Coming off a long hiatus, I figure there's no better way to get back on the horse than to jump on the 9/11 anniversary bandwagon. Plenty of columnists have taken this opportunity to present their opinions on the responses to terror over the past five years. The general consensus, at least among my favored sources of news which, I'm sure, share my liberal bias, is that the US response to terrorism has made more terrorists, although not nessisarily more al Qaeda terrorists, and it may have also made the moderate Muslim community more vocal as well; that special interests and political parties have responded with more infighting rather than more consensus; that nothing really phases the British and that we need to be prepared to make more sacrifices. I agree.
The typical liberal perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the war on drugs and the like: it's not really a war and we don't really understand it. The solution is, like all liberal solutions, a call for more understanding and cooperation. The conservative perspective is that the war on terror is failing for similar reasons to the failure of the Vietnam war: liberals are pussies and are sapping our strength, and apparently our willingness to arrest all funny-looking brown people. I tend to think that both sides are right, or both sides are wrong, depending primarily on how ornery I'm feeling. Put another way, it is stupid to treat issues like they are coins; there are more than two sides to most conflicts and often the best solution is one that combines the better elements of heads, tails and the rim around the edge. Ok, that simile kinda got away from me....
But I'd like to use another simile to help visualize my perspective on terror. I think terror is a lot like weeds. The Bush approach to the War on Terror has been something like this: "dern weeds killed my prize rosebush," then he found the part of the garden with the most weeds and burned it. The problem with this approach is multifold. Burning kills weeds, but it also kills flowers and veggies and good stuff like that. Furthermore, it left portions of the garden unweeded. Furthermore, burning plants helps fix nitrogen in the soil and makes it easier for the next generation of plants to grow. Part of what makes weeds so weedy is that they are really good at growing where you don't want them to. Guess which plants are gonna spread most easily back into the burned section of the garden. Probably not the rosebush.
The liberal approach might be characterized, at its extreme, as somewhat like my grandma's take on gardening: "oh, well Queen Ann's Lace is beautiful too, and I don't like to call it a weed..." The thing is, Queen Ann's Lace does have some nice flowers, but it also tends to grow where you don't want it to, and to make it hard to grow other things. Goutweed, milkweed, all these plants can be pretty attractive in their own rights, but if they're growing in your neighbor's garden, your garden had better be filled with some pretty resliliant plants or they'll take over yours as well. Think of this in economic and social terms: if your economy is full of strong companies with good growth and your civil society is well developed, then you are pretty resiliant and dissent and division are not a major problems; if your "plants" are weak, it's easy for weeds to take over.
Neo cons, for their part, seem to be thinking: "we've got these great herbicides (profiling, wiretaps) so why won't these hippy vegan organic types let us use them?" Like the liberal gardener, the neo con has an approach that seems sensible in many situations. The problem is that they trade long-term health for short-term conveniance. Sure, herbicides will help keep your garden weed-free, pesticides will help kill the bugs and synthetic fertilizer will grow great looking gardinias, but at the same time, you are poisining the soil, and your tomatos will never taste quite as good as the organic ones.
So where does this garden metaphor bring us? The most sucessful garden always requires a real investment of time and energy, especially when it is first planted. You've gotta go in, weed by hand, compost, water and repeat. But a few years later, the garden gets to the point where it can do pretty well on it's own. Taking this back into the real world, I find it amazing how people love to consider the "problem" Islam - terrorists and fundamental regimes like Iran - in terms of Communists and Fascists, but have failed to learn the lessons of two hot wars and a cold one. Communists gained in power when the economies struggled, Fascists gained in power when governments struggled with Communists. Two World Wars did not end the "Communist threat," and if anything made it worse AND created fertile ground for American-style Fascism (or as close as we got, McCarthyism). Our ultimate sucess against Communism was through economic development, both in America and supporting it in Europe, Japan and Korea through the Marshal Plan and such. Communist countries that we tried to fight directly: North Korea, China (kinda), Vietnam, Cuba. All are still at least nominaly Communist. Communist countries that we fought indirectly, economically and such: The Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the rest of the Eastern Bloc. None are Communist anymore. Hrm.
The lesson is clear: we don't win this kinda war with guns, bombs and secret police, we win it simply by being there.
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