Just Above Sunset
July 31, 2005 - Thucydides got it right a long time ago...
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As reported Tuesday, July
26, in the New York Times, on Monday last things changed - U.S. Officials Retool Slogan for Terror War. The Global War on Terror
is over. Or it has been renamed. The Bush administration
is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle
is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday. Whatever. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, Monday was saying he had "objected to the use
of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution."
Are these guys really
this clueless? But what really gets to
Kaplan the comment from Steven Hadley that they were basically looking for an alternative to gloom - a positive alternative. In short? A happier acronym. Look at the first letters
of Global War on Terrorism. GWOT. What does that mean; how is it pronounced? Gwot? Too frivolously rowdy, like
a fight scene in a Marvel comic book (Bam! Pfooff! Gwot!). Gee-wot? Sounds like a garbled question (Gee what?).
Kaplan goes on to wonder
whether Hadley and all the rest of our other top officials really believe this nonsense?
The question he asks is whether they so enraptured with PR that they think a slogan and a strategy are the same thing
- and that retooling the one will transform the other? We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...
and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Got it? Change the words and you change the reality. The meaning of words
had no longer the same relation to things, but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be
loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything
was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. Yep, it's all how you look
at things, and who controls the words used. It must be very strange
to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He
is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception
that, when not bored, is hostile. It's all how you look at
it. One man's reality is not another's. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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