Ending Global Idiocy
Michael Totten asked me to help out shifting the tone of comments on
Marc Cooper's blog a little to the right of Che Guevara, so yesterday I chimed in. I noticed that one particularly insistent troll was yammering away prodigiously and hit him upside the head with a reality stick. Pity was that he has immunity to such things.
The topic revolved around the effectiveness of the Bush Administration's actions to influence terrorists since 9/11 against Al Queda. The troll was of the opinion that there were no terrorists in Iraq, and if there were they didn't have Al Queda union cards, so that didn't count as real War on Terror activity. I explained as how our Army and Marine snipers had been killing 35-40 insurgents a day, many of them foreigners, and over a thousand had died in the last month. All of these were confirmed good kills, and I'm sure a very high percentage of them were of leadership types. I asked what could possibly more influential to the terrorists than killing them. His answer: ending global poverty.
I declined to answer the idiot at that point, although Michael Totten did his usual great work in destroying that argument on its merits. This morning I thought it through and realized how profoundly stupid that troll's argument was, and also how common that thread of idiocy is. On June 30th, the bulk of governing functions in Iraq will be handed over to Iraqi's. Right now, there are the remnants of a festering insurgency. Every major Islamist terrorist organization is providing fighters to the disruption of Iraqi reconstruction. The house in on fire and this moron's response is to weed the neighbor's garden.
Ending global poverty is a lofty goal, and a worthy one, too. Personally, I think that we have the tools to accomplish a lot of this in my lifetime, and we have finally come to an awareness of the actions we can take to make this happen. One of the key solutions is integrity and the crucial value of transparency in government. The most clearly identifiable cause of poverty is bad governance; for the reality immune, that does not mean another four years of "W". Amongst the worst administers in the world are religious fanatics; if you include communism as a religion, all the worst rulers are religious fanatics, and some of them worship Marx.
Iraq is about to be given self-governance and try to lift itself out of poverty. To help them achieve this, the idiotic troll wants us to cease combat operations against the religious fanatics and focus on doing something somewhere non-confrontational. The United States is not going to do that, instead we are going to do our part to end global idiocy. Every day, another 35-40 high order idiots leave this world courtesy of US military force, and the world is a better place for it.
