Regarding the $25 million dollar question (Is bin Laden dead or alive?), President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address said nothing, which is probably wise considering that no one knows much of anything about the condition of the world’s most elusive scold.
A few reports suggest bin Laden might already be dead, taken out not by an American air strike but by a treasonous kidney. That ultimately an ailing organ, and not the artillery of a superpower, might have been the operative scythe is not surprising, especially to disciples of the sagacious Augustus McCrae:
“I’d like to know what took him,” Call said.
“He might have choked on a pepper,” Augustus said. “Them that can’t be killed by knives or bullets usually break their necks falling off the porch or something.'”
But Afghanistan is not Lonesome Dove, bin Laden is no Pedro Flores, and President Bush’s nonmention has given anguish to those who think a still-breathing bin Laden makes the last four months in Afghanistan a half-achieving extravagance.
The president, however, has been fastidious in pointing out that the war’s success is not conditioned solely, or even considerably, by the fate of bin Laden. This war, says the president incessantly, is about “ridding the world of terror.” The world.
In his address, Bush called Iran, North Korea and Iraq an “axis of evil” and said, “I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.” Furthermore, “History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.”
Freedom is an unsparing calling, and if ever there was a country suited to its defense, it is the United States. However, the rhetoric of the Bush administration, though appropriate for the immediate post-Sept. 11th mood, is increasingly overconfident. And the more Bush lays out the future for the war on terror, the more he constructs the scaffolding for the conservative case against his plan.
Conservatism is a sobering philosophy primarily because it springs from a respect for reality. As George Will once said, “Conservatives expect bad things to happen and are rarely disappointed.” Conservatives look askance at large domestic spending projects not because they want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer but because they know that such projects (the War on Poverty, etc.) are ultimately counterproductive, and that major eruptions of idealism, though well-intentioned, tend to scorch humanity’s more pressing and fundamental priorities.
So for a party that has traditionally opposed utopian projects on a continental-let alone universal-scale, the current optimism of the president and his supporters for ridding the world of terror is remarkably odd.
In defense of the president’s universal eyes, Washington Post columnist Michael Kelley wrote that “Bush’s War of Sept. 11 may be compared . . . with the Cold War,” which was a war “against a whole class of regimes; importantly: regimes, not nations or peoples.” Kelley wants his readers to conclude that the swelling scope of the current war is as winnable as the Cold War.
It is not. Though the United States went hither and yon to prevent the spread of Communism, spurred by the policy of containment, the Cold War presented the United States an identifiable, foundational target: the Soviet Union. The United States knew that once the U.S.S.R. was either defeated or transformed, the political and military threat of its satellite states would likewise wither. If the current war were as much like the Cold War as Kelley wants it to be, then it would seem the defeat of the Taliban should affect terrorism as much as the transformation of Russia affected communism.
But here we are, much of the Taliban long since forced to find their post-earth paradise, and the President is talking about an “axis of evil” linking Northeast Asia and the Middle East. Compelling reasons do exist, of course, for attacking certain states (Iraq, primarily), but is it reasonable, or even possible, to hunt down terrorists in all parts of the world? Even if this could be done, is it not fanciful to think that this would be anything but a transient accomplishment?
The State of the Union address is always a happy hour of platitudes, a worldwide forum permitting the president and his supporters to exalt in the unachievable. The speech usually improves approval ratings and is, generally, a benign affair. Perhaps conservatives-and liberals-should keep this in mind when worrying about the president’s remarks. Then again, perhaps this is not mere rhetoric.
Matt Emerson is a sophomore studying political science.
