Karl Rove

[Note, I still think the article I liked to on Huffington Post says this more eloquently, but I'm peeved, so I have to write something. --Liam]

The more I read about Karl Rove's statements regarding liberals and the 9/11 attacks, the more furious I get.

Liberals don't get 9/11? But it was his conservative administration that decided that it was more important to go after Saddam Hussein than to CATCH the people who purpetrated the attack.

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers, Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

Let's see, the resolution to go into Afghanistan was passed by the combined houses of the Congress by a vote of 518-1. I wasn't aware that conservatives had that great a majority. Amazing how fluid the definitions are. When trying to identify liberal bias on PBS, several conservatives were reportedly counted as "liberal" when in any way contradicting the administration, but when counting the votes on the resolution to go to war, suddenly everyone on voted FOR it is a conservative and the lone dissenting vote the work of liberals.

"Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies."

Is it not possible to do BOTH? Yes, we had to defeat our enemies (al qaeda, remember them?), but by not taking the time to understand our enemies, even as we went after them, we simply managed to find a way to anger them. As a nation we've done so much Islam bashing that we've made the entire Islamic region our enemy, rather than just the extremists.

There has to be understanding. That doesn't mean not defending ourselves, but attacking blindly... well, that's what al Qaeda did to us, they decided that we were "the enemy" and didn't even bother to try to understand us.

Understanding doesn't mean sympathizing and it doesn't mean giving in, but if you don't understand what leads your enemies to attack you then you are not doing all you can to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. If you don't understand your enemies' way of thinking, you can't be prepared for what they may do next.

And meanwhile, Karl Rove leads our President to go to war with someone who had nothing to do with 9/11, helps to lose us the good will of the world that we had after 9/11, and accomplishes for al Qaeda recruitment what the 9/11 attacks failed to do.

Sure, Mr. Rove, you and your conservative buddies "understand" 9/11 and how to protect us. So tell me why so many more people hate us now than before you lot took your swing at "protecting" us?

UPDATE: There was a quote from Sun Tzu's The Art of War that I was looking for earlier, to reference on the part about understanding your enemy, but I couldn't find it. Coincidentally, another blogger DID find it and posted it, and I thought I'd add it here. Arguably the best known, most respected treatise on warfare and tactics, it says:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
--Sun Tzu

I think it's clear we're having about equal numbers of victories and defeats (check that daily body count before you claim otherwise) in Iraq right now. Maybe if we'd spent a little more time understanding our adversaries, we'd not be in quite the quagmire we're in today.

Copyright (c) June 23, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net