Skip to comments.

Posted on 09/21/2001 9:20:35 AM PDT by Liz

Some ideas are so stupid, you have to be an intellectual to persuade yourself of them. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton's deputy secretary of state and now the head of the new Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, tells the Yale Daily News he believes America should not attack the terrorism problem simply from a military angle, and he advocated further support for development projects.

"If people are really poor and really desperate, they're going to be really angry," Talbott says, apparently having forgotten that the Marshall Plan came after the defeat of the Nazis.

Similar sounds of appeasement, National Review Online notes, can be found in Tikkun magazine, whose editor, Michael Lerner, writes: We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do" with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food, and that one billion are literally starving.

We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources by the richest society in world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the resentment that others feel toward us.

We may tell ourselves that the suffering of refugees and the oppressed have nothing to do with us--that that's a different story that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel outrage, anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.

"Really Poor?" "Literally starving"? "Inequalities of wealth"? At the moment, the two leading suspects for having sponsored the attacks are Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The Washington Post reports today about bin Laden that "estimates of his personal fortune vary widely, from a few million dollars to $300 million." Forbes [http://www.forbes.com/2000/12/04/1204faces.html] last year estimated Saddam Hussein's personal fortune at $7 billion.

In a Yale Daily News op-ed this week, Donald Kagan also a Yale professor, accused Talbott and yet another Yale professor, Paul Kennedy, of "blaming the victim": Many people and nations in the world resent and dislike the United States--its political system, its culture, its way of life and power--but they do not kill innocent civilians and make war for that reason. Those people who do may be pitied for their derangement--but first, they must be stopped.

Whatever one thinks about American power and its role in the world, surely it should not change to make such people less angry. Surely, at this moment, our chief concern must be how we can stamp out such evil.

Such voices as those of Kennedy and Talbott are always available in countries such as ours. Their grievances about various aspects of our own country lead them to seek the causes of any troubles in us and to urge an understanding of our enemies.

Slate's William Saletan offers an astute critique of the Kennedy-Talbott-Lerner approach: The practical point made by these consequentialists is that we can't stop terrorism without addressing its causes. A diagnostic approach, they argue, is wiser than simply lashing out in anger. They're right about that. But their wisdom falls short of the next insight: Consequentialism is a two-way street. It's true that terrorists can impose consequences on us. But it's just as true that we can impose consequences on terrorists.

Superficially, it's empowering to analyze every situation in terms of the consequences of our own acts. Understanding how we can change the enemy's behavior by changing our own appears to put control in our hands.

It also gratifies our egos by preserving our sense of free will while interpreting the enemy's conduct as causally determined. We're the subjects; they're the objects. But the empowerment and the ego gratification are illusory. By accepting as a mechanical fact the enemy's aggressive response to our offending behavior, we surrender control of the most important part of the sequence.

Useless Idiots--II
It takes an exceptional degree of stupidity, not to mention animus toward America, to call for "peace" at a time like this. Unlike Vietnam or the Gulf War, this is not a case of America choosing to intervene overseas; America was at war the moment our enemies struck us on our own soil.

We're a bit surprised to find that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a hotbed of stupid anti-Americanism. And yet the Boston Herald reports that scores of students and faculty members gathered around a "Nerds Against War" banner. Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology at MIT, expressed his sympathy for America's enemies: "Desperate, impoverished people will take a lot of suffering before they give in. And they will repay it in spades."

It's not just MIT, though; an online flier on the institute's Web site invited students to "rally for peace simultaneously with students at Caltech, Cornell, Colombia (NY), Wesleyan (CT), Harvard University, and 140 colleges and universities around the country."

Banner Banners--IV
City officials in Berkeley, Calif., ordered American flags removed from city firetrucks, the Daily Californian reports. Reason: The fire department was afraid that "antiwar protesters" might attack the American flag.

"If we roll into an emergency situation in the area where the demonstrations are being held, we feel it is a possibility that some of the demonstrators might attack the flag and or the firefighters that are flying the flags," assistant fire chief Michael Migliori tells KPIX-TV.

Why not just have a policy that the firemen will turn their hoses on any "protester" who makes a move against the flag? Some of those little pukes could probably use a shower anyway.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.