Writing For Oil
It’s tough to write about the war and the politics involved init, mainly because most of the sites that I read do such a better job of it. But, soldier on I will. In the comments to my last post, and partly in response to a question about Saddam’s newly minted POW status, JP sends a William Safire article from the NY Times that ends on the note;
…our decision to lead the world's war against terror makes the case that what we have been doing is strategically sound as well as morally right.
This is the bottom line for me, as well as it seems for most people in the country. It is why the Democrats won’t win in the next general election. In contrast, Joe Conason writes in Salon (article is free if you click through the advertisements) that even Bush’s proposal to go to the moon will benefit Haliburton. Hat tip: Instapundit). With this kind of green cheese mindset, the Dems are not doing themselves any favors. As did the proverbial Chicken Little or the boy who cried ‘wolf’, they will reap their rewards at the polls.
For more years than I’ve been alive, defenders of the defunct Soviet Union made respectable hay in the press and other print. They still occasionally do, but most folks understand that the place was not only a mess, but the government killed all sorts of common folk in the process. They (the Soviets) also threatened to convert our country into the utopian dreamland all of our blinkered fifth columnists believed in. There are still people here that wish for and work for that, some at our finest universities. Even though Russia is still somewhat of a basket case, we can call our strategy a success because we are not staring them down over ICBM’s. This took a long time.
Whereas a gun is not imminently dangerous without an idea to pick it up and use it, neither is an airliner without the idea to crash it into a building full of people. It is the idea that is dangerous. The pen is mightier than the sword doesn’t mean that you won’t get your hand chopped off. It means that the written word is capable of inciting people to war. To paraphrase Monty Python, “No one expects the Muslim Inquisition!” Of course, this works both ways. The Mad Mullah’s in Iran, (original home of the phrase, “America is the Mighty Satan!”), are facing the idea of the end of their rule.
As the world turns, we are facing the end of the old axiom that ‘politics end at the water’s edge.’ Safire rightly notes that the reason to go to war was, and is, “to reverse the tide of global terror that incubated in the Middle East.” The reason for that incubation was the bastardization of a religion that has stifled human progress in the Middle East for hundreds of years, nurtured by the European colonization of the region that treated the former flower of civilization as an unruly child in need of stern guidance. We’re hip to that, we were an unruly colonial child once. But instead of taking the risk of helping our Middle Eastern cousins break the yoke and enter the age of Enlightenment, privileged sibling brownnosers sitting in the front row of French Lit class, tattle to instructor Chirac that George is in it for the oooiilll!
That is our boon and our bane. As we are rightfully foresworn to not crush dissent, even pigheaded dissent for disingenuous reasons, half-assed knuckleheads like me are driven to concoct rebuttals to highly paid, trained journalists, at the expense of mixing metaphors, mangling the language in run on sentences and appearing as foolish as they are. But we chicken hawks do need to take part in this war of pen and sword, even at ridiculously low risk, to support our brothers in real harm’s way.
