Monday, October 29, 2007

Fearing Fear Itself - New York Times Op-Ed

Some consider Paul Krugman as too liberal and various other things. I do not always agree with him, but sometimes he seems able to get a direct connect with what is going on - often to the detriment of the country or its rank and file citizens. This column (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) correctly identifies how the Bush regime and those on the right who would seek to succeed it have utilized blind fear as a total to subvert the law, including the U.S Constitution. The parallels to the scene in the Imperial Senate in one of the Star Wars movies where Palpatine uses fear to gain extraordinary powers are real.
Yes, after 9-11 there was great fear and much uncertainty. Some was justified and much was not, particularly when viewed in retrospect. Living in a port city with huge volumes of cargo - most of which is NOT adequately screened - it is easy to let one's fears run amok. What if a dirty bomb or hazardous waste bomb were slipped in and detonated. You get the idea. But, fear should not be allowed to trump reason and logic and hard facts as opposed to conjecture and fantasy. Here are highlights from Krugman's column:
In America’s darkest hour, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged the nation not to succumb to “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” But that was then. Today, many of the men who hope to be the next president — including all of the candidates with a significant chance of receiving the Republican nomination — have made unreasoning, unjustified terror the centerpiece of their campaigns.
Mr. Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary and a founding neoconservative, tells us that Iran is the “main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11.” The Islamofascists, he tells us, are well on their way toward creating a world “shaped by their will and tailored to their wishes.” Indeed, “Already, some observers are warning that by the end of the 21st century the whole of Europe will be transformed into a place to which they give the name Eurabia.” Do I have to point out that none of this makes a bit of sense?

For one thing, there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t. And Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
Beyond that, the claim that Iran is on the path to global domination is beyond ludicrous. Yes, the Iranian regime is a nasty piece of work in many ways, and it would be a bad thing if that regime acquired nuclear weapons. But let’s have some perspective, please: we’re talking about a country with roughly the G.D.P. of Connecticut, and a government whose military budget is roughly the same as Sweden’s. Meanwhile, the idea that bombing will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — and bombing is the only option, since we’ve run out of troops — is pure wishful thinking. Last year Israel tried to cripple Hezbollah with an air campaign, and ended up strengthening it instead. There’s every reason to believe that an attack on Iran would produce the same result, with the added effects of endangering U.S. forces in Iraq and driving oil prices well into triple digits.
All of this would be funny if it weren’t so serious. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration adopted fear-mongering as a political strategy. Instead of treating the attack as what it was — an atrocity committed by a fundamentally weak, though ruthless adversary — the administration portrayed America as a nation under threat from every direction. Most Americans have now regained their balance. But the Republican base, which lapped up the administration’s rhetoric about the axis of evil and the war on terror, remains infected by the fear the Bushies stirred up — perhaps because fear of terrorists maps so easily into the base’s older fears, including fear of dark-skinned people in general.
I truly hope for a sea change in the direction of this country after the 2008 federal election, both in terms of lessening the grip of the Christianists who seek to deny equal rights to others with different views and/or sexual orientations, but more importantly in terms of regaining some of the better principles established by the nation's founding fathers and some of its great presidents (the Chimperator is NOT one of them, and in my view, may be viewed as the worse by history).

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