I'm back with more musings - blogs are perfect for that.
Plenty of thoughts today about the so-called war on terror. The Bush-Cheney billboards in the Lansing area brought this on, with their insistence that the current administration could 'fight the war on terror' or some such thing. Terror is a tough thing to fight; it seems to me that rather than trying to sniff out and prevent attacks and attackers (the act of terrorism) we ought to be focusing our efforts on the ideals behind terrorism. There are always going to be haters, but it seems like we can prevent the cultivation of these attitudes if we don't act like haters ourselves. Imagine if, rather than spending over $100b on a war, we had used that money as aid around the world. We could have built up - rather than totally obliterated - the global post-9/11 goodwill towards the U.S. As Kerry points out, we need to be respected abroad, and this notion of boots before flip-flops is NOT how that is going to get done.

posted at 2:49 PM - comments