HANSON HINTS THAT AMERICA WILL REQUIRE A GREATER SACRIFICE THAN 9-11 to wake up in: Feeding the Minotaur --Our strange relationship with the terrorists continues.
Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.
Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.
The billionaire capitalist George Soros -- who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors -- now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.
Recently in the New York Times I read two articles about the supposedly new irrational insensitivity toward Muslims and saw an ad for a book detailing how the West "constructed" and exaggerated the Islamic menace %u2014 even as the same paper ran a quieter story about a state-sponsored cleric in Saudi Arabia's carefully expounding on the conditions under which Muslims can desecrate the bodies of murdered infidels.
Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats -- Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry -- employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon -- precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies %u2014 and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...
No, bin Laden is quite sane -- but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.
Pointer from: The Countertop Chronicles
Posted by Vanderleun at June 15, 2004 10:28 AM