Submitted by Felix, Apr 24, 2007 15:27

While it's dubious whether the "war on terror" umbrella gathers and emboldens such "disparate groups" abroad, it has more effectively shaped a more home-grown variety of dissent here in the States. Expatriots blasting the unwholesomeness of arrogant and avaricious American values--a trend spanning McVeigh to Cho, pre- and post-9/11--has created in the States a peculiar if latent sympathy with anti-American groups who themselves "force their indivdual and narrow values." These are isolated incidents, but this principle of citizen-alienation is more pervasive. The real appeal, of course, is that violent cabals, however isolated, profess crusades toward radical change in a time of radical (Western) evil. Not only do they embrace a sense of individual purpose, they also brandish a strength of conviction rare in America and perhaps extinct since the last Great War, where we saw firsthand how strong rhetorical convictions are attractive, whatever their caustic content. Despite its first-term success, this principle has been an increasingly less effective strategy for the Bush junta. Post-Regan, post-Cold War attempts to coerce international allies and to contrive a sense of imminent danger at home have had marginal success--namely because our credibility has fallen as our authoritarian rhetoric has escalated. The public sees this loss of credibility in the UN, in Gitmo, in the Oval Office. The rhetoric that "strengthens terrorists" has had a more damaging impact here at home, having alienated the American public from the complexities of the world-stage and our increasingly upstaged role on it. Let's hope someone in Congress will follow the Labour Party's lead and refute this counterproductive Orwellian jargon. It is worth the cost of an incumbancy.

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