Nonfiction

Who’s Breaking The Will Of The American People?

Just two weeks to go until the mid-term elections, and the political climate is (as we Americans have come to expect) rapidly degenerating into a quagmire of finger pointing and name calling, as each “side” tries to blame the other for all the turmoil the average citizen hears in the evening news. Recently, the conservative trend has been to try to blame the liberals for the upsurge in violence in Iraq. In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking from his White House office was quoted as saying:

I think they’re very much aware of our political calendar here, I really do. And when you see the kinds of things that happened this year, for example, when the Democratic Party in Connecticut purged Joe Lieberman, in effect, drummed him out of the party on the grounds that he had supported the President in the global war on terror, that sends a message to the terrorists overseas that their basic strategy of trying to break the will of the American people may, in fact, work.

Now, ignoring for the moment the blatant lapse in logic of this sentiment, let’s consider the will of the American people, and what might be happening to break it.

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Of Diplomacy and Nationalism: How We Argue Inside Our Own Borders

Recently, a study published by Johns Hopkins University estimated the Iraqi civilian deaths at 655,000. This was a careful, scientific study, peer-reviewed and meticulously backed-up by other sources. The statistic is horrendous, the implications ominous. You would think that someone other than the families of those killed would care.

Oddly, however, it seems that in the U.S. our need to justify our actions makes it imperative that we dispute even the most solid evidence that our actions may have had disastrous results. We pick apart numbers which would make us reconsider, hearken to higher goals, and remonstrate with ourselves to “keep our eye on the prize”. Those who find themselves righteously outraged are all too often ignored by those who are trying to find the truth, as their outrage hints at a brand of extremism, and we have enough of that going around already.

Obviously, presenting hard numbers is not enough. Holding out summations by our own intelligence services which indicate that our activities are counterproductive to our proclaimed goals is not enough. Providing evidence that our leaders have deceived us is not enough to change our minds, or even to make us insist on an investigation. And yet, we are cautioned to be moderate in our statements, to consider the other side, to above all make our loyalty to our country foremost in all our thoughts and deeds.

At what point is the middle path the path to hell?

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