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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Scathing in Newsweek

If you like you're Bush criticisms hot, you're gonna love this Newsweek online commentary by Michael Hirsh.

Listening this week to the latest excerpts from Osama bin Laden's and Ayman al Zawahiri's taped messages, it is hard not to marvel at how lucky these would-be revolutionaries have been in their enemy. Who would have thought that, four and a half years on, facing down the mightiest power in history, this sociopathic pair would still be out there talking trash, their continued existence a daily desecration of the memory of the 9/11 dead? Or that bin Laden and Zawahiri would have been able to whip what had been a bare ember of “global jihad”—one barely smoldering on 9/10/01—into a global conflagration? .....

It is time to have an accounting of just how badly run, and conceived, this "war on terror" has been.....

On 9/10/01 America had adversaries, but mainly on the fringes. The invasion of Afghanistan brought barely a peep from the Arab street. No one had much use for Al Qaeda, even in the Islamic world. Global polls like those taken by Pew and the German Marshall Fund showed a remarkable degree of global consensus in favor of a one-superpower (in other words, American-dominated) world. The silver lining of 9/11 was a chance to reaffirm the legitimacy of America's role as trusted overseer of the international system.....

How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence.

3 Comments:

  • That's the word alright.

    By Blogger Neil Shakespeare, at 2:24 AM  

  • So then what the hell is the matter with us? Why is he still in the White House why are the Senate and the Congress dominated by Republicans? Why?
    Either we're really stupid, or we're really mean, or we're completely blind?
    And I don't want to hear the lame excuse that it's only 51% of us. We all know there's more than enough complacency to go around.

    By Blogger Justin, at 7:44 AM  

  • Justin, just my opinion, The Bush campaign used a variety of fear elements to gain support. Homophobia, the fear of a brown-skinned man sneaking in at night and killing white women and children.

    My opinion is that that resonates very strongly, whether consciously or not, with a lot more Americans than anyone wants to admit. Combining that with an appeal towards fundamentalism, which is a normal societal response to the perception of threat, enabled them to grab a slim majority.

    Fear can make people do amazingly stupid things.

    But maybe that's just an excuse. Maybe I'm that far out of the mainstream. Up til the 2004 elections, polls showed that a majority of Americans rated Bush a "good man" or "trustworthy."

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 8:44 AM  

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