Dark Bilious Vapors

But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and withal escape being classed with persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors....
--Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: Meditation I

Home » Archives » July 2005 » Wait? Didn't these clowns get elected because they would be "better" at fighting terrorism?

[« Thought for the Day:] [From the "Life in the Bluff City" department.... »]

07/27/2005: Wait? Didn't these clowns get elected because they would be "better" at fighting terrorism?


Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan gives us a scathing review of the bAdministration's latest national security initiative: Say G-WOT? Terror attacks, Taliban resurgence, suicide bombs—obviously, it's time to change the slogan.

One question comes to mind while reading the New York Times' report today that the Bush administration has decided to change the name of its counterterrorist campaign from "the global war on terrorism" to "the global struggle against violent extremism": Are these guys really this clueless?

What else to make of the story's opening sentence:
The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
Three subquestions arise just from the lead. First, this is the administration's solution to the spike in terrorist incidents, the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, and the politico-military deterioration in Iraq—to retool the
slogan?

Second, the White House and the Pentagon are
just now coming around to the idea that the struggle is as much ideological as military? This wasn't obvious, say, three or four years ago?

Apparently not. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, the
Times reporters who co-authored the article, note:
Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks. [Italics added.]
It took four years for the president of the United States to realize that fighting terrorism has a political component? It took six months for his senior advisers to retool a slogan? We are witnessing that rare occasion when the phrase "I don't know whether to laugh or cry" can be uttered without lapsing into cliché.
Send in the clowns.....

We could have done better.... we could have done much better than this.

Len on 07.27.05 @ 06:10 AM CST



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