No need to listen to us lefties. Here are a few excerpts from a recent article by Paul W. Schroeder in
The American Conservative, entitled "The War Bin Laden Wanted".
I invite anyone on this board to refute the points made in this article. By refutation I do not mean rabid rant, but rather reasoned rebuttal. Dubbyistas who take a crack at it will earn my renewed respect.
A United States that had responded to 911 in the manner Schroeder suggests would have had -- and continued to have -- the active support of many millions of people like me around the globe.
Instead we're wondering whether the US hasn't become just another banana republic.
Quote:
(...) It is beyond doubt that ... for more than three years after 9/11 things have generally been going (bin Laden's) way, and that he could not have achieved this huge, improbable victory without indispensable American help.
(...) Certainly 9/11 required strong action including military measures against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the natural, inevitable war psychology pervading the country had to be reckoned with. Yet ... these needs required actions like those taken initially more than words. As far as the public rhetoric and justification was concerned, nothing hindered the administration from conceiving and explaining the undertaking differently both to the American public and the world, especially the Arab-Muslim world that was Osama bin Laden’s real target.
There is little point now in drafting the kind of address Bush should have delivered to Congress and the public. But one can readily imagine an American president (though not Bush) persuasively making the two cardinal points. First, the United States intended to pursue al-Qaeda with all the weapons at its command on grounds of legitimate self-defense and, while respecting the rights of other countries, would allow no one to interfere with these actions. It would not, however, dignify al-Qaeda’s atrocious crimes by calling them acts of war or give Osama bin Laden and his fellow criminals what they obviously wanted, a pretext to portray themselves as soldiers in a holy war against the United States. Instead, it would pursue them ruthlessly the way civilized nations had always pursued criminal organizations, as international outlaws and pirates, enemies of all governments and of civilization itself, and it expected other countries to co-operate in this struggle.
(...) The "War on Terror" in America is basically a sham, a charade. While great, even ultimate sacrifices have been demanded of relatively few, chiefly those in the armed forces, for the overwhelming majority of Americans having the country at war has meant massive tax cuts, exhortations to spend and consume, enormous deficits, politics and government spending as usual - in short, no wartime sacrifice at all. The rest of the world knows this and sees the hypocrisy, if we do not. (...) |