They really should know better
I don’t read US political blogs that much (Kevin Drum being one of the few exceptions) but with the so-called War on Terror and the very real war in Iraq, politics - and more particularly international politics - has seeped into otherwise interesting and intelligent blogs and has exposed their authors as either smart fools, useful idiots, or just hoplessly náive and ignorant about international affairs.
Take Steven Den Beste for example. I stumbled on him a few years back and found him interesting, intelligent, well read and entertaining. But US foreign policy and the war on terror are blind spots for him. This otherwise rational independent thinker believes among other things that Canada only sent troops to Afghanistan so they could weaken the US position in Iraq by not having to commit troops there [ link]. Needless to say this is absurd logic (unless you’re from South Park).
I had some brief e-mail correspondence with him before the Iraq war where he assured me that the anti-war Europeans were the victims of a massive propaganda campaign. A few months later when no WMDs were found he had to do a quick side-step (he had placed a lot of faith in the discovery of WMDs to support his arguments for war). He now suggested that WMDs were not the real reason for the invasion of Iraq but rather they were just a decoy as the American people could not be trusted with the truth [link]. So who were the real victims of propaganda then?
Then we have Eric Raymond, the prince of open-source who advocates a security through obscurity approach to the so-called Flypaper strategy. Who says Americans don’t do irony? The Flypaper theory is in itself a massive attempt at self-delusion that has been eagerly seized upon by those who cannot reconcile events on the ground with their own perceptions of how things should be.
As with Den Beste, Eric Raymond is a logical and fiercely independent thinker. I have great respect for him as a programmer, and I can sometimes find something in his libertarian rants, but it seems he also has a total blind-spot when it comes to US foreign policy.
And then we have the king of the bloggers himself Glenn Reynolds who advocates a See No Evil, Hear No Evil approach to the war in Iraq, reporting only good news. ‘Oh yeah, things are going really well for the US in Iraq but if biased anti-war media types like the BBC keep on misreporting then the rebels are going to get encouragement and our boys are going to lose heart’. Try as I might I can’t imagine Saddam’s remnants using the western media as a source of motivation. They have plenty of material closer to home.
Glenn Reynolds also believes that Miss Afghanistan in a bikini at the Miss World beauty contest is a sign that Afghanistan is becoming a more liberal, tolerant and pluralistic place. I guess the record-breaking heroin production numbers this year are another sign of it.
Needless to say I disagree with all of the above but that’s not really my point here. I just cannot understand how such intelligent, well-read, critical people can stoop to such shoddy thinking on this one issue and propose theories and scenarios that they themselves would laugh out the door if they came across them in a different context. There may be a case for the war in Iraq - there is certainly a case for a war on terror of some form - but the cases that these guys make just do not stand up to any serious scrutiny.
9/11 changed the USA alright. And for some people the change was so subtle that they did not even notice. After the smoke and fog of war and rhetoric has faded this unspoken, unacknowledged change will linger on. For many it has not been a change for the better.
Mark Waters marked time at 8:45 pm on November 19th, 2003 .
