As mentioned in previous diary entries, my dad is an intelligent, thoughtful wingnut. We periodically engage in political conversation in an attempt to understand one another better, and to present our cases to each other. Recently, my 10-year-old son B_
_ elected to join in, e-mailing his grandpa in an attempt to convince Grandpa to vote for Kerry (the initial exchange can be viewd
here.
Well, Grandpa wrote back--and then some. B__ was a bit overwhelmed by the response, but after a few days he's back at it with grandpa.
More below the fold:
Here's the first part of Grandpa's response to B_
_:
B_
_ wrote:
Hi, grandpa! Of course the John Kerry people know about the terrorists and the 9/11 attack!
(Grand)Dad wrote:
No one says they don't. The question is whether they have the will and the intention to do the right thing about it. We believe they have neither.
B___wrote:
And John Kerry said that he was going to hunt the terrorists down and not just bomb whole countries.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Talk is cheap. Hunting down the terrorists is a long and tedious job, and we are already doing it. It will probably never be finished; we have to settle down and face that fact. The world has changed forever.
We are not "just bombing whole countries". Bombs are part of war, but the hard part is and always will be the ground troops fighting it one door at a time, one hole in the ground at a time. That kind of war is also part of the war against terrorists.
The part you can't see is the part that has to be secret if we're ever going to get them, the spy work, the commando work and everything that goes with all that. It may not look as though we're doing those, and that's good, or we would fail.
B
_ wrote:
Sure there are terrorists in Iraq. Just like there are in other countries. But that doesnt mean that we can just go bomb all the countries that have some terrorists in it.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
This is way too simple an argument. The point is not that there are terrorists in Iraq. In fact most of the "insurgents" there now are militant Islamists from other countries, brought in probably by Osama and others like him who want to make it look as though the Iraqis don't like the idea of being free from Saddam.
We aren't bombing the country; the country is the Iraqi people, and we are avoiding them very carefully. Sure, in war some innocent people get killed, but we're doing a very good job of avoiding most of that. We have attacked and destroyed the evil regime of Saddam Hussein. (Evil is an OK word; it describes something contrary to the will of God, something bad, something with intent to wipe out something good.)
Saddam is gone from there, captured, and will stand trial. A new government of the Iraqi people is in place and is standing tall against the attacks of all these outsiders, terrorists who are trying to bring it down. It's a very scary thing to be president of Iraq right now; it's very likely he will be assassinated, but he is doing it anyhow because he believes in the work.
There's a hero, and no question about it.
B__ wrote:
Plus I thought that we were attacking Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction.
(Grand)Dad wrote:
Again, way too simple. That was one of the reasons, yes. They didn't have them yet, by the way, but just recently the commission investigating that (not Mr. Bush) decided that it was very clear Saddam was just laying low and would have begun developing them again just as soon as the UN sanctions were lifted.
There's LOTS more, but you get the idea.
Here's B__'s latest response:
Hi, grandpa!
What makes you think that John Kerry doesn't have the will and the intention to do the right thing about the terrorists?
What do you think he ought to do that you think he isn't going to do?
And it's not fair to say "talk is cheap." That's pretty much all that John Kerry can do right now since he's not the president right now.
Sure we are doing other stuff too. We're not just bombing a country, but the truth is still that we are bombing a country.
Bombing countries is a big thing. No matter how careful you are, innocent people will die. We can't go bombing other countries for any old reason.
We're bombing a country that didn't have anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, that didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and isn't the country the terrorists came from (most of them came from Saudi Arabia).
I have to go to school right now. When I come home I will deal with the rest of what you said.
So far,
From
B__