Soccer Dad

An unserious country

Jack Kelly laments that, as a nation, we are Failing to know our enemy, and ourselves. Kelly laments the lack of knowledge our leaders have of the world and the lack of responsibility they assume. The public has its failing too.

... there is our preference for celebrity over authority. Though the panel contained two former secretaries of state (James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger) and a former secretary of defense (William Perry), it was comprised chiefly of people who know next to nothing about either the Middle East or the military.

We listen to famous people because they are famous, not because they have any insight into the topic at hand. (The news media paid little attention to the opinions of retired generals Jack Keane, Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey, who met with the President Monday, though they have forgotten more about Iraq than the members of the ISG ever learned.)

A recent Gallup poll confirms that. (via memeorandum.)

Part of the problem is, of course, what we are told and how we are told it.

...the glee with which many in the Washington establishment -- particularly in journalism -- greeted the (glaringly obvious) finding that things are not going well in Iraq suggests an elite so insulated and out of touch that it sees no ill consequences flowing to themselves from a defeat being inflicted upon their country. The appropriate response of serious people would have been concern, perhaps anger. But an elite that sees a big setback in the war against Islamofascism chiefly in terms of its impact on domestic politics is not comprised of serious people.

As a whole, he is right, we suffer from a lack of seriousness. And that could have terrible consequences.

We are not winning in Iraq. But we are not losing, either, though we surely shall if we do not soon know our enemy, and know ourselves. Our education should have begun on Sept. 11, 2001. But it's not too late -- yet -- for it to start.

It makes the loss of Jeane Kirkpatrick and what she represents all the more acute. Jack Kemp remembers

Jeane saw the old Soviet Union not just as an evil empire but as an inhumane experiment in totalitarianism that would – given Western economic, military and moral strength – wither away and die out. Indeed, she helped inspire President Reagan to say at Notre Dame in 1981 that “the West would not contain communism, but transcend it. We would not denounce it but dismiss it as a sad and bizarre chapter of history whose last pages are now being written.” How very true!

Blogdigger tags: Iraq Study Group, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kelly, Media, Politics.

Posted by SoccerDad at December 13, 2006 8:21 AM