|
|
|
|
A Quagmire of Ideas
 President
Bush says we are not only in a war of
arms, but “a war of ideas.” And, as I understand it, he figures he’s
just  the
man to lead the free world into intellectual combat.
Apart from
“democracy,” the president’s idée du jour is that
our biggest challenge comes from Iran, whose current leader, a Mr.
Ahmadinejad, has his own arsenal of ideas. He says that the state of Israel
should be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust didn’t happen, for
example. Of course politicians will say anything to get elected, but Bush
won’t stand idly by while Ahmadinejad slips dangerous ideas to
al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The danger to the world is that the War
of Ideas will escalate and spread beyond the Middle East.
In wartime, the president, under
our Constitution, is not only our chief executive but the commander in chief
of our ideas. In this respect, I have to wonder if Bush is quite up to the job.
At one time, I thought he might be at least approximately conservative, in a
practical sense. No longer.
Frankly, I’ve been
disappointed in Bush. It’s always somewhat disappointing when a guy
you took for a reasonably functional numbskull turns out to be, in fact, an
utterly hapless imbecile. If this is a war of ideas, we’re in for a real
quagmire.
Now Bush is reaffirming one of his
pet ideas, the idea of preemptive warfare, which he believes has been a
stunning success in Iraq. Since he is fond of World War II analogies, he ought
to ponder one of its obvious lessons: unintended consequences.
The Japanese preemptive strike on
Pearl Harbor, however well-intentioned, failed to prevent Franklin D.
Roosevelt from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, he
developed them anyway — and he and his successor used them on
Tokyo and Hiroshima. If Bush is contemplating a sneak attack on Iran, he
might bear this precedent in mind.
![[Breaker quote for A Quagmire of Ideas: The endless conflict]](2006breakers/060316.gif) Americans
have notoriously short attention spans, but other
nations have long memories. This week the Ides of March passed unnoticed in
this country, but in Ireland it revived, as always, an ancient grudge: Irishmen
bitterly remember it as the date on which Brutus and his ilk completely
spoiled all Julius Caesar’s plans for St. Patrick’s Day. Brutus
later lamely explained that the hit on Caesar was a preemptive strike to save
the Republic, but it backfired and resulted in civil war, then in the Roman
Empire, headed by rulers every bit as goofy as Bush.
It can’t be repeated often
enough: War always brings unintended consequences. Nobody foresaw that
the Iraq war would lead to Bush’s claim of intellectual leadership. If we
had, there might have been more resistance at the beginning, even from
conservatives.
This war has taken a terrible toll
on journalists. Some have been killed, and those who survived have had to
learn to spell a lot of weird names, such as Ahmadinejad. Many of us
— and I think I speak for everyone — have a hard enough time
spelling Condoleezza.
Miss Rice, the mushroom cloud
lady, is now being touted as a possible successor to Bush in 2008. Though
she says she has no plans to seek the presidency, some Republicans think
she would be the ideal candidate to counter the Democrats’ favorite
at the moment, Hillary Clinton. No doubt this would make for an extremely
exciting campaign, and whoever won we would have a historic first: a woman
president.
Nobody could complain that there
wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between
the two candidates. The alternatives would be dramatic. The voters would
have to choose between a black spinster and an old white woman married to
Bill Clinton. The head spins. Both, of course, would continue the war in Iraq
and, probably, Iran.
If elected, Rice could be expected
to continue Bush’s other policies, programs, and aspirations, such as
putting a man on Mars, weather permitting (the post-Katrina proviso). But it
wouldn’t necessarily have to be a man; it could be a minority woman.
As for the War of Ideas,
meanwhile, we may never know when we have won it. There would seem to be
no middle ground between Bush and Ahmadinejad, and both are very
determined men. Maybe the best we can hope for is a costly stalemate.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |