War on Terror ≠ WWII Part 2
Please understand this: The Bush administration and those who support it believe that the Iraq war and the war on terror are parallel to World War Two from every significant viewpoint. For them, the fate of the world hangs in the balance, so going to extremes (torture) is a necessary evil - they don't understand why anyone has a problem seeing that. For them "bad news" de-moralises the troops and causes them to lose their resolve, while at the same time rallying the enemy (our bad news is their good) and encouraging them to think that they are winning. So rigidly controlling the language of the war is necessary for them ("not a civil war"). Secrecy is also rigidly necessary because the enemy will use whatever they can find out to kill our soldiers and our citizens. The Bush administration and its supporters don't understand why US journalists and citizens want information other than "trust us, we are keeping you safe."
The biggest problem with all this is that the world has changed alot since World War Two. For most people this is probably a no-brainer. For anyone else I'll list just a handful of big changes that make a huge difference in the way war works in the 21st century. 1) Global access to computers and the internet makes information flow very quickly and with little restriction. 2) For those who do not have internet access there are cell phones, which are as popular in virtually every corner of the globe as the are in the US, if not even more so. 3) 24 hour cable/satellite TV news. 4) Newspapers and magazines have the above sources to compete with so compete they do, bringing their own revelations of information to the table. 5) Universal access to powerful weapons and weapon-making technology and information make "the most powerful military in the world" less powerful than it once was. 6) Many nations have lived through, and remember occupations by colonial powers - and they won't just sit down for it again. There is not enough unoccupied territory on the planet anymore for them to move somewhere else. And they're tired of being pushed around - especially in geographical areas that already got brutalized by the post-WWII Allied (which then became colonial) Powers. People and Nations have always wanted to control their own destinies - now more than ever. 7) The fact that individual people all over the world fly to different countries every single day and see how other people live and hear how other people think and share information face to face and bring all this back home with them makes it utterly impossible to successfully hide significant information about people in other countries much less to successfully demonize the population of an entire nation or religion (as was done quite successfully during WWII in the absence of communication resources and technologies available today).
My reason for bringing this up is that those of us who are opposed specifically to the war in Iraq and more generally to the way the war on terror is being fought seem to have difficulty understanding why Bush and his supporters do what they do. No one needs to come up with any devious or conspiratorial theories that demonize Bush and his supporters. As true as some of these theories may turn out to be, they are fundamentally unnecessary. And worse they muddy the rhetorical/political waters by providing Bush and his supporters with endless straw men to attack. If we who oppose these wars could turn to addressing the actual terms with which Bush and his supporters have and want to continue to frame these wars, then we would be able to bring to light their flawed, outdated thinking in a way that has no escape valve of "plausible deniability" or "passing the buck." If they won't make their governance transparent, then we must - and we must do it all the way down to the ideological underpinnings I've outlined above. When we refuse to see inside the minds of Bush and his supporters and when we demonize them or falsely label them idiots, we do so at our own peril because they feel their ideology in their hearts and it patterns the thoughts they have. The ideology of Bush and his supporters truly has divided this nation and set a large part of the world against us and if we hope to change that we will first have to work to reveal the false premises on which their ideology is based. The War on Terror and the War in Iraq DO NOT PARALLEL World War Two in any meaningful way. Pass it on...
update:
Apparently administration denials of their belief that the WWII parallels underlie their tactics have begun. This is quite confusing to me and seems to amount to shooting themselves in the foot in terms of maintaining what little support they have for their wars. Perhaps they will dredge up the whole "this is an enemy unlike any we have ever seen before" line, but then that would, on the surface at least, appear to require resorting to actual study and reseach and intelligence gathering (as opposed making stuff up and 'stovepiping' intelligence) to successfully do battle with this enemy.
The biggest problem with all this is that the world has changed alot since World War Two. For most people this is probably a no-brainer. For anyone else I'll list just a handful of big changes that make a huge difference in the way war works in the 21st century. 1) Global access to computers and the internet makes information flow very quickly and with little restriction. 2) For those who do not have internet access there are cell phones, which are as popular in virtually every corner of the globe as the are in the US, if not even more so. 3) 24 hour cable/satellite TV news. 4) Newspapers and magazines have the above sources to compete with so compete they do, bringing their own revelations of information to the table. 5) Universal access to powerful weapons and weapon-making technology and information make "the most powerful military in the world" less powerful than it once was. 6) Many nations have lived through, and remember occupations by colonial powers - and they won't just sit down for it again. There is not enough unoccupied territory on the planet anymore for them to move somewhere else. And they're tired of being pushed around - especially in geographical areas that already got brutalized by the post-WWII Allied (which then became colonial) Powers. People and Nations have always wanted to control their own destinies - now more than ever. 7) The fact that individual people all over the world fly to different countries every single day and see how other people live and hear how other people think and share information face to face and bring all this back home with them makes it utterly impossible to successfully hide significant information about people in other countries much less to successfully demonize the population of an entire nation or religion (as was done quite successfully during WWII in the absence of communication resources and technologies available today).
My reason for bringing this up is that those of us who are opposed specifically to the war in Iraq and more generally to the way the war on terror is being fought seem to have difficulty understanding why Bush and his supporters do what they do. No one needs to come up with any devious or conspiratorial theories that demonize Bush and his supporters. As true as some of these theories may turn out to be, they are fundamentally unnecessary. And worse they muddy the rhetorical/political waters by providing Bush and his supporters with endless straw men to attack. If we who oppose these wars could turn to addressing the actual terms with which Bush and his supporters have and want to continue to frame these wars, then we would be able to bring to light their flawed, outdated thinking in a way that has no escape valve of "plausible deniability" or "passing the buck." If they won't make their governance transparent, then we must - and we must do it all the way down to the ideological underpinnings I've outlined above. When we refuse to see inside the minds of Bush and his supporters and when we demonize them or falsely label them idiots, we do so at our own peril because they feel their ideology in their hearts and it patterns the thoughts they have. The ideology of Bush and his supporters truly has divided this nation and set a large part of the world against us and if we hope to change that we will first have to work to reveal the false premises on which their ideology is based. The War on Terror and the War in Iraq DO NOT PARALLEL World War Two in any meaningful way. Pass it on...
update:
Apparently administration denials of their belief that the WWII parallels underlie their tactics have begun. This is quite confusing to me and seems to amount to shooting themselves in the foot in terms of maintaining what little support they have for their wars. Perhaps they will dredge up the whole "this is an enemy unlike any we have ever seen before" line, but then that would, on the surface at least, appear to require resorting to actual study and reseach and intelligence gathering (as opposed making stuff up and 'stovepiping' intelligence) to successfully do battle with this enemy.
posted by pajkossy | 10:18 AM
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