Friday, November 14, 2003
America Good, Terrorists Bad
Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski (and I can't tell you how proud I am of myself that I typed that from memory without having to look) writes in the International Herald Tribune about the need for American leaders to give up their "with us or against us" rhetoric in order to lead the world, and stop looking at everything through the prism of good guys versus bad guys. Brzezinski identifies a crucial point that is a major problem: the language we use to describe what we're doing. "Terrorism is a technique for killing people. That can't be an enemy. It's as if we said that World War II was not against the Nazis but against blitzkrieg." Which was obvious to anybody who isn't drunk on the administration's Kool Aid on, oh, I don't know, September 13, 2001. But it's in Bush's interests to control the language and simplify the problem--which, contrary to making the problem easier to deal with, as simplified things often are, makes it downright intractable and nearly impossible to solve. Which is also in Bush's interests.
Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski (and I can't tell you how proud I am of myself that I typed that from memory without having to look) writes in the International Herald Tribune about the need for American leaders to give up their "with us or against us" rhetoric in order to lead the world, and stop looking at everything through the prism of good guys versus bad guys. Brzezinski identifies a crucial point that is a major problem: the language we use to describe what we're doing. "Terrorism is a technique for killing people. That can't be an enemy. It's as if we said that World War II was not against the Nazis but against blitzkrieg." Which was obvious to anybody who isn't drunk on the administration's Kool Aid on, oh, I don't know, September 13, 2001. But it's in Bush's interests to control the language and simplify the problem--which, contrary to making the problem easier to deal with, as simplified things often are, makes it downright intractable and nearly impossible to solve. Which is also in Bush's interests.
