The Republican Presidential candidates so opportunistically decry the Presidents ‘lack of strategy and leadership’. Like a shark feeding frenzy, they smell blood in the water and the black bile of vim and vitriol spew from their drooling jaws. The sheer impact from their gut felt righteous indignation is, for them, proof of their veracity in the cause of ‘shock and awe’ against the evil of terrorism. Yet, when it comes to deaths by gun violence in our own country, the great rhetorical monoliths of truth, justice and the American way shrink to an anemic puff of hot air.

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Aristotle, the basis of democracy, would have rational, enlightened voters contemplate upon proportion, magnitude, and ‘ratio’, the basis of the word ‘rationale’. Emotion has the tendency to distort and dramatize. It tends to bring out the strongest and darkest emotions of human experience: hatred, anger, arrogance. While I will admit emotions can be fun and make for great movies, we must, at the end of the day allow rationality to incline our ears to a more sublime and adaptive voice.

In all human endeavors psychology has taught us that in order to understand behavioral motivations we need to look at the emotive payoffs which drive them. A terrorist is an enigma to those of us who have meaning in our lives. We have loved family members, basic security and enjoyment of life. For us, the antithesis of our basic meaning is the irrational and self-destructive terrorist. We set up the stage of the terrorist as the evil genius, the diabolical embodiment of Satan. We justify our own hatred and darkness based on the greater, perceived evil. Our meaning is enhanced by reacting violently to the Great Satan.

Likewise, the terrorist is motivated by violence to the Great Satan. Our Satan’s differ diametrically but each of us has the tendency to feed our meaning with the carcass of the other.

Here is what Republicans, which give themselves completely over to their base instincts, do not understand: A terrorist knows they are not going to win a conventional war against us. However, with the advent of the internet and the virtual, almost innumerable, clamoring for publicity and voice, the promise of meaning is fueled by the instantaneous and highly dramatic act of pure ego, even as the final and resolute ingesting and absolute enveloping of the id. The id in Freud has no other than itself². It incites phantasmal passions infinitely from the imaginary order of Lacan.³

Here is where the fait fatal of Republican rhetoric plays into the symbiotic relationship with the terrorist. The behavioral motivation of the terrorist is publicity. The Republican rhetorical response to terrorism is war, the pinnacle of publicity, as we saw with G.W. Bush. The devout Republican believes the ‘war’ can be won. The devout terrorist has already won, as war is the publicity they crave. Realistically, it is impossible to win the ‘war’ against terrorism. ‘Winning the war against terrorism’ is effectively an admonition that the war has already been lost. Terrorism is not a state you can win a war against, it is a psychology. Terrorism and war are devoted bedfellows. Neither can annihilate the other. They are determined to dance from instinctual necessity into perpetuity. The neocons of the Republic Party are the terrorists dream. The neocons are the primary recruitment mechanism for the terrorists.⁴ However, caught in the cross-fire of their narcissistic hate affair are the innocents the Republicans claim to champion.

The answer to this senseless debacle is not more war. More war is like throwing more fuel on the fire. If Republicans really want to win the war they will have to call off the fight at the O.K. Coral with its Wild West romanticizing and listen to what President Obama is telling them. ‘We’, meaning the most immediately effected first, need to quietly, without the hubris of “shock and awe”, eliminate these publicity craving terrorists. The middle east is, and should be, the on the fore front of a world wide effort to starve these ravenous appetites for publicity. Islam should assert itself against the blasphemous and heretical attempts to justify the murder of innocent people. Likewise, let us not forget that Pope Pius XI made a contract, the Concordant, with Hitler in order to protect Catholics as he justified it. When a major religion becomes the mouth piece for hatred and war, it blasphemes and thus, apostates, itself. When religion is silent in the face of evil it becomes the face of evil.

‘Nation building’, the once politically disposed phrase by the Republicans, is now effectively the defacto politically correct way for Republicans to justify to themselves what is, for all intents and purposes, endless occupation. Our longest wars under G.W. Bush would have no end with the current crop of Republican candidates. Even Rand Paul would ‘evolve’ on the issue of military engagement as evidenced by his more recent statements, “If I were president, I would call a joint session of Congress. I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.”⁵ What the American public need to understand is that gut level reaction is exactly what fuels the fire of terrorism and political rhetoric on the right. No solutions or victories can come out of the wars of G.W. Bush and this is not President Obama’s fault. It was the fault of an ill-conceived strategy. We have more terrorists, more debt, more of our own killed and injured and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians because we let unabated emotion take over for intelligence and cunning.⁶ As far as I am concerned when I hear war hawks advocating reckless and endless wars they may as well be saying, “Let’s go kill our kids and put trillions more on the national debt to satiate our ignorant rage.” In the end, the solutions they propose are no different than the ones the terrorists propose; senseless violence without end which only exacerbates the problems, all the while feeding their own blood lust for vengeance.

If they really wanted to do something to make a difference for approximately 30,000 deaths as opposed to dozens of deaths a year on average since 2005, they should apply their righteous indignation to the NRA but when did facts ever make a difference to them?

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¹ Fact-checking a comparison of gun deaths and terrorism deaths

² “The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other. This principle recurs in Darwinian biology as the “survival of the fittest” and in psychoanalysis as the natural instinct of the ‘id’ for gratification, possession, and power — the libido dominandi.” Face To Face With Levinas, page 24, isbn= 0791499367, Link

³ Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory

⁴ “Since the U.S. occupation of Iraq began in 2003, foreign jihadists have flocked to Iraq, making it a new center of jihad – and in the process, they have transformed the nature of the anti-U.S. Iraqi resistance. Iraq’s insurgency is concentrated in the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq, though much of the rest of the country outside the Kurdish regions is convulsed in civil war or confronting the problems of a de facto failed state.

Only a portion of the insurgency consists of jihadists who took up arms in the name of God, but over the years their numbers have grown. A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate found that “The Iraq conflict has become the ’cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”[4] Foreign jihadists are capitalizing on, and exacerbating, the strife in Iraq. Between 1,000 and 2,000 foreign fighters are in Iraq, and they carried out most of the suicide bombings. Most are from Arab countries, with Saudi Arabia comprising the lion’s share of those killed. In recent months, however, the number of Iraqi jihadists has swelled. Indeed, this may be one of the most lasting effects of the U.S. invasion and occupation: the growth of a domestic jihadist movement in Iraq, where none existed before.” Iraq and the Global War on Terrorism, Brookings Institute

⁵ Republicans Evolving on ISIS: Rand Paul takes tougher stance on terrorism, FoxNews

⁶ Iraq War – Direct Government Cost

Brown University

Iraq War: 190,000 lives, $2.2 trillion

Harvard University – Total Economic Impact

The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets

“The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. Since 2001, the US has expanded the quality, quantity, availability and eligibility of benefits for military personnel and veterans. This has led to unprecedented growth in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense budgets. These benefits will increase further over the next 40 years. Additional funds are committed to replacing large quantities of basic equipment used in the wars and to support ongoing diplomatic presence and military assistance in the Iraq and Afghanistan region. The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs. As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”

Washington Post

After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising sharply

Institute For Economics and Peace

The Economic Cost of Violence Containment