I’m still catching up on reading after the holidays, and I see that RCP’s Tom Bevan gripes:
Many thanks to Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation for just beating the December 31 deadline for the dumbest comment of the year award. Regarding the failed terror attack on Flight 253, Vanden Heuvel writes:
I believe the lesson is that we need to end as quickly as possible the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and call for an end to permanent war against Islamic terrorists.
Because the terrorists will stop trying to kill us if we do these things, right? You would think that if the last decade has taught the world anything – from 9/11 to London to Bali to Madrid to scores of other places around the globe – it’s that laying down our arms and giving the Islamic terrorists a big hug will not achieve the preferred outcome.
Bevan makes a classic conservative (neoconservative?) mistake here, asking the wrong question. What matters isn’t whether us ending the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan will make the terrorists stop trying to kill us. No, what matters is whether continuing those wars will make them stop trying to kill us. If the answer to that question is “no,” then it’s all a colossal waste of time, money, effort, and human life. And to Vanden Heuvel’s “dumb” point, that’s time, money, and effort (and, potentially, human life) that could be better used in other ways that do make them less likely to try to kill us.
As plenty of counterterrorism experts have pointed out, our military actions in that region of the world ironically makes them more likely to try to kill us, so it’s exactly counterproductive. Of course, since those experts envision approaches that extend beyond
blowing up brown-skinned people, they’re “unserious.”
But Bevan gets even worse:
These people wanted to kill us yesterday, they want to kill us today, and they will want to kill us tomorrow (and every day after that) until either 1) we cease to exist or 2) reform-minded Muslims finally stand up and take their religion back from these violent lunatics.
To think otherwise is to indulge in a fantasy – and an exceedingly deadly one at that.
OK, Mr. Wizard: In what way does our continued occupation of two sovereign Middle-Eastern nations make option 2 the slightest bit more likely? We’re left to wonder, because Bevan doesn’t bother to explain it, and, as I mentioned, those “unserious” experts claim that quite the opposite is true. It’s as if he’s wholly unaware that he’s just completely undermined the point he was trying to make, even if one buys the risible “they hate us for our freedoms” logic that seems to underlie his argument (which I obviously don’t).
In trying to call out the alleged “dumbest comment of 2009,” Bevan has instead provided us with arguably the dumbest blog post of 2009.
Footnote to the Preceding: His colleague David Paul Kuhn makes a valiant early attempt at the 2010 honor, writing a blog post in which he argues that political reporters pay too much attention to political bloggers. I’ll take that as a sign that political reporters can safely ignore his posts. 
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
And to Vanden Heuvel’s “dumb” point, that’s time, money, and effort (and, potentially, human life) that could be better used in other ways that do make them less likely to try to kill us.
You understate the point here, and I think importantly so:
If we could choose a different course of action that has exactly the same results as to “them” trying to kill “us”, but uses less time, money, effort, OR blood; we should switch to that alternative immediately.
It’s just icing on the cake there are fewer terrorist plots as a side effect of us killing less of our own soldiers and sending home to their spouses fewer killers, abusers, and trauma victims.
War is paid for in the coins not just of our dollars and our blood and our national honor and the shreds of our national ethics, but also in the coin of families torn apart by making killers and strangers of our human capital that might otherwise have been parents and workers.
We should never have gone into Iraq or Afghanistan. We should seek out those who harm us and destroy them. Otherwise, let the Moslems fight among themselves. They’ve been doing it for centuries and we aren’t going to turn them into good little democrats anytime soon. Defend the United States and quit trying to be the policemen of the world.
Uh oh. I largely agree with Lou/Morris/Fred. I think I need a shower!
TG, I’ll get you the bleach.
Really, I’m not picking a fight for once, just being a language geek.
Lou, I notice that you spell the word ‘moslem’, which is now very much rarer than ‘muslim’. Are you old enough that you first learnt the older spelling, or is there same other subculture that still spells it that way?
(Yes, I recognize the irony of my spelling ‘learnt’ in this question. My orthography is just atavistic.)
Dan:
I was a little surprised he didn’t call them “Mussulmen.”
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Unclear on the Concept =-.
Well, I’m actually curious if there’s some body of literature that he’d participate in that the rest of us wouldn’t. Imagine if there was some evangelical treatises that are old enough to use that spelling but are still wildly popular with certain groups.
And there’s always ‘Mohammedan’.
The archaic spelling is “Mahometan”
[/time to stop googling Treaty of Tripoli]
Best reCAPTCHA ever: “fuel argument”
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Unclear on the Concept =-.
T:
When you agreed with Lou you agreed with me, too, so back in for more scrubbing you go.
If you want I can ask Barbie to pop in and you can make it a trifecta.
It will be daylight during some portion of the next 24 hours.
So… apparently Recapcha, as cool and creepily on-topic as it is, bites the bag as a filter against spam.
Plagiarism detection vs. plagiarism encouragement – a wonderful spambot war!
“Guaranty” is one of the funnier misspellings I’ve seen in a while, BTW.
Digg:
Guaranty isn’t actually a misspelling, though it probably wasn’t the appropriate word for the context.
Dan M:
Not sure how those are getting through. We get few enough of them that it wouldn’t surprise me much if it were an actual person (or several actual people) copying, pasting, and answering the reCAPTCHA challenge.
Judd:
Agreeing with you doesn’t make me feel dirty, it just generally makes me reconsider my position.
.-= tgirsch´s last blog ..Unclear on the Concept =-.
“Really, I’m not picking a fight for once, just being a language geek.
Lou, I notice that you spell the word ‘moslem’, which is now very much rarer than ‘muslim’. Are you old enough that you first learnt the older spelling, or is there same other subculture that still spells it that way?
(Yes, I recognize the irony of my spelling ‘learnt’ in this question. My orthography is just atavistic.)”
“is there same other subculture that still spells it that way?”
I would never expect you to pick a fight. Yes, I’m old enough that most people used to spell it Moslem. Usually, I use Muslim, but why does it make a difference to you?
“is there same other subculture that still spells it that way?”
Not trying to pick a fight, but most people spell it “some” instead of “.” Is there some subculture that spells “some” that way?
Your editing feature doesn’t work. I tried to edit my comment, but the text kept scrolling to the top. I quess you will call it poetic justice.
“.” should be “same.”
No, my saying ‘same’ for ‘some’ was a typo, which I suspect even you managed to figure out.
As to what difference the spelling makes, none. I was exhibiting something called “curiosity”. Since you seem to have never heard of the concept, perhaps you should look it up.
I know of the word guaranty. The question is whether poster did. Since, guaranty doesn’t make as much sense as guarantee in teh context in which it is used here, I can only assume it was a gross misspelling of guarantee. And, that’s partially why it’s funny. Those are are the funniest mistakes, the ones that aren’t just mistakes, but are legitimate words that alter the meaning of the sentence.
My favorite of all time is in George W. Bush’s high school paper, in which he was writing about a crying woman and seeking a synonym for tears. So, he grabbed a thesaurus and wrote the following clause, “as the lacerates streamed down her face.”
“No, my saying ’same’ for ’some’ was a typo, which I suspect even you managed to figure out.
As to what difference the spelling makes, none. I was exhibiting something called “curiosity”. Since you seem to have never heard of the concept, perhaps you should look it up.”
Don’t take things so seriously. Some liberals have no sense of humor. You are right, though. You are curious. Even you should know that “moslems” and “muslims” refer to the same group of people. Grow up.