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Complicit?

My old colleague Sheldon Richman makes the case for polarization in our politics. I hear him, I think, but his essay claims:

“We can’t afford such weak dissent today. The Bush administration is perpetrating horrors in the Middle East, and not to say so is to make oneself complicit.”

Is that necessarily so? If so, this starts to sound like George Bush himself back in his cowboy-style days, when he said: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.”

I happen to agree that the Iraq War was a mistake, a horrible mistake. In this particular case, I thought it was a mistake at the outset, too. But can we really expect the administration to reverse course when the opposition is hellbent on embarrassing and repudiating the “Bush administration”?

Has it ever actually made sense to fight fire with fire? I say No. Two flames don’t extinguish one another – if anything, they enhance the inferno.

Instead, water puts out fire. I myself consider in a kind of transpartisan “bucket brigade.” But I don’t care to judge others as “complicit” if they don’t – for whatever reason – choose to pick up a bucket as well.

Yes, the “Bush administration” led the charge to war, no question. But, at the time, he had broad support in Congress and with the general public. To forget that is to forget a most salient fact, in my opinion.

-Robert Capozzi

Posted by Robert Capozzi on August 17, 2006 02:15 PM |

Free-for-all (frfr-ôl) -- n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present participates.

from Dictionary.com



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