour, but IMHO it’s foolish to categorize the vague terrorist enemy as haters of liberty – the terrorists are very specific even in their myopic bellicose rantings.  They are tacticians, not visionaries, really.  Zakaria makes a good case in his Bin Laden’s Bad Bet piece that fundamentalism is undercut, at least as political powers, because they cannot have political power as long as they cannot say their own name out loud as international outlaws, and the street furor will die down as the mullahs are silenced.  That’s the key here, isn’t it?  Making sure we don’t give the mullahs another great opportunity to reignite the flames.   I don't for one moment believe that the people who hate the US are "haters of liberty".  I believe that, first and formost, they hate themselves - or not really themselves as persons, but the position they find themselves in.  I drew this conclusion while watching Irish Catholics throwing insults (and stones) at little Protestant girls on their way to school.  I asked myself, why are they doing that?  Do they really hate the little girls so?  They couldn't possibly.  The hate must come from something else, more than likely their own powerlessness and their inability to create one iota of change to better their world.  They feel stripped of everything.    Some of the things I've read about Arabs suggests much the same kind of thing.  Many of the young are well educated but absolutely stuck.  There is nothing they can do but hate and try, in practical and ideological ways, to release that hate so that it doesn't totally overcome them.   By the way, Time magazine has a good point-counterpoint dialogue in its Sept. 11 issue, between Andrew Sullivan and Michael Elliot about if America has really changed and then they’ve also posted commentary by author Philip Bobbitt, who seems to have been very influential within the Bush Administration, titled Get Ready for the Next Long War.   Sen. McCain also writes that we have to “fight for democracy everywhere.”  Is his the visionary voice?  Bush has not asked us to sacrifice for a worthy goal (yet), but McCain seems to relish his role of leading where others don’t yet want to go.  Sometimes, they call that leadership.  Will Bush meet that challenge?  Karen   Thanks.  I'll look for it.  I'll also look for the October Atlantic, which you referred to in a previous posting.   Ed