My Response To A “Bush Is Great” Email

On Sep 11, 2006, at 11:42 PM, David wrote:

Unfortunately, David, what Bush has tried to do, or what he has “intended”
to do, has nothing to do with the reality he has created. I happen to
believe that he’s fundamentally a “good” person in that I believe he
thinks he’s doing the right thing. So I don’t think he’s evil or
hateful or anything like that.

But that doesn’t matter. The fact is that the world hates this country
intensely because of his actions, and this fact has put is in far more
danger than we’ve ever been before. See, the thing you and other
conservatives are not realizing is that terrorists need something in order
to operate: they need the world to agree with them, or at least a large part
of it.

If terrorism lacks support, it dies. And I’m not talking about finacial
support — I mean popular support. What Bush has done is create a massive
upsurge in support for terrorism across the entire planet. Nobody likes us
anymore directly as a result of him. Not even our allies have any sympathy
for us. At this point we could be bombed on our own soil again and the world
would basically agree that we deserved it.

That’s what you’re not seeing. It’s not about being militarily tough on
terrorists. That doesn’t work if you’re creating hate at the same time. You
have to act in a way that makes the entire world sympathize with you, thus
removing the power from the terrorists. If you are “tough” on terror, but go
around making the entire world hate you then you’ve done the country a huge
disservice.

Here’s a mathematical way of looking at it: imagine you have two elements —
protection and animosity. For every point of protection we lower our risk by
1 point, and for every point of animosity against us we gain 10 points of
risk.

So if you’re trying to lower risk (which is what he’s trying to do), you
can’t launch a campaign that raises our protection by 15 points while
simultaneously raising the animosity against us by 100. If you do the math
you’ll see what this does to our country’s actual danger level, and pointing
to how much protection that 15 points got us is utterly meaningless.

This is precisely the world we’re living in now. We’re being told that the
military gains we’ve made are winning the “war on terror”, when in fact
we’ve done nothing but make it more acceptable to attack us due to
our behavior. I ask you to consider this and rethink your opinion.

Sincerely,

—Daniel MiesslerE: [email protected]: https://danielmiessler.comG:
0xD158D5A3