Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Cognitive Dissonance: thy name is Gregory D. Foster

The American public is being lulled into a false sense of insecurity. And insecurity, constructed or real, is what gives those in power - our purported protectors - their self-righteous aura of indispensability.
I can’t believe this guy is a professor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces at National Defense University; well actually I do. He is a smart guy, West Point Class of ’69 and all, but beyond this article from the Baltimore Sun, you see a classic Leftist Militarists along the lines of Les Aspin. Nice smart guy, but just stuck in the Carter Administration. Well, lets get back to the Fisking.
President Bush; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace; the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John P. Abizaid; and the recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, among other authoritative purveyors of received wisdom, all warn us that we're embroiled in - and destined to be further subjected to - what is to be known as a Long War.
...and your counter argument is…..
It would be one thing if such semantic legerdemain reflected revelatory strategic insight or a more sophisticated appreciation of the intrinsic nature of postmodern conflicts and enemies. But that is not the case. In fact, it's hard to avoid the cynical view that America's senior military leaders are willfully playing public relations handmaiden to their political overlords at the expense of a naive, trusting citizenry.
Oh, if everyone was as wise as you, or better yet, all power was in the hand of you and like minded men and womyn, then all decisions would be right, correct, perfect, and the world would break out in Perpetual Peace.
The intent of the message is to dull our senses, to dampen our expectations, to thereby deaden the critical, dissenting forces of democracy that produce political turbulence and impede autocratic license. Being warned here amounts to being disarmed - intellectually and civically.
Anyway, down the hill from here is a standard issue Howard Dean stump speech. Yawn.

I would really expect more from this guy, but you have to give it to him, he is consistent when you read a lot of his work. The thing that bugs me about this article is it could be pasted together by bits-and-pieces by clipping The Village Voice, The Nation, DailyKos, and DemocraticUnderground. Yes, I read/visit them.

Having read this for the 3rd time, I have realized why this seems so tired and stale; not only did we read all of this tripe in 2004, you could almost take this word-for-word from a lot of the junk written at the end of the Cold War during the Reagan Years.
America's ruling elite has once again opted for rhetorical contrivance and the politics of fear over the bold, creative strategic leadership expected of the world's self-proclaimed only superpower.

Mesmerized by their own illogic, they have failed to recognize that perpetual war can never lead to the ideal state of perpetual peace that Immanuel Kant spoke of over two centuries ago. It can only drain us of all we are and possess.
Professor Foster, you left this at the last A.N.S.W.E.R. meeting.

BTW, you really have to watch this PowerPoint presentation he gave at the Canadian Forces Symposium. 14 January 2003. I want you to at least get to the slide titled to “Path to Perpetual Peace” to see where this guy is coming from, but you need to see the whole thing. Just a bit of warning, with statements like, “The future is where we are destined to spend the rest of our lives,” you might worry about what your tax dollars are paying for.

This guy has some solid ideas that are good things to argue about. I am not saying he is right, as a matter of fact, about 50% of his stuff is just goofy, but that is OK. One doesn’t hone one’s opinions in an echo chamber. Then again, if I read "Post-Modern" in one more product from him......


He is seriously waiting for the next Democratic administration.....
TCR: Link Fixed.

No comments: