RALPH PETERS: IDEOLOGY VS. REALITY
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ideology-vs-reality?f=puball
It’s a source of constant disappointment to me that, in this fortunate country where we have a free flow of information and the right to think for ourselves, so many of us, from individuals to media conglomerates, buy into rigid party lines, knee-jerk ideological responses to complex issues, and wild claims from fear-mongers, left or right. Facts matter. Even when those facts are uncomfortable and challenge our general beliefs. When new facts emerge, we have to be willing to (constantly) re-examine our positions. As Americans, we always want there to be good guys and bad guys, clearly identified, but whether we speak of Syrian rebels or our own Congress, the real challenge is just to identify the less-bad guys.
Consider a couple of examples, foreign and domestic, in which we, the People, have been manipulated, based on our ideological biases-which, inevitably, open up blind spots.
Last week, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, made headlines when he announced that his government had detected the flow of larger numbers of al Qaeda operatives into Syria to support the anti-Assad opposition. And our media-every single outlet-took al-Maliki’s claim at face value: “Oooooh, al Qaeda’s coming! Bad rebels, bad!”
No one stopped to ask why al-Maliki might have made that announcement-when he certainly hasn’t had the West’s best interests at heart since the U.S. abandoned Iraq to Iranian influence. Well, here’s what lay behind it: al-Maliki works closely with the Iranians. The Iranians desperately want to save the murderous (and anti-Western) Assad regime in Syria. And Iran knows that all you have to do is to whisper “al Qaeda!” and we panic. But, of course, we wouldn’t believe anything Tehran said about Syria. So the Iranians got their Iraqi client to be their mouthpiece. And we bought it-without asking for one shred of evidence. Iran 1, USA 0. Again.
This isn’t to say that the Syrian opposition are all angels-the freedom fighters run the gamut (and have some very different definitions of “freedom”). But let’s try logic again: If your family is being massacred and the West just stands by watching and tut-tutting, and Islamists appear to help you defend your home and save your family’s lives, to whom will your sympathies gravitate? At present, al Qaeda is absolutely not a significant player in Syria. But endless dithering can make it one over time. While direct American military intervention isn’t the answer, either, we should be strongly encouraging our regional clients and (relative) allies to act at various levels. Oh, and covert support from the CIA and special ops for the more-attractive elements in the opposition certainly would help-as well as giving us an on-the-ground feel for who’s who.
But the fundamental point here isn’t the fate of Syrians, but our own gullibility, our unwillingness to get off our mental duffs and ask hard questions, to think for ourselves.
Now let me take on a more sensitive issue: Whatever dumb stuff Michelle Obama has done, said or written in the past, she’s been a much better First Lady than her husband has been a chief executive. I fully support her efforts-every one of them-to get American children to eat healthier diets. What on earth is wrong with encouraging kids to eat just a little less junk food and occasional fruits or vegetables? As I first stated over a dozen years ago, the number one security threat to our country is obesity, which is crippling our health-care system, gobbling budget dollars, and leaving us with a literal youth bulge-kids so obese they can’t qualify for military service, too fat to fight. Childhood obesity is condemning a generation to ill health, just as teachers’ unions condemn children to joblessness and mediocrity.
But as soon as Mrs. Obama made healthier food for kids her cause, conservatives leapt to attack her. And we heard wailing about the “food police” and cries (not least, from the junk-food industry) that Michelle the Meanie wanted to restrict freedom of choice in our schools and control our diets.
Well, my fellow Americans, I’m a conservative on three issues out of four, but I’m with the First Lady on this one. Food police? I’d sign up for a food Gestapo, given the desperate waistline situation today. “Restricting freedom of choice” for children and schools? For heaven’s sake, we restrict children in regard to any number of things, from requiring them to attend school in the first place, to drinking alcohol, getting a driver’s license, or even seeing movies we (ridiculously) believe would corrupt them forever and ever. Children need rules (and secretly want them). While we don’t need a workhouse atmosphere drawn from Oliver Twist, there is no reason, whatsoever, to turn junk food purveyors loose in our schools. And with nearly half the nation on food stamps, conservatives should be campaigning to restrict their use to nourishing foodstuffs, while forbidding the use of food stamps (which I insist on calling them, no matter what cute acronyms the government invents) to buy soda pop, candy, chips, “energy drinks,” etc. With bar coding and computerization, this would be easy to do-but the powerful junk-food industry doesn’t want it to happen and its hustlers have managed to recruit conservatives by blathering about “freedom of choice” (which, of course, we conservatives do not apply to women’s rights).
Do we really want to be the mindless tools of the junk-food industry? Are we such brain-dead ideologues that we can’t accept a sincere initiative to improve the health of our children because it comes from the other side of the political aisle? If we can’t agree that school lunches should be reasonably healthy, we’ll never agree on a federal budget.
When something is a good idea, it’s a good idea, no matter who comes up with it. An obese eight-year-old is damned for life. And the rest of us are condemned to pay for his or her health care for decades-while the obese adult cannot contribute to our national defense. When the junk-food industry tries to wrap itself in the flag and tells us that our kids have a right to choose whatever they want to eat, my conservative response is, “It’s a child, not a choice.”
We’ve also let ourselves be conned by Big Energy (do you really think Exxon-Mobil has your best interests at heart?), but that’s another story.
It’s just not a simple, white-hat vs. black-hat world. When we insist on keeping it simple, we make ourselves into simpletons. To me, a true conservative is someone who never accepts the claims of politicians, business interests, activists of any stripe, or the media until he or she has thought through the problem and asked the tough questions. We conservatives should not let anyone use us. Also, if we want the moral high ground, that means having the moral integrity to recognize that, sometimes, the other guys have a good idea-such as taking reasonable steps to combat childhood obesity. Remember Dragnet? Well, all conservatives should be Joe Fridays, insisting, “Just the facts, ma’am.”
Successful democracy relies on a mentally alert public. At present, the worst thing the Democrats are doing (the worst thing they have ever done) is to create permanent dependency among minorities and the poor. We recognize that and contest it. But if we submit ourselves to a permanent dependency on demagogues, unscrupulous business interests (I’m talking ‘bout you, Frito-Lay, and you corn-sugar cons, and you, Pepsico), and opinions handed down by our favorite talk-show hosts, we’re as un-American as the extreme left.
As for Mrs. Obama and her White House vegetable garden, “You go, Girl!”
Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and former enlisted man, a novelist and journalist, and a strong believer in eating your vegetables, but scraping the politicians from your plate.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ideology-vs-reality?f=puball#ixzz20mSPhuX0
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