A taste or two:
For more than 20 years prior to September 11, Islamic terrorists imprisoned and murdered our diplomats and military personnel, destroyed our civil aviation, machine-gunned our civilians, razed our embassies, attacked an American warship and, in 1993, the U.S. itself. For varying reasons, none legitimate, we hesitated to mount an offensive against the terrorists' infrastructure, hunt them down, eliminate a single rogue regime that supported them, or properly disconcert our fatted allies whose robes they infested. This was comparable in its way to Munich. Only in 2001, when it became obvious to any rational being that we must, did we retaliate, but even then in the face of domestic pressure to judicialize the response, which was exactly what we had done all along.He left out Congress. For all of my joking about them, it is becoming more clear every day that the baby boomers either can not or will not lead.
The underlying corollary to this reflex of appeasement is the notion that our military options are constrained financially, as if we are not a nation of stupendous wealth and it has not been the American tradition since the Civil War to spend, in support of war, with the intensity of war itself. In 1945, we devoted 38.5% of GNP to defense, the equivalent of $4.76 trillion now. The current $400 billion defense budget is a twelfth of that and only 3.2% of GDP, as opposed to the average of 5.7% of GNP in the peacetime years between 1940 and 2000. A false sense of constraint has arisen in every quarter of society. It is the ethos of the administration, the press, the civilian side of the Pentagon, and many of the prominent uniformed military brought to high rank in recent years.
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Perhaps this and previous administrations have had an effective policy just too difficult to comprehend because they have ingeniously sheltered it under the pretense of their incompetence. But failing that, the legacy of this generation's presidents will be promiscuous declarations and alliances, badly defined war aims, opportunities inexplicably forgone, ill-supported troops sent into the field, a country at risk without adequate civil protections, and a military shaped to fight neither the last war nor this one nor the next.
I think it is time to implement my Social Security plan. Here's the deal: the post-baby boomer generations will continue to pay Social Security taxes but forfeit our Social Security retirement benefits (we don't expect to get them anyway). In exchange, the baby boomers can collect Social Security--on the condition that they just go away.
We've had enough ankle-biting, incoherent, emoting, petty, pathetic, uninspired, uninspiring, cry-baby, look-at-me, rub-vasoline-on-my-heinie-and-tell-me-it's-special so-called leadership from that generation.
8 comments:
Isn't the current President Bush a baby boomer, or does he win prizes anyway for his "no vaseline" type of maturity?
Did you read the article?
Oscar,
What do you hope to accomplish by referring to my comments as a "tantrum" and "childish-looking"? Could my quoting of Anchorman have been an indication that I was deliberately exaggerating to make a point?
A counter example: I think it is childish and petulant to make assertions like President Bush, "and his administration has been unquestionably incompetent since [making the decision to go to into Iraq]." There have been quite a few successes in this war, like Saddam Hussein being removed from power and that huge election in January, which suggest that any observer could pretty easily question how incompetent the president and his administration have been. However, that discussion became a nonstarter when I called your statement "childish."
That said, let's get down to brass tacks here: the disagreement is over whether or not the U.S. should have gone into Iraq. In my opinion (and Helprin's), opponents of that war are not only deluded, they are dangerous. In my opinion, any of our elected officials who oppose that war are fools who can't be trusted to drive buses, let alone lead a country at war.
So the real problem I have is with our elected officials, including the president, who support the war. They made the right decision--good for them. But they have allowed the opponents of the war to dominate the discussion. They refuse to lead. They refuse to make clear why this war is and always has been right and necessary. The president has been most guilty on this count because he has the bully pulpit, but there hasn't been a single credible alternative (that's why that Zogby poll indicates that Bush would still beat Kerry).
Instead our national leadership has spent the past four years bickering, pandering, forcing the nation to pretend we are not at war, and taking partisan pot shots instead of working to make sound strategic decisions (Helprin's point). And who makes up the overwhelming majority of that national leadership? Drumroll..... Baby Boomers.
I'm not necessarily asking for unity of purpose. I am asking for leaders who are on the right side actually to lead.
That said, sure, unity of purpose is rare in American wars, but so are wars that are started by attacks on America that kill over 2,000 people. So now our comparison gets down to World War II and the current war.
Like now, American leaders in World War II were all men and women, they all spoke English, and they were almost all Christian. Like now, they overwhelmingly supported the war with their votes in Congress.
Unlike now, the president and the leaders in his party went out of their way to make the case for the justness of the American cause in the war. Unlike now, the leaders in the opposition party did exactly the same thing (see, for an example with the war on the horizon, Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia).
So what is different? They are two different generations that grew up in two different cultural Americas.
"You may believe that attacking Saddam was part of a logical response to 9/11, but that was not what Congress stated and that was not what most Americans believed. It was the concern of a current or future alliance Between Saddam and Al Qaeda that gained Bush support for the war."
Explain how the invasion of Iraq would have happened without 9/11. It was never a war against al Qaeda, it was a war against fundamentalist Muslim terrorists and the states that support them.
Germany did not bomb Pearl Harbor, neither did Italy, but they ally themselves with those who did, much as Saddam Hussein allied himself with the radical enemies of the United States. Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, Iraq never stopped being a hostile belligerent after the Gulf War.
"A large congressional majority supported giving Bush the power to go to war against Iraq if other means to verify the elimination of WMD's had failed."
Along with a list of at least twenty more reasons.
"Some hoped we would go to war; others hoped we would not have to. How many people voting for War with Japan hoped that war would not be necessary[?]"
Thanks for proving my point. They overwhelmingly supported the war with their votes in Congress (since both of those conditions you mentioned were met), and then hemmed and hawed and waffled and qualified about the justness of what was clearly a just war.
There is a basic definitional difference here, which is why my first long comment in this thread said "the disagreement is over whether or not the U.S. should have gone into Iraq. In my opinion (and Helprin's), opponents of that war are not only deluded, they are dangerous. In my opinion, any of our elected officials who oppose that war are fools who can't be trusted to drive buses, let alone lead a country at war." The war in Iraq is just one front in the war on terror. It is an obvious front. All of the pretending that there are legitimate reasons not to go to war in Iraq is the perfect example of the poor leadership of the generation that is in charge right now.
If the baby boomers were in charge in 1941, they probably would have declared war on Japan, and then passed ultimatums to Germany and Italy demanding that they disavow their alliance with Japan, cease hostilities, or face the consequences later. (By the way, we didn't declare war on Germany and Italy the morning after the attack.) Then there would have been debates and campaigns with candidates whining about how they supported the war with Japan, but that incompetant FDR keeps spending precious resources on Germany and Italy. Every time there was a difficult or costly battle in Europe, they would question the cause. Because, you know, there is no known relationship between Germany and Italy and the planning and execution of the Pearl Harbor attacks.
Look, I'm sorry that Saddam Hussein only supported suicide bombers, ran terrorist training camps, tried to assassinate a former president of the United States, developed and used chemical weapons, and gave every appearance of trying to do it again. Hussein was a hostile dictator with access to great wealth and proven connections to extremist Muslim terrorists--exactly the kind of regime we could no longer tolerate after Sept 11.
We have to be blubbering morons to let our enemies use the fact that there is no Bin Laden-Iraq-Syria-Saudi Arabia Pact against us. Either that, or we have to be led by a generation that cannot lead. I suspect that the generation that was in charge after Pearl Harbor would have reacted to Sept 11 quite a bit differently than their grandchildren have.
Let's review:
I'm pretty sure I called all of us either blubbering morons (hence the "We") or poorly led. I'm leaning toward the latter since I've made the case that the big problem is a generational lack of leadership, a point you have disagreed with by calling my clearly hyperbolic statements "childish." I thought we were past that, but then you had to go back and call them "rants."
But you also made the interesting point that historically there have been serious divisions among the American people in many of their wars. That is true, but I argued that this war was analogous to World War II, which did not have the divisions, but our current leadership has not been anywhere near as steadfast in or clear about the causes as the leadership of the WWII generation in their war.
Since I've openly criticised the entire generation, including the president, for their leadership in this war, I'm not sure what President Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq has to do with this particular discussion.
There are serious issues here, and I think some interesting points have been made. That's why I put up a new link for the discussion. I don't know what that eloquence stuff was all about, but nice job making up an argument for me and then kicking its butt.
Absolutely. The president is most culpable because of his lack of clear leadership. My frustration is that I have not seen any alternatives from anyone in that generation that particularly inspires me.
Maybe, as you say, they are hamstrung from the get-go by unclear leaderhip from President Bush. But I kind of hope that greatness would find a way through the foolishness.
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