As reported by Think Progress [1], President Bush is now arguing that war is a healthy catharsis:
President Bush proudly declared that American foreign policy no longer seeks to “manage calm,” and derided policies that let anger and resentment lie “beneath the surface.” Bush said that the violence in the Middle East was evidence of a more effective foreign policy that addresses “root causes.”
In other words, people are like trees and groups of people are like groups of trees. How do you prevent BIG forest fires? By allowing little forest fires [2]:
By the 1940s, ecologists recognized that fire was a primary agent of change in many ecosystems, including the arid mountainous western United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, national parks and forests began to experiment with controlled burns, and by the 1970s Yellowstone and other parks had instituted a natural fire management plan to allow the process of lightning-caused fire to continue influencing wildland succession.
Controlled burns are a great theory, except when they aren’t. For instance, in 1988: [2]
On the worst single day, August 20, 1988, tremendous winds pushed fire across more than 150,000 acres. Throughout August and early September, some park roads and facilities were closed to the public, and residents of nearby towns outside the park feared for their property and their lives . . . About 1.2 million acres [were] scorched; 793,000 (about 36%) of the park’s 2,221,800 acres were burned. Sixty-seven structures were destroyed.
Check out Bush’s video. [3] How do you prevent big wars? By not getting in the way of little wars. Thus, we’re doing a “controlled burn” out in the Middle-East right now–everyone’s letting off a bit of steam. Peace, it turns out, is an obstacle to peace.
We’ve got everything under control. How do we know this? Because Bush says so. No problem, except for the hundreds of lives being lost and the thousands of lives being ruined. And the millions of people of the Middle East who, unbelievably, have much more reason to hate the United States now than they did before we winked and nodded while Israel started setting fires.
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