Another week, another Shawn Redden column. Despite his tendency to substitute raw emotion for fact or evidence, his pieces are always entertaining; yet it disturbs me that such unsubstantiated vitriol manages to find its way into Student Life on such a regular basis. Apparently, the ability to write a coherent logical argument is no longer a prerequisite for graduate students of history.
A hallmark of a recent piece, “Megalomania as foreign policy,” is the use of rhetoric to the point of absurdity. Sentences which conflate the present understanding of “terror,” as used in the context of Bush’s speech, with Stalinist purges or Nazi ideology is to distort the term past the point of recognition. Using it as a stepping stone to declare the President as a “self-stated jingoistic religious zealot… [and] moral relativist” crosses the line into a far more absurdist reality.
I really wish I could take more issue with the factual basis of the piece, but I can’t since there doesn’t actually seem to be any. How does one argue with the statement that the Bush administration is run “no differently than a drug cartel, the mafia, or Bin Laden’s International Islamic Front?” Aside from the fact that I imagine the mafia to be better organized, there is simply no other way to counteract this statement, because it makes no sense whatsoever. The U.S. White House is the same as a drug-running, revolutionary terrorist front? Sure, why not. I guess the big lies really do go down more easily than small ones.
I am also unsure as to why the invasion of Iraq was unconstitutional or unconscionable, for that matter. Last time I checked, Saddam was shoving dissidents through plastic shredders. But I suppose that’s neither here nor there. War was declared and funded by Congress. You can like it or not, and you can hold Bush responsible for poor planning or execution, but calling it unconstitutional is a logical leap so unfounded that it makes truth cry. There were far better ways to drop the price of oil-and seeing how the US currently is taking none of it, much better ways to follow through, I suspect-than invading Iraq. For example, buddying up to the regime would’ve ensured far more lucrative oil contracts than spending billions to reconstruct the place. And I’m not real clear on why we want to preserve the strength of the dollar. Given that any modern economist (not to mention the Bank of England) will tell you that in anything but the short-term, floating currencies move quite apart from the vagaries of their respective central banks, exchange rate changes are far more complex than this flippant, absurd sentence warrants.
They plan on toppling Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia? Far be it for me to criticize these paragons of Middle Eastern virtue (I’ll leave that to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and quite a few other organizations), but Redden produces not a scrap of evidence that these “invasions” are either imminent or inevitable. It’s like an “X-Files” script out here.
Shawn Redden is free to argue any point he wants, but if he hopes to persuade anyone but raving conspiracy theorists, he needs to spend far more time arguing and far less time throwing around terms like “insane and racist foreign policy.” Just because Iraqis aren’t Americans doesn’t mean that they like megalomaniacal dictators and their horrific children any more than we do; assuming the reverse for no good reason is far more “racist” that anything Bush has done.