Although we see ourselves as a peaceful nation, there is considerable room for doubt. In a recent blog I pointed out that making peace with the Muslim world was our only long-term option, given that every Islamic society is rapidly being instilled with permanent anti-Americanism, almost from the cradle. But many responders would have none of it. They found peace a pointless, futile, doomed strategy. Here are their reasons.
--Peace shows weakness.
--The jihadists would attack us anyway, all the more viciously if we stop fighting them.
--Withdrawal from Iraq would goad the insurgents to come after us.
--The world is too dangerous for us to pursue a course as idealistic as peace.
--Our enemies deserve what they get from us.
And so the received opinions of the military establishment are parroted. We pursue homeland security, even though the current policies have been implemented with dismal results (see Gov. Kean's recent blast on behalf of the 9/11 commission against the Congress and White House for failing to make our major cities and airports even a whit safer than they were four years ago.) There are huge holes in the militaristic arguments, anyway.
--We can't stop Muslims from hating us by attacking them.
--To say that terrorists will be goaded by peace has no historical precedent. Terrorists are goaded by repression and aggression.
--We've successfully made friends with enemies in the past (Germany, Japan, China, the former Soviet Union).
--If our enemies deserve to be punished, haven't we done that already? The thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and miscellaneous terrorists bombed in camps testifies to that.
--We've taken on the "axis of evil" without sufficient troops and armaments to win the fight we picked.
--The American public has no stomach for war, protracted or short-term, that doesn't lead to victory. Since victory is nowhere in sight, the entire militaristic venture is politically self-defeating.
The mass media don't parrot militaristic arguments as bluntly as bloggers, but there's no great taste for peace there, either. I can't name a single major columnist who advocates massive military cuts. Nor a single one who has openly sided with the peace movement. The opinion elites have gradually allowed the concept of immediate withdrawal from Iraq on to the front page, without taking the radical step of turning the U.S. away from being a threatening bully on a global scale.
Click: www.intentblog.com
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