Fear Part 1: Bake Sales and Angelina Jolie

In the realm of foreign policy, liberals have put forth the argument that conservatives are controlled by fear, and that they should make room in their hearts for hope, taking an optimistic attitude toward dialog and diplomacy. That's a fine sentiment, but there's no way to definitively correlate that reality. On a macro level, liberals have criticized the prodigious defense spending of the United States since the Second World War. As one bumper sticker laments, its schools that need bake sales to stay funded rather than the Air Force. Given the size of the defense budget, there's probably always some bit that can be trimmed, but people take for granted that America's military superiority is an effective, credible deterrent. If War was unleashed eons ago from Pandora's Box, there's no going back. You can't wave a magic wand so that no one will aspire to research and develop new ways to kill or build a bigger army, let alone get people to forswear war. Liberals might point to Europe as escaping the curse, but they enjoy that false sense of progress under the umbrella of American security. Even in America, people have developed a sense of entitlement to peace and prosperity, derived from modernist expectations that we are, as Fukuyama said, at the "end of history."

A lot of criticism against hawkishness these days focuses naturally on the war on terror. Angelina Jolie drew upon the the theme of hope versus fear in an interview about her new film, A Mighty Heart, where she plays the wife of slain journalist Daniel Perle. Jolie's heart continues to bleed a la John Lennon's Imagine. She suggested that if we were just a little more open to dialog, and turned away from our fearful response, things would get better. I'm for understanding other points of view, but that doesn't mean all our problems will be solved. "Fear" of terrorists is a ridiculous canard. It is terribly reductionist, ignoring rational motivations like precaution. The United States doesn't remove the Taliban from power because of fear, but because of the rational expectation that removing them will prevent them from harboring and facilitating future attacks.