general thoughts

Generals are strange birds. The single-page interview in this week’s Sunday New York Times Magazine is with Wesley Clark. I always assume that military men, through and through, are most likely to be deeply embedded and in favor of the current armed operation – that image has change drastically over the last three years as various retired honchos speak up. One of Clark’s questions dealt with the Global War on Terrorism and its impact on the World. He points out that when we try to amass the threat of terrorism against the behemoth of the Cold War (with the implications of each confrontation) we are conflating the religious intensity and horrors involved in terrorism in a desire to grant the confrontation a greater import. (Okay, I added a bit to what I think is his thought process…he only got one line answers to each question published in article...I’ve got endless space.) His idea seems to come from the math that 200 million Russians, and a government with a capability to destroy the globe, was a far greater threat to this country than 50,000 hardcore religious extremists and their current methods of attack. As of today, even though the threat is real and the results of terrorism frightening, we seem to live as if the experience comes from the same cache of fears we carried post-WWII through the late 80s – a belief that our way of life was constantly under attack, we needed to stay vigilant, or be at the ready to dive under the school desk. Maybe it’s time we take a long look at the world situation and decide exactly how threatened we are; how much of our daily lives have changed in the last six years due to terrorism? I put forth that it’s a change of miniscule proportion. There’s certainly not representative of a fear of hemispheres being blasted into oblivion and cities melting away. Maybe the focus of the lens can be drawn in on the threats that can be reached, contained, and disarmed. Is it really a global war? Enough of that; I’ll ponder it.

T.