some more political thoughts

yes...and yes...this is my agreement or, rather, acknowledgement of an anonymous commentor's remarks. I must aquiesce and admitt, after scrutiny of my hastily (and poorley) written words, that I was, in fact, a bit harsh on 'ole Buzz.

However, I will clarify the intention of my remarks (I do not believe the premise of my argument to be without a legitimate claim) with regards to those comments. It does me no good to lay claim (historically or otherwise) to the reciprocities of american political history such as "manifest destiny" or a "a city on a hill"--this was the weakest part of my argument to be sure. I do much better, I find, by speaking directly to the composition of the thoughts I find flawed--flawed from my opinion--not some supposed standard of absolute correctness that I would otherwise pretend to reincarnate in my being and words. This I will do--after paying due homage to Ryan Sandrock, forever the avatar of Howard Zinn.

Thus, I ask and answer (for my own clarity of mind as much as anything else):

When do we decide, as a people, that one extremism demands another extremist response? Where is that line? Is it completely fair to point to September 11th, 2001 and gasp in horror, "Pearl Harbor, re-lived"? Is it journalistically accurate, ignore ethical, to pretend that we are, again--symbolically, "standing down Nazi Germany" in our occupation of Iraq? Does taming a frontier have anything to do, symbolically, with the courage of American troops in Iraq or the power of the American people to affirm their presence and their mission there?

I say that we, as the American people, must distinguish between what we believe--what our mission and our values are--and how we achieve the execution and protection of those beliefs. This distinction, if done carefully and with respect to all parties involved, is what separates us as the users of the "language of a city on a hill" from those who use a similarly potent "language of jihad." If we cannot make such a distinction, and we cannot hold our leaders accountable to this distinction than we are besmirching our mission and our history of doing "big things." This is what islamic extremist terrorists have done to their history and the mission of Islam by not distinguishing the horror and implicit evil of their acts with the clearly peaceful aspects of Islam as a religion:

"Religious extremist groups in the Islamic world are deeply divided along ideological and sectarian lines. Stereotyped images of Islam as a monolithic religion predisposed toward violence do not do justice to the fact that most Muslims are peaceful. Such stereotypes also fail to take into account the multi-faceted complexity of those Islamic groups that choose violence as a political strategy.

The rise of religious extremism in South Asia and the Middle East has to do primarily with four factors: the absence in much of the Muslim world of democratic, accountable governments, and, indirectly related to this, disputes over contested territory; the failure of governments in some Islamic countries to address problems arising from rapid social, demographic, and economic changes in the last century; financial, logistical, and moral support provided by external actors; and the breakdown within Islam itself of ijtihad—the established tradition whereby religious clerics independently interpret the Koran in order to apply Koranic law to diverse and changing circumstances."--quoted from the website for the United States Institute of Peace.

Forgetting the rhetoric of the presidential campaign and the media's horrific manipulation of access to that rhetoric, it is not wrong for Americans to distrust this President based on his repeated failed attempts to make such a distinction between the mission and the execution of that mission. It cannot be denied that our mission in the fight against terror in protection of our freedom and the freedom of all threatened by terrorism has been incredibly compromised by the failure of this administration to "execute." Does this mean that Kerry can or would do a better job? Not by a long shot. In fact, I rather doubt it.

Ideologically, our choices for president are very different--but we must judge on not only on belief or ideology but on performance--on their ability to achieve what they believe in a way that does not compromise the belief. It is easy to say--it is much harder to do. In this light, Kerry and Bush come very close to each other--in fact, they are very much the same. Every word uttered is distant from the last and even more distant from their record of achievements.
Our mission in Iraq, though perhaps mired in poor execution, must not fail. But more importantly, we must elect leaders who will judge that mission's tasks according to the "how" not only the "why." This is the origin of my worry for Mr. Manweller's distortion and my commentor's acceptance of that simplification.