Honest dissent
Yesterday was a beautiful day for the monthly "Rally for Peace" on the Allen County Courthouse Green.? Citizens for peace lined the entire block north of Main Street here in Fort Wayne.? Many of these people have been attending these rallies since the 2002 and the months leading up to the war in Iraq.? Others joined over the next few years and yesterday saw even more new faces.Why is it that, after nearly three and one half years since the rallies began, even more people are starting to take an interest?? The answer is both simple and complex.? On the one hand, there are people who see the war in Iraq
as doing more damage than good (more than 2300 U.S. deaths, a new breeding ground for terrorists, a burgeoning insurgency far from the last throes and a looming civil war) and on the other hand there are people who are finally noticing that the Bush Presidency has been horribly mismanaged.? Bush has often boasted about being the first President with an MBA, but the result isn't all that different from every other business he has "managed".
Alan Stewart Carl of Maverick Views wrote last week about how he disagrees with The Nation's Jonathon Schell's assertion that we are "sinking into the same crises that spawned Watergate."? While I also disagree with some of Schell's assertions (he believes radical Islam is a creation of the military industrial complex to pull us into war), I do see some unnerving similarities between the early 1970's and today:
- An "imperial" Presidency
- An unpopular and unnecessary war
- Illegal wiretaps
- Files being created to keep track of Americans who publicly disagree with the President?
- Anti-war rallies
I do not, as Schell asserts, believe that radical Islam is a hoax.? I do not buy into the conspiracy theories that 9/11 was planned by our government to pull us into war.? What I do believe is that we need to end end the war soon.
It is in the comment section of Alan's post where we see some strong arguments on both sides of the equation.
DBL said...Like Mr. Schell, I lived through the 70s, but unlike him, I grew up.
You have hit the nail on the head, of course. Schell, and his allies on the left, don't think that Islamic extremism, jihadism, is anything to worry about, beyond hiring a few extra policemen to arrest the bad guys (along with some lawyers to defend them) and maybe some more firemen and ambulance crews to clean up any mess. Strategic thinking about Islamicism and the challenges it presents in Europe, in the mid-East and in Asia, as well as here in America, is simply beyond Schell's ken.
The good news is that young people today look at Schell and his 1970s fixation as if he were writing about the 1870s. They can see that the world we live in today is vastly different than the last century's and requires fresh analysis, fresh ideas, and above all, an open mind. Schell fails on all accounts.
7:36 AM
?
cakreiz?said...
There's a big difference between Schell's position that terrorism is essentially an illusion versus Robert's analysis that it is decentralized and difficult to combat. With the possible exception of Iran's looming nuclear capability, terrorism is largely unaffiliated and decentralized, as Robert suggests. I wouldn't argue otherwise. It makes this threat very difficult to deal with.
My beef is with Schell's belief that the WOT was artificially created to feed the military-industrial complex. Apart from being wrongheaded, it will die in its tracks politically.
1:00 PM
cakreiz?said...
That is the question, Alan. As I've suggested to Robert, Europe's neutrality strategy hasn't been remarkably successful. In the final analysis, we're all infidels in the eyes of radical Islam.
1:34 PM
?
Robert Rouse?said...
I thought we were doing a fine job of forcibly confronting radical Islam in Afghanistan. I believe our actions in Iraq were poorly thought out. Our presence in Iraq has done more for the cause of radical Islam than anything else we had done before. Bush's sabre rattling seems to be a better recruitment tool for al Qaeda than if they were able to take out full page ads in the Islamabad Daily Gazette (if there were such a paper).
Imagine if during World War II, for every German soldier we killed, two more popped up out of hatred for America. This is the course we are currently on.
Of course radical Islam is a threat, the USS Cole and 9/11 made that abundantly clear. But we should have kept after Osama and used our resources where
we knew there to be al Qaeda leadership.
Until we took Saddam Hussein out of the picture, Iraq was definitely not a hotbed of Islamic terrorists. We created the gap, and they filled it in. Now Iraq is probably more dangerous to the region because of the looming civil war between Shia and Shiite.
All we did by going into Iraq was add a highly flammable fuel to the burning embers of radical Islam.
3:42 PM
While I don't believe in Schell's theories of manufactured enemies, I still see the effects of Bush and Cheney's? efforts to infer Iraq ties to 9/11.??? A Zogby poll of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq showed that 85% of them believe they are in Iraq " to retaliate for Saddam?s role in the 9-11 attacks".? Most of us are well aware that the terrorists who were involved in the September 11 attacks? were from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.? Even Bush has admitted as much.? But this doesn't keep him or other members of his administration from consistently mentioning Iraq and 9/11 in the same sentence during speeches.? During yesterday's rally, a woman in the passenger seat of a car that had stopped at the light rolled down her window and pointed to a sign that said "Iraq did not cause 9/11", she said, "excuse me, but Iraq was behind 9/11."When it was explained to her where the terrorists were actually from, she screamed "you're wrong" and gave us the finger.
When the rallies began, America was firmly behind the President and the war, but as more people learn the truth, the more the polls swing in the opposite direction.? Now, Americans who are opposed to the war and want to bring our troops home are in the majority.? It's amazing what a little education will do.? Karl Rove once said, "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."
Over
the past five or six months, the rallies on the Courthouse Green have become more interesting with the addition of counter demonstrators across the street.? While their numbers have grown (not that surprising when you consider Allen? County is a vast hotbed of the right wing) from three to eight, they still haven't been able to muster the numbers the anti-war people have.? Mitch Harper, the former Republican State Representative who runs Indiana Parley and Fort Wayne Observed stopped by the rally to say hello and commented on the low number of counter demonstrators.? He jokingly said "Republicans have better things to do like going to work".
I believe the real reason is because not that many supporters of the Bush war plan actually know about the counter
demonstrations.? I wouldn't mind seeing more of the counter demonstrators.? I believe debate and dissent are part of what makes America a great place to live.? I just think it's a shame that there are some who still believe that dissent against the war amounts to a subversive, if not? treasonous act.?
Perhaps it would do those who believe in such inane ideas to heed the words of the late Republican President Dwight Eisenhower - "Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."