Big stick stupidity

I was thinking back on this stupid letter from Mary Lou Bates of Bethany, where she offered a bunch of stupid "questions" that one might ask the President and Secretary of Defense. After doing some searching, I discovered that this isn't the first time that she's gone down this path. Writing back in September of 2012, she observed:

Ronald Reagan once said that in the history of the world, no country had ever been attacked because they were too strong. Can we afford the military budget cuts? After eight years of such cuts (accompanied by higher taxes on the rich and everyone else, beginning in 1993), we were rewarded by the horrible 9/11 attacks.

WOW. This is bogglingly stupid, and it is difficult to imagine that a reasonably intelligent human being could arrive at this conclusion. In her mind, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a direct result of cuts to the military under the Clinton administration.


Think about that for a minute. Does it make any sense? I mean, the perpetrators of those attacks were from Al-Qaeda, "a global militant Islamist and takfiri organization founded by Osama bin Laden in Peshawar, Pakistan, at  some point between August 1988 and late 1989,with its origins being traceable to the Soviet War in Afghanistan. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement." Given that this organization is, by definition, stateless, does anyone see how the strength of the US military matters? Al-Qaeda isn't a nation with a leader and an army that can wage conventional warfare and can, when things get bad, surrender.


It is unimaginable that Al-Qaeda operatives were thinking of tanks, stealth fighters, and troop readiness when they were plotting their attacks. Indeed, the people who care about such things are leaders of nation-states who have armies and territory and natural resources and civilians. THEY care about the size of a rival's military. People who DON'T care are stateless militant organizations that engage in terrorism. Like Al-Qaeda.


It is mind-boggling that the Oklahoman would ever run letters like this. Ms Bates has to be one of the dumbest people on the planet, and yet her ill-informed, unintelligent opinion gets spaces in a major state newspaper because, well, it supports some sort of jingoistic fetish that right-wingers have. Spending money on infrastructure or the social safety net is wrong and bad for the country. But spending more than the next 10 nations combined on weapons systems that no one needs? THAT is a good way to spend money.