The danger of papering over terror with “good news”

An e-mail written around August 11 by a conservative friend, who has been distressed for some time by the continual messages coming from conservatives and Bush supporters—most recently Karl Zinsmeister—about how great things are going in Iraq. My friend’s chief concern is that our cheerful acceptance of ongoing terror violence in Iraq—so long as apparent progress is being made in building schools, having elections, and so on—will translate into a similar acceptance of terrorism when it starts occurring regularly in the United States:

Every day we hear of explosions, attacks. David Brooks said this morning that four cities are becoming terrorist strongholds. I’m not for getting out, but clearly we have to do more than just say how things are looking good and that we shouldn’t focus on the bad news. We have to bring more stability; democracy is meaninglesss in chaos. But even if we aim for less than “democracy” or a “free society,” we are still not going to have a U.S. friendly nation if this kind of violence continues. In fact we will make more enemies.

A stiff crackdown would be great but only if coupled with real military might. When you have an active insurgency on your hands, cloak and dagger is not enough. That’s ok for relatively stable societies like ours and Singapore. I am not wanting deliberately to detract and be negative but I don’t see the value of pumping up good news when awful things are happening. I wouldn’t want to live under such a situation, where I see people blown up in front of my eyes, and then hear that things are going well and there’s lots of good news. So I can’t imagine Iraqis are happy either, even though it was good to get rid of Saddam, and most of them probably appreciate that.

And that’s my underlying fear, that when suicide bombs start going off here (and Dick Cheney has said that that is inevitable), we will have neocons saying, “Hey, our society is still going strong, it’s not that bad, focus on the good news.” I feel that I want to stop that whole line of thought in whatever way I can so that it won’t be used to accommodate us to horrors when they start happening here.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2004 08:07 PM | Send