The dogs of war 0
I must be a conservative in liberal's clothing: I find conservative articles intelligent and observing more than liberal ones. But –and this is a big but–I have to close my eyes at all the condescension, patronization, and just plain pig-headedness that is conservatism.
Take <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200406140811.asp">this article</a> for instance.
Ostensibly, it critiques Western oversight in handling the Al Qaeda threat. But, being the conservative bias-bastion that the writer is, actually makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib: 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.
Bah. Horse pucky.
But he makes other good, very observant points. So here's what I've done: I snipped the bits that I like from the bits I simply cannot stomach. What remains is my own filtered version of red-blue politics (Canadian terms for Tory and Grit, aka Conservative and Liberal but here hyphenated and joined as one).
From the article:
Much has been written about our problems with this postmodern war and why we find it so difficult to fully mobilize our formidable military and economic clout to crush the terrorists and their patrons. Of course, we have no identifiable conventional enemy such as Hitler's Panzers; we are not battling a fearsome nation that defiantly declared war on us, such as Tojo's Japan; and we are no longer a depression-era, disarmed, impoverished United States at risk for our very survival. But then, neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Tojo nor Stalin ever reached Manhattan and Washington.
So al Qaeda is both worse and not worse than the German Nazis: It is hardly the identifiable threat of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but in this age of technology and weapons of mass destruction it is more able to kill more Americans inside the United States.
I think Islamofascism is brilliant in its reading of the postmodern West and precisely for that reason it is dangerous beyond all description ’Äî in the manner that a blood-sucking, stealthy, and nocturnal Dracula was always spookier than a massive, clunky Frankenstein.
Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West.
This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply.
If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing ’Äî but quickly point to the U.S. and scream "Iraq!" And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch.