Doober's confused about strength, and power.

[dusmcj]

There was a telling moment which crystallized much of the rest of the SOTU, and it was when Doobs said that the terrorists didn't have the strength to confront us directly, and so they used terror to attack us instead. There are multiple questions contained in that little vignette, and it may illuminate some of the problems with the administration's policies... (aside from the revelation breathtaking to me that US counterinsurgency policy traces a lineage back to Nazi practices in occupied Europe:wow: )

First off, the tail of the scenario, the choice to use terror specifically, which I'll take as violence aimed at a civilian population for political ends, as opposed to other tactics. Bad choice all around, including for the terrorists. So we're done with that.

Whereby we get to the interesting part: the scenario that the terrorists should attack us directly, as though there were an honor thing going there or something. The Marine Corps' own rules for survival state among other things "there is no such thing as a fair fight, do whatever you need to to win". So strength or no, what is this bullshit about meeting on the field of honor at 20 paces and taking a potshot ? Methinks there is a barely veiled attempt here to insinuate our inherent goodness, in that we're the sherff of the peaceful town, and while the Turbaned Kid may try to rob the bank, if he awakes the slumbering town we are of course infinitely stronger and will vanguish him with elan.

My problems with this are manifold: first off, as above, only assholes believe that war and conflict are honorable. You made the choice to start blowing shit up, you're not going to go dainty about it unless you're stupid. Many fundamentalists, including Islamic ones, are stupid. The leadership of AQ and similar groups is not, in the tactical short term at least. Since I don't think that Doober, or more specifically his advisors, are stupid at this level either, it seems like he's trying to pull a fast one, slip in an implication which can't stand on its own by suggesting that AQ should do something manifestly stupid.

Second, there's the whole fixation with the strength thing. For me this correlates with the circular reasoning that I see in the neocons: if we were not right, we could not be strong. Since we are strong, we must be right. On our side. On the side of the putatively weak terrorists, there is the implication by the same line of reasoning that because they are not strong, they cannot be right. The whole thing rests on the flawed original implication that right ==> strong. (Which is true if moral strength is meant, of which the administration has so little, but is flawed if material strength is meant. Gandhi and King also didn't challenge their opponents directly, for the same reasons. Yet they were righter, and ultimately stronger in that intangible sense this administration has trouble grasping, than anyone on the radar these days.) I extend this to the notion that regardless of the terrorists' strength, their choice not to meet us in direct confrontation should, at our peril, not be taken as indication that they do not have legitimacy to their geopolitical position, if we recall that they get their name via the tactic they use, i.e. its wrongness should not transfer automatically to them.

The world is a more complex place than cartoon or anachronistic rules of gentlemanly honor would have us believe. If we pretend otherwise, we are being fundamentally dishonest, and while we may do so in an attempt to shame others in this particular case, as a tactic of our own (he's not man enough to fight head on) to coerce the opponent to be goaded or dishonored, that doesn't allow us to recover. We bullshit at our peril, particularly if we have the awareness provided by the "post 9/11 mindset" prescribed by our leader. Ahem.