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Where Do These Views Come From?

I was reading an article on The Swamp, one of the Chicago Tribune’s blogs, about an email Senator John Kerry sent to his supporters today. In the email, Senator Kerry lambastes Senator Joe Lieberman for repeating Vice President Cheney’s rhetoric that voters who fail to support the war in Iraq are emboldening the terrorists.

I’ll disregard the context of the email for now. What I found particularly interesting are a couple of comments that were made by readers of the article. Here is a portion of one comment from Rick, posted on August 17 at 4:05:57 PM:

Talks are not going to resolve the terroist problem. These people have been brought up in a very different culture from ours and have been raised to destroy the west at any and all costs, and if they die along the way they become martyrs.

The only way to defeat the terroists is to defeat them at their own game. Kill all of them.

Here is a portion of a comment from Bill, posted on August 17 at 4:08:22 PM:

I have a solution for Iran and Syria. If I were Commander in Chief. I would call both of those Bozo’s and state “This is the President of the United States. You have 24 hours to quit this terrorist support. You don’t I will tell you right now, Tehran and Damascus will be the worlds largest parking lots”. then hang up “Click”……

The reason I find these two comments intriguing is that they represent the views of many, many Americans. And I’m curious why so many Americans share these views. Basically, these two readers say the solution to the terrorist problem is simple: kill all the terrorists. Wherever the people live who wish us harm, we need to go. And we need to kill these people. Done deal.

But have they not been paying attention to Iraq? We’re not exactly doing much of anything there in the way of wiping bad guys off the face of the planet. In fact, as I discussed previously, the bad guys in Iraq are getting badder. The violence is escalating.

Introducing increased instability to the political powder keg that is the Middle East isn’t exactly our best hope in combating the terrorists. But that is what President Bush and his administration are doing. Rick and Bill not only fail to find a problem with that, but they think we should extend our ambitions in Iraq to Syria and Iran.

Picking a fight with Baghdad is like taking candy from a baby compared to going after Damascus or Tehran. And we’ve seen how well things have gone for us so far in Baghdad. I don’t see where Rick and Bill are finding the confidence that things would go demonstrably better, if not frighteningly worse, if we take our aggression to Syria or Iran.

So I started to wonder, where do these views come from? Is it too many action flicks? Too many pats on the back from World War II success? What is it that makes so many Americans believe that all we have to do to stop terrorism is start dropping bombs all over places where Arabs predominantly live? Do that many Americans really think there is utterly no nuance to this terrorism problem? Do they not think that maybe the causes of, and hence the measures to combat, terrorism may be exceedingly complicated, and this problem may not be solvable by the dropping of large numbers of bombs? Are they incapable of appreciating that fueling anti-American sentiment in the regions of the world where terrorists are looking for more and more recruits might be a bad idea?

This isn’t a Western, folks. We can’t stroll into town, guns blazing, and expect to kill all the bad guys and find our way to a happy ending. We’ll have to be a little more clever than that.