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Entry: The Dream team Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/the_dream_team#16740 Post contents: To discover that Leon is Ron Paul's foreign policy adviser was a stunner. To put it mildly. If somebody who knows Paul reads this, please tell him to change advisers fast, before he finds himself in the neoconservative war-mongerers camp. As to the issues of the debate, Paul, Leon and Adriana all seem to assume that Americans are cheering the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policies, and that promising to continue those policies will be real vote-getter in the election. Where do you leave the results in poll after poll that show 60-70% of voters wanting troops out of Iraq either immediately or with a short delay? To me, this statistic suggests that an offer by Obama to end the war and get the troops home will easily give him the presidency. We seem to differ quite starkly on what are Americans' perceptions. As to how to deal with national security issues, all three of you share the assumption that the most effective way to deal with violence is counterviolence -- i.e., beat up the guy who hits you so bad he does not dare to hit again. There is, however, a diametrically opposed school of thinking, which used to be hugely influential in West, and which saw counterviolence as increasing conflicts, not ending them. The reasoning was simple: counterviolence creates hatred and starts a cycle of revenge. A case study of this phenomenon can be seen in the increasing radicalization of Pakistan that Adriana worries about: to what extent has this radicalization been caused by American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq? Furthermore, to what extent will additional American actions just get us deeper into the hole?(Rumsfeld should have continued to pursue his question: "Are we creating more radicals than we are destroying?") The Western (at least Anglo-Saxon) tradition called for responding to violence by non-violence -- by "turning the other cheeck" and "loving your enemies". This seems highly counterintuitive, but it worked. Interestingly, the emphasis on this approach seems to have been developed by late medieval confessors, who had outstanding opportunities to investigate the depth-psychology of violence and cycles of revenge, since they were right in the middle of the brutal, passionate and irrational society described by Huizinga in his "The Waning of the Middle Ages." The contrary approaches to violence may reflect a deeper religious/ cultural difference. This possibility stems from the question: are humility, meekness, not revenging wrongs, turning the other cheeck and loving your enemies part of the Jewish tradition at all? My knowledge of Judaism is very limited, so I wonder if somebody who knows Judaism could provide details on this point. Humility is clearly implied in the Torah, because pride is the sin of the devil and very harshly condemned. This logically makes humility the highest virtue. However, is this is implication worked out somewhere, or was Christ with his emphatic teaching of humility and meekness the first to make this natural extension to the moral teaching of the Torah? Sent at: 2008 09 07