(Cont. from Part 1) Card tells us twice that he's a Democrat. Although in the paragraph following the first such reference, he says that the Democratic Party is an "insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party." Now, personally, I wouldn't want to identify myself publicaly as a member of an "insane, self-destructive, extremist-dominated party." But everyone is different, I guess. Maybe it's a science-fiction writer's mystique kind of thing, I don't know.
I notice he also uses the favored Republican grammatical construction "Democrat-controlled Congress." This is a cutesy Republican thing that goes back at least to 1964, but has only caught on with mainstream conservative political commentators more recently. In normal usage, "democratic" and "republican" are the adjuective forms of "democracy" and "republic." But for some reason, the Reps decided that it was cute to call their opponents the "Democrat Party." I don't know why. It's always just sounded dorky to me. I guess the Democrats could start calling them the "Republic Party." But why? To show that they can use bad grammar just like them there Republicans?
With articles like Card's, one can get lost in the mass of vague points, careless generalizations and questionable statements of fact. So it's helpful to recognize that there's a fundamental flaw in Card's perspective. He assumes that the United States can impose its preferred form of government on Iraq through military power and will, with will being understood in the superficial sense of homefront cheerleading. If the fans (the American public) would just cheer enthusiastically enough, those Iraqi guerrillas will just put down their arms and everything will be okay.
It's yet one more example of how tempted we Americans are to process what's happening in terms of our own domestic political concepts and desires. Card says that "the outcome of this war is going to depend more on the American people than anything that happens on the battlefield." It doesn't occur to him that the Iraqi people may have some say in the matter.
(Cont in Part 3)
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