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Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, December 10, 2003
00:25 - Get 'em up against the wall...
http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1690&mode=thread&order=0

(top) link
Via LGF, where the news has been getting both far more encouraging (e.g. the anti-terrorism protests in Iraq) and more bleak, comes this:

Likewise, in Iraq, both the violent resistance and the so far fence-sitting Shia clerics are learning that the U.S. only understands force. The White House decided to have "elections" in June, not because proconsul Bremer suddenly remembered that Iraq belonged to Iraqis, but because the tenacious armed resistance was beginning to threaten Bush's 2004 election.

The rising death toll of American soldiers finally got the White House to set a date for "elections" in Iraq. But the White House is still trying to get away with a sham process in which proconsul Bremer will get the final word about who gets elected to the new Iraqi National Assembly. (It's an American tradition -- sham elections -- and who better than Bush to know it.)

The Shia leadership's insistence, in the teeth of White House opposition, on real and free one-person-one-vote elections, is embarrassing to the U.S. It is exposing the hypocrisy of Washington's claim to "export democracy." But Washington's capacity to absorb embarrassment is infinite. The Shia clerics are likely to discover that only when their threats become dead serious will the U.S. cave in.

Given how much the Pentagon wants to maintain Iraq as a new vassal state and a strategic military base, threats probably won't be enough. The Shia leadership will have to demonstrate a capacity for organizing effective resistance.

Here, too, the lesson of the steel tariffs is not without merit. While Iraqis have every right to shoot and kill occupation soldiers, that isn't necessary the most effective way to influence George Bush. Quite a few of the people who fund Bush's election campaign are involved in the latest corporate gold rush ("reconstruction") in Iraq. Attacking their interests might be a quicker way to get the president into listening mode. The lives of American soldiers are dear, but four more years in the White House are priceless.

This, and Eminem writing songs encouraging the assassination of the President, and Ted Rall actively encouraging the Iraqi insurgents to kill Americans, and regular protests in our cities' streets increasingly brazenly waving the banners of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden as righteous martyrs lying however futilely across America's senseless path of destruction... where's it all leading?

It's getting harder and harder to imagine that these kinds of sentiments-- that our troops' lives and even those of the domestic and foreign reconstruction contractors are nothing more than casino chips to be stacked on Red and cast against Bush a year from now-- are the province of the wacked-out far Left. These ideas are seeing currency in longer and larger and more reputable-looking articles, graduating day by day from the fuming and incoherent message-boards where they were espoused with the same swaggering adolescent bravado that typically accompanies a righteous frag in Quake, and gaining in linguistic dexterity and intellectual "rigor" with each new medium it infects. By the time next year's election rolls around, how far will the one-upmanship have gotten? With another year of this seemingly out-of-control feedback loop of hatred and bile to come, where one's sincerity is judged upon how much he hates Bush and to what lengths he's willing to go to unseat him... what are the campaign ads going to look like?

If they don't openly endorse assassination on prime-time TV by that time, I'll be very pleasantly surprised. But I worry about how far they will go.

Sooner or later, one of these people will in fact legitimately commit treason. More accurately, hundreds and thousands of people will push well into the realm of the definition of the word, seeing no reason to stop the advance of their rhetoric, and the authorities will do nothing to stop it-- because they know full well that the most vitriolic of the Leftists are on a hair-trigger to accuse anyone who calls them on it of McCarthyism, fascist police-statism, and crushing of dissent. They'll continue to do so well beyond the point where what they're doing can, in fact, no longer legitimately be called "dissent".

But it'll have to crack sooner or later. Something will happen, someone will finally go too far, and out will come the billy clubs. And what then?

The revolutionaries will have their martyrs. They'll have their righteous cause (Look! Crushing of dissent, just like we've been saying all along!). They'll have the spark, and they've been busily piling up the tinder now for three years.

They're itching for real, honest-to-God Revolution. And they may well get it.

"John Locke" in the LGF comments:

If violence will advance their cause, and Ash is clearly advocating that, have they not abandoned the democratic process, the rule of law, and the protection conferred by civilized discourse?
Josh is exactly right, these power-crazed rhetorical nihilists are hell-bent on forcing a violent showdown. That will be the end of them, and their leaders know it, but the evolution of their rhetoric and the script of their fantasy ideology both require a violent climax.

It's a terrible choice that we who would be the defenders against such a Revolution face: a) tolerate the affronts of the revolutionaries to the point where they're actively causing damage to our country and its citizens and soldiers, out of fear of the consequences if we... b) fight to put them down, thereby becoming everything they accuse the Right of having been all along.

And honestly, I have no idea which choice I find more palatable.

Both choices suck, from my perspective. But from the Left's perspective, both choices are winners.

This is what spurs them on.

They know they can't lose. Either they get free rein to pursue whatever mad goals they want, or they get the excuse to rise up in violent self-defensive war. Either way they get what they want-- whether by extortion, holding us hostage to our scruples, or by justified violence once they've pushed those scruples into the margins. Either way works.

(The fact that these are precisely the reasons why terrorism works-- it depends on the West's insistence upon fairness and unwillingness to tackle declared threats sensibly and effectively, things terrorists can always count on-- is what makes these people's tactics all the more galling. They learn from the best.)

There's got to be a third choice. It's got to be real, and it's got to be the one we as a country choose, because it's the only way we can remain a unified nation, I fear. Either of the first two choices would change America forever, and for the worse. There has to be a third way out that doesn't give away the farm.

* Bush could resign. But no, that gives away the farm-- it appeases the Left and assumes unearned blame for what in more sober eyes has been a great success, not a bloody failure.

* We could catch Saddam, and he could reveal incontrovertible proof of complicity in Islamic terrorism, plus active French and German and Russian subversions of US interests and UN mandates, eternally shaming them before the world and vindicating the US. But that's just a pipe dream.

* Iraq could stabilize, a pacifist Democrat could win the White House, Britney Spears could have some sex scandal or something, and the war could leave the public radar screen, and the Left would gradually lose steam and fade from the streets. But that too would give away the farm-- another 9/11 would be our reward for the inevitably decreased vigilance.

I don't know. All ways out of this mess look bleak or unrealistic, and I genuinely fear for what the coming months will bring.


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