28 June 2007
Lugar ‘s Switch
Senator Richard Lugar is too smart to have been taken in any longer by calls for supporting military adventurism abroad simply because American troops have been put at risk. The "War on Terror" is not really a military challenge; war is the wrong metaphor. The real challenge is much more tedious: liberating people's minds from domination by antisocial demagogues.
Military engagement is a convenient sacrifice to ask American voters to make. There is a romance to it that makes its mortal danger worth the risk. The genius of the Bush Administration and its strategists was to have recognized how that devil-may-care attitude could be exploited in order to ignore the immense budgetary expense and personal cost and to cement political power. Of course, the objectives of this strategy were transparent to victims in the Middle East and realists in the rest of the world. Moreover, they have become increasingly obvious even to American adventurers.
Perhaps the good intentions of the American people can be defended—a mistaken use of force in protection of our security. Military force clearly was not the appropriate tool for excising the use of terror for objecting to U.S. corporate and government actions. The lesson to be learned from all this is that international Islamic or other foreign critics of American policies need to be educated on how to use the U.S. system to accomplish their objectives, which in some cases may be the same as those desired by American citizens. Terror will only backfire on them, and on Americans as well.
Senator Richard Lugar is too smart to have been taken in any longer by calls for supporting military adventurism abroad simply because American troops have been put at risk. The "War on Terror" is not really a military challenge; war is the wrong metaphor. The real challenge is much more tedious: liberating people's minds from domination by antisocial demagogues.
Military engagement is a convenient sacrifice to ask American voters to make. There is a romance to it that makes its mortal danger worth the risk. The genius of the Bush Administration and its strategists was to have recognized how that devil-may-care attitude could be exploited in order to ignore the immense budgetary expense and personal cost and to cement political power. Of course, the objectives of this strategy were transparent to victims in the Middle East and realists in the rest of the world. Moreover, they have become increasingly obvious even to American adventurers.
Perhaps the good intentions of the American people can be defended—a mistaken use of force in protection of our security. Military force clearly was not the appropriate tool for excising the use of terror for objecting to U.S. corporate and government actions. The lesson to be learned from all this is that international Islamic or other foreign critics of American policies need to be educated on how to use the U.S. system to accomplish their objectives, which in some cases may be the same as those desired by American citizens. Terror will only backfire on them, and on Americans as well.
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