Ideological Warfare

As Christmas approaches and defeated politicians pack up to leave Washington D.C., the American populace eagerly awaits the New Year. The coming change in power will make for interesting viewing this January. The electorate has voted for change and for now, we all will have to join in the game of wait and see. I fear however, that this change is merely a modified version of the Vietnam era and will only bring in a new form of weak willed politicians who are ill equipped to deal with the reality of what we face.

I spent the past week hauling freight from Oregon down to Los Angeles and back north to Spokane and the Idaho panhandle. In L.A. nobody was talking much about Iraq. Californians tend to think about local issues but then again, maybe that isn't so unique to California. Spokane is a college town with an air base on it's periphery. This makes for a combative view of world affairs. I spent the better part of Friday morning listening to two guys argue over Iraq, democrats versus republicans, the economy, you name it. They were chattering away on the CB. One guy was obviously a young man, more than likely a college student who despised the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq. The other gentleman was probably a trucker. Both of their arguments were long on emotion and short on fact.

The weather was extremely gloomy with temperatures hovering at the freezing point, no wind and the beautiful mountainous terrain obscured by heavy fog cover. As I listened to these two men argue, I got to thinking about the mess we are in over in the Middle East. Who has a well defined, bullet proof solution for this? Nobody! However, this does not mean that we should not bother trying to find an answer. I wonder if we still have not learned the lessons of the Vietnam era? Have we developed a society which will not allow us to identify our current threat? Have secular progressives (Bill O'Reilly's term) changed our social fabric to the point that we no longer recognize an ideological threat to our nation? I don't know the answer to these questions but I often think about them.

The counter cultural movement of the late 1960's produced a laissez-faire attitude in many Americans. The so called, if it feels good, it must be good mentality. Members of this movement felt that if we could all just be mellow and groovy there would be no negativity in the world. In their view, the world would be one happy place with no need for warfare or economic competitiveness. Organizations of all types were the antithesis of their desire. A personal sense of right and wrong and long standing social norms were turned on their heads. They weren't "bad" people, just overtly naive about humanity and nation states. Many of the leading players on today's national political scene are products of this generation. These same people seem to feel in their hearts that they can make the entire world a groovy non aggressive place and fail to recognize that the threat we now face would annihilate us if they could.

Why do these folks not recognize this threat? In my opinion, by recognizing the threat of Islamic Jihadists, this group of people would be forced to reanalyze some of the basic tenets of their belief system. They have worked long and hard to develop this social belief system and will stubbornly refuse to relinquish it. In order to avoid doing this, they tend to blame us for the problems in the Middle East. To be sure, our foreign policy has made mistakes in the Middle East since the end of World War II however, these mistakes nor the existence of Israel have created the animosity of the jihadists. The United States and Israel are easy scapegoats for the jihadists. Economic disparity and lack of education are the primary culprits in the development of this hatred.

The current power brokers of the flower power generation would have us believe that all we need to do is talk with our enemies. Enemies of nation states do not agree to talk until they are convinced that negotiations are the only guarantee of their very survival. Sound militaristic? You bet it is. War is ugly however, humanity on a global scale has yet to progress to the point where the act of war between opposing sides becomes extinct. We now face an opponent that wishes to destroy us regardless of how inoffensive we may try to be. The only way to deal with this threat is to make the members of this movement come to realization that their belief in our total destruction will instead, lead to their extinction.

Lastly, in our ongoing struggle to come to terms with just what the separation of church and state means, we fail to recognize that as far as the jihadists are concerned, the church is the state. In our attempt to avoid offending Islam, we fail to call a spade a spade. Yes, we are in an ideological battle for our very existence as a nation and I only hope that the flower power generation who now have gained the reins of power in Congress will recognize the threat. We need to vigorously debate policy issues and search for new solutions to old problems however, we also need to avoid at all costs the deadly snare of existing in the safe, nonthreatening social paradigm that we may have created.

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