For some reason I woke up just after 5 this morning, and couldn't get back to sleep. I guess since I've been reading Al Gore's book lately, I have some thoughts on issues of fear and rationality clunking around back there, and they poured out onto my screen in the form of a speech given by an abstract Democrat running for President...not my usual diary, but here it is:
My fellow Americans,
For the past several years, America has lived in fear. We have been travelling through a long dark tunnel of terror, running from one fright to the next. It is time to stop running. I do not want to run anymore.
Some of this was natural and inevitable. It is only human to fear another attack after one is hurt. To throw one's arms up in self protection after being hit. To move away from the direction of the pain. To wish to strike back at the aggressor, and teach them a lesson.
Yet we have been led into actions much beyond such natural self-protection insticts. We have been led by people who have abused our human fears, and played our worst insticts to commit monstrous deed in our collective name as Americans. This must end.
We have been led by people who vacilitate between telling us to hate and fear one man in particular, Bin Laden, and telling us he is of no consequence. Led to believe this man is America's greatest enemy and a prime threat to our existence on one hand, and yet led by a group that cannot or will not pursue, arrest or kill this supposed great threat to us. This is folly and a great failure of American imagination. It was natural for us to over-estimate the threat this one man meant to us, after he struck us hard and so very painfully at a time when our guard was down, and our defences to such unorthodox attack, weak. That time is past.
America, is greater than any one man. It is most certainly greater than an old man living in a cave who needs dialysis to keep alive churning out self-aggrandizing video tapes every few months. We have elevated this man far beyond the scope of fear that any one mortal man should hold for a nation so great as ours. We have done so at the wishes of an Administration driven by fear, loathing and low primal instincts of humanity. A President that cannot dream to think bigger for America than an endless series of pointless conflict merely to lash out on America's behalf in ways that only succeed in bringing on more risks and creating more enemies for America.
And people of this very sort now vie to replace this President in office and continue his failed policies. Fear drives them. Fear of terror. Fear of nuclear weapons. Fear of dirty bombs. Fear of inaction, and fear of being perceieved by America's foes as being weak. I am afraid too, afraid that it is time for America to show such people that their time is over. This country cannot succeed by setting its policies based on whatever we think the terrorists want. Aren't you tired of being told "The terrorists will be emboldened" by this or that policy? SO WHAT? We are being led by the childish and flighty, who have no ideas of their own to handle terrorism, and can only think to do the opposite of whatever they think the terrorists might want. Pathetic.
I do not claim to know what exactly will "embolden" the terrorists, and frankly I care very little about what they think. I care what you think. Terrorists don't get to vote in this country, it is run by you, the people, not by fear of Osama Bin Laden's impression of us. This is doomed to fail. Should we stay in Iraq we asked? "Yes, because leaving will embolden the terrorists" they tell us. Really? More so than bleeding the lives of our soldiers week after week? Does it not embolden this implacable mythical foes we are told to panic over to see us weakening our military through overreach in a land we cannot claim to understand, in a conflict that is older than our nation? We have lost a global game of truth-or-dare with these foes, as they taunted us to reach into a hornet's nest, saying "or are you too chicken?"
Adults do not behave like this. Adults determine the best course of action based on internal motives and a rational appreciation of the consequences of each course. School yard taunting from men of the low caliber of Osama bin Laden should be the very last thing we consider. Embolden him? How could he possibly be made any bolder than this Administration has made him? He has attacked us, killed thousands of our citizens, sent us swarming with rage into a country that had nothing to do with his attack on us, and all the while he sits safely somewhere, continuing to taunt us, and given our full, rapt, attention each time he does. No more.
You cannot raise your guard in one direction without lowering it in another. After 2001, our guard was up and our attention was so very focused on our perceieved foreign foes. But we lowered our guard as a nation to our domestic foes. I speak of fear, hatred and desire for vengeance. These are the foes we must now defeat, before we have any hope of beating Al Qaeda.
It is time to stop reacting to these people. Each time we set our course based on their taunting, we only succeed in teaching them to taunt us some more. It is true that we have not suffered another attack since 2001. Why would Bin Laden need to attack us again, when we are doing such an effective job of harming ourselves just out of fear of him? We have managed to lose the lives of over 3 thousand of our soldiers in what we were wrongly deceived to believe was a strike at his allies, and his support in Iraq. We have damaged our respect the world over. Hatred and fear of America is at historic highs, in every country you can name. Our closest friends love us less, and those who used to admire us now detest us. How could Bin Laden even dream to achieve such damage to America with another attack?
I will lead America for Americans. I will lead firstly on what we perceive to be America's best course. What Osama thinks will be very far from my calculations, which is something not one of the leading Republicans can say with any honesty. They want more of the same. They will try to differ from the current occupant of the White House on some trivia - Giuliani is supposedly socially liberal, Romney will claim to be fiscally responsible. McCain thinks the failures in Iraq can be attributed to some laundry list of tactical mistakes made early in the occupation. This is all distractions. They will all continue to make the biggest mistake George Bush and Dick Cheney have made in leading America: being driven by fear, and trying to make all of you afraid.
Whatever trivial policy shifts they will make won't matter so long as fear is what drives them. It is all that drives them. They will try and drive you to fear me, to claim if I am elected President, terrorists will win. There was a time when no American candidate for office would say such outlandish and despicable things as that, but George Bush and Dick Cheney have made such statements routine. Imagine all of us politicians were nothing more than car salesmen (with no offence meant to car salesemen by that comparison), Republicans selling Fords, and Democrats selling Chevies. It would be as if the Ford salesman were to say to you, "Don't buy a Chevy, it will explode and kill your family if you buy it!" You would be apalled that a salemen would say such an awful and obviously untrue thing about his competition. It would be ridiculous. Yet here America is, being told the same thing by craven hucksters.
What new course can any of these candidates possibly offer? I will tell you: More of the same, and even more of the same. War with Iran perhaps. Or Syria. There are lots more supposed great threats to us we should all be terrified of. Never mind that rattling our sabres at these countries is precisely what is driving them to develop nuclear weapons. After all, North Korea showed the way! Now that they have nuclear weapons, only then is the Bush Administration willing to talk with them. No threats of invasion. No chatter in the neo-conservative publications calling for bombing raids. What lesson could a country like Iran possibly draw from that? In 2001, they had a reformer President, who made overtures of friendship to us after we were attacked. They cooperated with us in our efforts to roust the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. What was their reward for that? Being named to Bush's "Axis of Evil" in January 2002. What happens next? The reform movement in Iran was set back a decade, and the reformers, demoralized, stayed home the next election giving us Iran's current fiery and intemperate President, Ahmedinejad. Another man we are often told to fear incidently.
These people will, if elected, continue to go around the world threatening people and throwing rocks at beehives, and feigning outrage when they get us stung now and again. It would be comical if the consequences were not so tragic to each family that loses a loved one in these failed and immoral foreign policy misadventures. I am not laughing, but perhaps the very people they aim at so foolishly, probably are. This has been the era of High School Politics in America. Where gossip and invective have won the day, where taunts and bullying were of great importance. It is time we graduated and left that behind us.
John Edwards' hair cuts? Barack Obama's grade school? Hillary Clinton's accent? Al Gore's weight? Is that the best they can throw at us? It's really telling that these people have failed utterly to defeat Al Qaeda when their thinking is revealed to be so juvenile and contemptibly facile. It would be wrong for me to imply that the people making these attacks on the Democrats are stupid. The real shame on them is, they think you, the American people are stupid. They really do, otherwise they would give you the respect you deserve and try and come up with substantive and meaningful reasons not to vote for a Democrat. High school politics, my friends.
What new course can I offer? A course of peace, not war. A course of calm, not panic. A course of reason, not fear. It sounds trite, but it really is that simple. Peace breeds peace just as much as war begets war. With those as foundational principles a new course for America can be made. A course that leads to the security of knowing no one will attack us because no one has any good reason to do so. A course that leads to a calm and rational discussion of the threats we face, and our choices between them. A course that addresses the true threats we face, strikes hard at those who will not make peace or accept it, and makes friends of those who merely misunderstand us. Republicans never learned in high school that you do not "win" by attacking everyone who ever said a mean word about you. You win by making friends of most of them, and when someone else says something mean about you, your new friends will stick up for you.
For all the great things FDR did, leading America out of the Great Depression, through the Second World War, social security and the New Deal - today what should resonate most with us, is his very wisest observation. I repeat it today, as it has never been more true. The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. America can and must come out of the dark, and cold place of panic we have been led into. The Republicans want to dive us deeper into it, and we must reject that couse, and them.
Thank you.