In the struggle against a group like al Qaeda, most of the important work involves international cooperation to gather intelligence so that the secret cells embedded across the planet can be unconvered and destroyed. An essential project, but not one that requires anything of the general population.
Most of it is scarcely a matter for the military (though this administration's unforced decision to invade Iraq -quite peripheral to the "war on terror"-has created a military problem), for this is not an enemy to be defeated by armies or by our arsenal of advanced weaponry.
The challenge posted to us by international terrorism is less like the wars we've known, and more like if an asteroid threatened to strike the earth some time in the future. We'd certainly want to see to it that the right people were recruited to attack the problem and were given all the resources they need to keep the asteroid from hitting the earth. But, as imperative as that effort would be, it is not what we'd be talking about all the time, or thinking about all the time.
Indeed, a good leader would challenge his people not to let this danger cast a large shadow over our lives and our collective conversation. Let us deal with the problem intelligently, a good leader would say. Let's set our fears aside, and go on and do great things in other arenas.
But this leader wants us always thinking about his war, and his role as a "war president," our commander in chief. To what end?
Political Gain for Him, A Price Paid by the Nation
Because the American people cannot serve the cause by getting all riled up about "the war on terror," a leader who works to keep them afraid and focused on a threat they can and should do nothing much about does his people a great disservice.
That's how a lot of people came eventually to understand the various colored "Alerts" the government issued. "What are we supposed to do with this information?" many Americans came to wonder. And the answer to that question was: nothing, really. (Not like with Gore's inconvenient truth, which challenges us to work to transform some of the ways we live our lives.)
And then out of this perplexity some people who noticed that the announcements of greater danger were strangely correlated with the political need of the administration to change whatever was the damaging subject of that moment. Raising the alarm -maybe it's not about our security, but about the leader's own quest for political advantage.
But it's not just the colored alerts. That's just one piece of a larger pattern.
Why direct our scarce national attention onto a problem in whose solution the people have little role to play? A whole tapestry of evidence shows clearly that the administration has wanted people focused on the war on terror, and in a state of fear, so that public opinion could more readily be manipulated into supporting, or at least not opposing, this regime's dismantling of the system of government that has always defined us as a nation.
The drumbeat on this "war on terror," creating an otherwise useless state of fear in the public, has served the regime as an all-purpose justification the assault on the legal and constitutional system. We need to tear all that stuff down -FISA, the 4th Amendment- these leaders want us to believe, so that they will be better able to protect us against our terrible terrorist enemies.
We are a nation at war. That's their story, and they're sticking to it. And they hold onto power by trumpeting this distortion of reality, and by having George W. Bush posture as the "war president"- who gives a disproportionate number of his talks in front of people in uniform, who emphasizes his role as commander-in-chief more than as president, and who, of course, directs our attention to a "war on terror" that, we're told, will last as far as the eye can see.
All this fear, that meets no national need. All this diversion of our attention, for no national purpose. Just a political purpose gained at great national cost. And meanwhile a great many of national problems that we SHOULD be talking about never get a place on the agenda.
The Wrong Fork in Our National Road
So in Bush v. Gore we now know how very much was at stake.
Most of it is scarcely a matter for the military (though this administration's unforced decision to invade Iraq -quite peripheral to the "war on terror"-has created a military problem), for this is not an enemy to be defeated by armies or by our arsenal of advanced weaponry.
The challenge posted to us by international terrorism is less like the wars we've known, and more like if an asteroid threatened to strike the earth some time in the future. We'd certainly want to see to it that the right people were recruited to attack the problem and were given all the resources they need to keep the asteroid from hitting the earth. But, as imperative as that effort would be, it is not what we'd be talking about all the time, or thinking about all the time.
Indeed, a good leader would challenge his people not to let this danger cast a large shadow over our lives and our collective conversation. Let us deal with the problem intelligently, a good leader would say. Let's set our fears aside, and go on and do great things in other arenas.
Political Gain for Him, A Price Paid by the Nation
Because the American people cannot serve the cause by getting all riled up about "the war on terror," a leader who works to keep them afraid and focused on a threat they can and should do nothing much about does his people a great disservice.
That's how a lot of people came eventually to understand the various colored "Alerts" the government issued. "What are we supposed to do with this information?" many Americans came to wonder. And the answer to that question was: nothing, really. (Not like with Gore's inconvenient truth, which challenges us to work to transform some of the ways we live our lives.)
And then out of this perplexity some people who noticed that the announcements of greater danger were strangely correlated with the political need of the administration to change whatever was the damaging subject of that moment. Raising the alarm -maybe it's not about our security, but about the leader's own quest for political advantage.
But it's not just the colored alerts. That's just one piece of a larger pattern.
Why direct our scarce national attention onto a problem in whose solution the people have little role to play? A whole tapestry of evidence shows clearly that the administration has wanted people focused on the war on terror, and in a state of fear, so that public opinion could more readily be manipulated into supporting, or at least not opposing, this regime's dismantling of the system of government that has always defined us as a nation.
The drumbeat on this "war on terror," creating an otherwise useless state of fear in the public, has served the regime as an all-purpose justification the assault on the legal and constitutional system. We need to tear all that stuff down -FISA, the 4th Amendment- these leaders want us to believe, so that they will be better able to protect us against our terrible terrorist enemies.
We are a nation at war. That's their story, and they're sticking to it. And they hold onto power by trumpeting this distortion of reality, and by having George W. Bush posture as the "war president"- who gives a disproportionate number of his talks in front of people in uniform, who emphasizes his role as commander-in-chief more than as president, and who, of course, directs our attention to a "war on terror" that, we're told, will last as far as the eye can see.
All this fear, that meets no national need. All this diversion of our attention, for no national purpose. Just a political purpose gained at great national cost. And meanwhile a great many of national problems that we SHOULD be talking about never get a place on the agenda.
The Wrong Fork in Our National Road
So in Bush v. Gore we now know how very much was at stake.
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