Red Rover
Reference: Karl Rove’s address to the RNC.
The GOP isn’t post-9/11 and no one in this country is pre-9/11. If anythig the GOP is post apocalyptic. It’s hard to claim the GOP as evil or, as a fond manage of mine would call it, bone-heads because they are smart people. What they have yet to realize is that the World Trade Center and Pentagon plane crashes did not change the world they just drew the curtain back from the eyes of Americans. America is no more at war than we were on September 10th. While terrorism is a relatively new threat to Americans but to the rest of the world it’s all old hat.
What the GOP fail to grasp is that they didn’t discover terrorism any more than Columbus discovered colonialism. The act of causing terror, as opposed to traditional or even guerilla warfare simply involves targeting civilians who are not accustomed to being targeted as a means of influencing policy. When you’re out gunned, you go after the the guy giving the orders or his boss (the public). This has the long term effect of turning non-combatents into weaponless soldiers - witness the attitudes of Israelis or the British during the IRA years.
Rove is right that for America this is a new kind of war, but the war isn’t on terror because terror is just a tool. You cannot wage war on terror or terrorism (the use of terror) any more than you can wage war on guns, knives, drugs or fists. Terrorism is a tool to achieving a goal. That goal is and has always been land and people. Al-Qaeda wants control over some amount of land and its peoples. Whether that is Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East or the World, the people of the those lands disagree and they need to figure out how to stand up to a guy who, at the end of the day, is a bully with an army of suicide bombers.
Red Rover, Red Rover come over Karl Rover. Figure it out. Be part of the solution.