Charles Krauthammer, the rightist columnist, begins his opus on Spain and terrorism (Albuquerque Journal, 3/21/04) this way:
"When confronting an existential enemy - an enemy that wants to terminate your very existence – there are only two choices: appeasement or war.":
There you have it. Pure moral thinking. Either-or. With us or against us.
Moral thinking is automatic, of course; we all have to work hard to avoid it. But Krauthammer uses it as a political technique, a way to frame the debate so that we do not see alternatives.
First, the idea of a war on terrorism is stupid. Terrorism is a tactic, not a gang or a state, which will survive long after we are all dead.
Secondly, there are ways to combat alQaeda's terrorism without appeasement and without conducting war the way George W. Bush is, in a manner that probably is fostering terrorism rather than diminishing it.
Consider:
He knocked off Afghanistan's Islamic fundamentalist government but let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
He gave Kabul an acceptable new government but not Afghanistan, which he forgot in order to pursue another agenda. (No wonder the Taliban routinely wage war there two years after their "defeat.")
He attacked the secular tyrant in Iraq, thereby suggesting our war is with all Muslims, not only murderous religious zealots.
He has done little or nothing to change the political and economic realities underlying the birth of terrorism.
Ah, but that might mean focusing on the Saudis, might it not?
Krauthammer doesn’t even mention the Saudi schools that teach anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism.
I am not surprised.
PS To mark the first year of the US attack on Iraq, demonstrators here and elsewhere rallied against the US presence there, calling on President Bush to withdraw our troops.
The war on Iraq was a terrible mistake. It does not follow that US troops should leave Iraq now. There's a new situation. Ah, but the affliction of automatic thinking is not limited to the Right.