Why Settle For Incompetence?

To the Editor:

A recent letter to The Bee claimed “in the cradle of liberty” it is wrong for a newspaper to run a piece criticizing the government, seemed an argument for voluntary self-censorship. Tyrants from Stalin to Saddam Hussein would surely agree. Under them, journalists who wrote anything critical were imprisoned or killed, and their colleagues quickly learned that it was “unpatriotic” to say anything not totally supportive of the leadership. Even worse, many citizens internalized this rule, convincing themselves that “good Germans” or “good communists” or “good Muslims” shouldn’t question their leaders.

Another letter claimed that “history has proven, we were winning militarily in Vietnam. If it hadn’t been for the protesting at home, the Vietcong most likely would have surrendered.” This is not history; it is mythologizing the past in order to make it more comforting.

A third claimed “the president and his closest advisors are in possession of all the information in a given international situation. Only they can assess the problem completely.”

President Bush is notorious for not listening to anyone with ideas or information counter to what he wants to hear. Those “advisors” who warned that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that we would need far more troops to control the country, or that the tax cuts plus the war would lead to a massive deficit, were ridiculed, punished, and subjected to smear campaigns.

Pandering to the anti-intellectualism of his core constituency, he is apparently proud of his ignorance of Middle Eastern history, religion and culture, and was unprepared for the consequences of overturning not only Saddam, but the power structure of his Baath party and the Sunni minority leadership. Consequently, we opened up a can of worms and then ordered our troops to make apple pie out of it.

We aren’t fighting a war in Iraq. There was a war to be fought in Afghanistan, against the Taliban and Osama, but we abandoned that for the apparently juicier and easier target of Iraq — despite the fact that Osama hated Saddam’s Baathists as much as he hated us.

Our soldiers are in harm’s way, but with no clear enemy. They’re trying to make the country work when it is no longer a viable country. They spend their days shuttling around in insufficiently armored Humvees, dreading the explosion of a roadside bomb, or a drive-by shooting, or a suicidal attack by children.

With Vietnam, the threat of the draft hanging over everyone not rich or well connected enough to get in the National Guard eventually forced people to begin to learn more history and geography than they really wanted to know, and they finally realized that the future well-being of America did not depend on preventing Vietnam from going communist.

The absence of a draft today makes it easier to avoid thinking about a horrible situation. Nobody’s loved one has to go to Iraq — unless he or she was unlucky enough to have joined the reserves to pay for tuition. We owe it to our troops to support them, but not by putting yellow magnets on our cars. We need to engage in a national debate in which we air the issues out — listening to criticism, ingesting as much information as we can — seeking solutions to this mess that are based on honest and informed assessments, not slogans and propaganda.

Why settle for incompetence?

Sincerely,

Julie Stern

19 Park Lane, Newtown                                             August 30, 2005