Asymmetric Warfare
I don’t know if you recall the “Isaac and Ishmael" episode of The West Wing, which Aaron Sorkin hurriedly assembled right after 9/11, but it has resonances for today. It featured a bunch of staffers sequestered in the White House kitchen talking to a bunch of visiting high-school students about a terrorist threat to the White House itself.
The one thing that most stands out in my mind about that episode was Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Madison native Bradley Whitford) and Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) pointing out that the reason political, economic, or religious fanatics have to resort to asymmetric warfare (their small forces being able to strike at selected non-military targets without warning) was that they’re losers and failures. That’s why their forces are small. That’s why they’re fanatics, because normal people won’t have anything to do with them, and they’ve purged from their own ranks anyone who doesn’t seem sufficiently ardent or conformist (might be infiltrators, you know).
God, that guy was a good writer:
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America has changed over the years. But these values my grandparents taught me — they haven’t gone anywhere. They’re as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots, is what’s in here. That’s what matters. And that’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does — every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
— Barack Hussein Obama (1961- ), 44th US president
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With malice toward none, with charity for all, ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
— Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th US president, 2nd Inaugural Address, 1865 Mar. 4
Labels: American values, insurrection, terrorism
posted by Richard S. Russell | 5:30 AM
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