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Tone Down The Bushophobia
By Gil Troy
The Jewish Week
March 16, 2006
Given that many people, especially in universities, no longer “trust” in “God” — as McGill University’s motto proclaims — and have relativized truth (“veritas” is Harvard University’s motto), modern intellectuals need a new slogan.
“In complexity, civility,” might be the place to start.
Oversimplifications, misrepresentations and one-sided narratives too often distort, demean and demonize, leading to division and distraction when the West needs unity, and some well-placed, strategically deployed fury focused on the right targets.
As manipulated Muslim mobs burned Danish flags — where did they get so many so quickly? — over the overblown cartoon controversy, their anger “naturally” metastasized into denunciations of Israel, America and George W. Bush. This latest manifestation of Bushophobia, given that the president had nothing to do with the relatively benign, although rarely seen, Muhammad cartoons, should chasten Bush’s critics in Europe and America. Could it be that President Bush was smarter and more foreseeing than most intellectuals? Might the jihadists pose a greater threat to world peace than Bush and the Republicans?
One need not agree with every administration action to suggest that we need to calm down the rhetoric and partisanship. Congressional critics and civil libertarians can continue piling on the adjectives, demonizing Bush’s administration as McCarthyite, worse than “Richard Nixon’s” and the creator of American “gulags.” That is their prerogative given their good fortune to live in a free country.
Actually, the more hysterical their claims, the more they prove how much room for dissent exists even in what they ominously call “George Bush’s America.” Debates about the Patriot Act, about eavesdropping on suspected terrorists, and about how to handle captured jihadists demand context, nuance and careful thought. All seem to be missing.
Sept. 11 remains this administration’s defining moment. The worldwide conspiracy of annihilationist jihadists has imposed unhappy choices on every responsible leader. The litany of “successful” attacks is only half the story. Since 9-11 there have been spectacular busts of terrorist cells regularly, especially in Europe. Iran’s president, among others, constantly calls for America’s destruction, as well as Israel’s, as he rushes to develop nuclear weapons. Moreover, anyone who believes that Hamas is “just” anti-Semitic and not anti-Western as well is as deluded as those philanthropic saps who raised $14 million to “buy” Gush Katif hothouses for the Palestinians, who then trashed them — twice.
During this difficult passage in world history, two of Bush’s greatest post-9-11 achievements are non-events, making them difficult to assess. Contrary to expectations on Sept. 12, there have been no other spectacular terrorist attacks on American soil. Moreover, the feared backlash against Arab Americans also did not occur. The recent riots in France and Australia suggest how volatile the situation could have been, especially as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center smoldered.
The Muslim cartoon riots pose an even more dramatic contrast to the American people’s maturity and restraint when viciously attacked. In assessing Bush’s civil liberties record, his leadership in targeting the terrorists, and shifting focus away from their religious and ethnic kinsmen in America is a remarkable, underappreciated achievement. Given those two critical successes, to call gulags whatever lamentable excesses that have occurred — after they were exposed and perpetrators were punished — is like calling chicken pox cancer. The Soviet gulags imprisoned millions, murdering more than 1.6 million detainees from 1930 to 1956 alone.
“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” a Great Society liberal, Justice Arthur Goldberg insisted. Abraham Lincoln worried: “Is there in all republics this inherent and fatal weakness? ... Must a Government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”
Understanding the difficulties of navigating between the shoals of pre-9-11 laxity vs. post-9-11 overkill, the Bush balancing act becomes more comprehensible. We now know that the bureaucratic “wall” between the CIA and the FBI, reinforced by the assumption that we would not be attacked at home, prevented the right people from receiving critical information before the attacks. Every day the Bush administration fears similar snafus.
Of course we should not substitute one set of generalizations, headlines and charges with another. And the Bush administration has as sacred an obligation to preserve all of our liberty for future generations as it does to protect American lives today.
“No easy matters will ever come to you as president,” President Dwight Eisenhower warned his successor John F. Kennedy when they first met. “If they are easy, they will be settled at a lower level.”
We must resist the temptation to exaggerate, overstate and caricature on both sides. We must redirect our anger away from one another toward the evil forces foisting such difficult dilemmas on all of us who are simply trying to live our lives. We need in complexity, civility; with context, humility; and in democracy passion tempered with responsibility, sensitivity and empathy for leaders and fellow citizens making the hard calls in a nasty world. n
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University. His latest books are “Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s” and “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today,” soon to be released in a revised, expanded edition.
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