As an individual who finds himself profoundly disgusted with the current state of American political discourse, I was particularly disappointed to read Chase Cooper’s editorial on Sept. 19. This is primarily because I feel that it is exactly this sort of inflammatory and facile argumentation that has led the United States into the quagmire of Iraq and threatens us further by sounding the drums of war against Iran. I find Mr. Cooper’s argumentation lamentable – representative of the dualistic, good-and-evil worldview that has plagued American foreign policy for the last six years. In his defense of Mr. Limbaugh as an acceptable Nobel laureate, Mr. Cooper asserts Limbaugh knows that “peace is achieved through the victory of good over evil.” This sort of sentiment might be acceptable for a high school-level essay, but leaves much to be desired considering it is printed in a college newspaper. \nWho exactly is good? And who is evil? And what does victory even entail? I can only assume that Mr. Cooper’s vision of this “victory” would approximate some sort of American hegemony, along the lines of a neoconservative model. Essentially, his argumentation seeks to reduce the maddeningly complex international system to a two-sided morality play in which one is either with us or against us. Mr. Cooper subsequently validates my initial suspicions by going on to declare that those who do not buy into this worldview “lack the moral character to fight to protect those things that matter most in life.” Implicit in this is the concept that those who don’t advocate a zealous campaign against the “evildoers” of the world are in fact sacrificing our collective security. At best, this is a naïve and counterintuitive concept; at worst, it evokes an Orwellian notion of perpetual warfare. \nIn my opinion, the unilateral assertion of American military might wherever in the world “evil” exists is patently detrimental to our national security and usually only serves to inflame anti-Americanism by severely undermining the core democratic principles we claim to champion.
J. Breck Kadaba\nIU junior
