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Mix-Ansicht- Bubble Bulletin: sehr lesenswert - CRASH_GURU, 10.04.2004, 12:06
Bubble Bulletin: sehr lesenswert
-->Addressing National Security Advisor Rice at yesterday’s 9/11 hearings, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey made what I found quite thought-provoking observations:
“I believe a number of things. I believe, first of all, that we underestimate that this war on terrorism is really a war against radical Islam. Terrorism is a tactic; it’s not a war itself. Secondly, let me say that I don’t think we understand how the Muslim world views this, and I’m terribly worried that the military tactics in Iraq are going to do a number of things, and they’re all bad… And I think we’re going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategy that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place. Let me say secondly that I don’t know how it could be otherwise, given the way that we’re able to see these military operations, even the restrictions that are imposed upon the press, that this doesn’t provide an opportunity for al Qaeda to have increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States. It worries me, and I wanted to make that declaration… I think the military operations are dangerously off track. And it’s largely a U.S. army - 125,000 out of 145,000 - largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation.”
And I can’t help but to ponder comments made by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. From one of Ron Suskind’s final paragraphs in “The Price of Loyalty”:
“One day in November (2003), as questions swirled about the justifications for the costly U.S. occupation of Iraq - what they may have been and what Americans were told - [O’Neill] recalled a conversation he and I had on a Sunday afternoon in the spring, a few weeks before the invasion. We sat on the porch at the Watergate, high above the Potomac, which was bursting with the flows of early spring. O’Neill, who had sat through scores of [National Security Council] meetings, was deeply fearful about the United States ‘grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through,’ he said. He was still hoping there would be a ‘real evidentiary hearing and a genuine debate’ before troops were committed. He knew that wasn’t likely. ‘When you get this far down the path,’ he said after a long silence, ‘you want to have a heavy weight of evidence supporting you. If the action is reversible, or if a generation can erase its effects, it’s different than if you bring the world to the edge of a chasm. You can’t go back.”
Concluding, I would like to share additional Mr. O’Neill comments. And I will add that I believe these insights have great pertinence today, helping to explain why there are so many things that just don’t add up - a peculiarity of today’s troubling times. These include the unfolding quagmire in Iraq; years of flawed economic policies from Washington; the current embarrassing state of economic doctrine; the disastrous course set by the Greenspan Fed; and the amazing wholesale acquiescence of the ongoing financial mania. Distressingly, I sense that O’Neill “hits the nail on the head,” addressing what I will refer to as The Powerful Force Behind the Iraq and Greenspan Quagmires.
“I think an ideology comes out of feelings and it tends to be non-thinking. A philosophy, on the other hand, can have a structured thought base. One would hope that a philosophy, which is always a work in progress, is influenced by facts. So there is a constant interplay between what do I think and why do I think it… Now, if you gather more facts and have more experience, especially with things that have gone wrong - those are especially good learning tools - then you reshape your philosophy, because the facts tell you you’ve got to. It doesn’t change what you wish for. I mean, it’s okay to wish for something that’s, you know, outside your facts realm. But it’s not okay to confuse all that. Ideology is a lot easier, because you don’t have to know anything or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It’s not penetrable by facts. It’s absolutism.”
(From earlier in the book) “Such men (“ideologues”) are not inclined to seek a middle ground so much as build a fortress at one pole or the other, hoping to create a place that will attract adherents until the midpoint, wherever it came to rest, ended up in their front yard. Only they, the ideologues attest, are truly driven by ideas. Big ideas that tend to explain history and human behavior and the way things are. They tend to stick with their own, find information that supports a wider view.”
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