Waiting for enlightment to strike the rest of Hafiz Barghouti's cousins is about as likely as my hitting the million dollar power ball lottery. As a possible avenue to ending the war the idea is a deadend. However, Donald Sensing has explored alternative outcomes to WOT. The amazing aspect of this is that these outcomes have to be printed and discussed at all. I mean can you imagine anyone during WW II doing the "on the one hand if the Nazi's win we'll all have to speak German and the Jews will have to be cremated". Unless you were an alien visiting from the planet Zoom, the understanding was clear: Nazi's were against life, liberty, truth, justice and the American way and therefore bad. OK? Clear? Copy? Now, for gripes sake, you have to drag some of our fellow Americans down to the bottom line and rub their noses in the mess just so they get an inkling of what the @#$! is at stake:
The four basic outcomes of this war:
"1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their cultures so that terrorism does not threaten.
2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East (at the minimum), the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.
3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.
4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.
Perhaps you can think of another, different outcome, but I think these pretty much cover them.
So the question for us commentati, whether based on the web or in traditional media, is simply: which of these outcomes is best? Which will be most favorable to human flourishing?
As for me, I choose the first, and have no qualms admitting I am heavily biased in favor thereof. And that bias certainly shapes my blogging!
The basic issue for news media :
For the news media, I ask you: which outcome do you want? It is not possible to pretend neutrality here, for the power of the media to frame the public's debate is too great to claim you are merely being "fair and balanced." There literally is no neutral ground here, no "God's eye view" of events, and hence no possibility of not taking sides. One way or another, what you print or broadcast, what stories you cover and how you cover them, what attention you pay to what issues and how you describe them - all these things mean that you will support one outcome over another. Which will you choose? How will you support it? These are the most important questions of your vocation today. But you are not facing them at all.
Roger Simon is right: this war is war at its most basic: "It's about civilization versus a death cult. Make a choice!"
One Hand Clapping
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