Leo Morris has a post entitled Opening Arguments: Yes, they are evil that underscores the lack of thought that got us into the Iraqi debacle. It’s short, so I’ll post the whole thing:
I think I’ll start handing out the Kurt Vonnegut Award (the Kurt) to the people who are the least serious about the war against Islamofascism. Today’s winner, media division, goes to Chris Matthews, who thinks, among other things,
If we stop trying to figure out the other side, we’ve given up. The person on the other side is not evil. They just have a different perspective. The smartest people understand the enemy’s point of view, because they understand what’s driving them.
I understand that our enemies want to kill us. I think it would be a pretty good idea if we killed them first.
This sounds good, but the generalizations “our enemies” and “them” tend to hide the fact that we don’t know who we’re fighting. Islamofascists? The Islamo part I understand: ‘Muslims’. Easy enough, but used in conjunction with fascism, I don’t comprehend. Merriam-Webster defines fascism as “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” So, aside from the general connotation of “bad people,” I don’t know how fascism works into this.
Matthews point in the quoted material is that we didn’t spend enough time during the period between 9/11 and the Iraq War trying to figure out who it was we ought to be fighting and why they hated us. That was part of the reason we ended up invading a secular Iraqi dictatorship in response to an attack perpetrated upon us by religious fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. If we didn’t have anything to fear from Iraqi Islamic fundamentalists before we invaded, we do now — and we still have al Qaeda and its supporters to worry about. More so than before, in fact, since we opened up Iraq as a place for them to operate.
Our lack of understanding and precise identification of “our enemies” leads to mistakes where we end up torturing and killing Afghan taxi drivers, for example. This is the kind of action that adds to the number of “our enemies,” with the end result that we are less safe, not more. Occupying Iraq has had the same result.
Probably the most important reason why we shouldn’t be so dismissive of the idea of understanding why individuals want to kill us is that we’re giving up on half of the opportunity to neutralize them. If someone has the desire to kill you, there are essentially two opportunities to stop them: take away their ability and take away their desire. Mr. Morris would have us abandon half of the equation. If you are standing in a swamp full of alligators, you can kill the alligators and you can drain the swamp. Draining the swamp is the best long term solution. By invading Iraq, we killed a spider and expanded the size of the swamp.
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