"Holly" — Wed, 9/6/06 2:14pm

I didn't watch Olbermann, but I saw the Bush speech he refers to, and I was mildly surprised that our President could still find a fresh new way to shock and horrify me with his irresponsible rhetoric. What got me was not that he compared the media to a bin Laden propaganda machine and those of us who question his policies as tools of the terrorists... that's old crap; I've been disgusted by that for so long that it's boring.

What got me this time was Bush's wacky new strategy of quoting terrorists to justify his policies. Think this through. Think about how profoundly, deeply crazy this is. Our President is defining both wars, and the conditions for an American victory in either, on our enemies' terms.

I'll post the link to the whole speech in a minute, but here's a typical excerpt:

The question is: Will we listen [to bin Laden and his followers]? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? America and our coalition partners have made our choice. We're taking the words of the enemy seriously. We're on the offensive, and we will not rest, we will not retreat, and we will not withdraw from the fight, until this threat to civilization has been removed.

This is what I find so fundamentally shocking. I'm sorry, but we're taking these criminal thugs that seriously? We're believing them when they brag that they could threaten our entire civilization?? We're letting bin Laden, of all people, dictate to us what victory or defeat looks like???

That's nuts. Because bin Laden has, very smartly, defined his war in terms that portray his soldiers as powerful warriors capable of truly destroying the American way of life. And he has defined an American victory in such a way that it's basically unachievable ever. An American victory on his terms would apparently mean that the world is perpetually happy and at peace and the Middle East contains entirely Western-style democracy and everyone wearing blue jeans. President Bush, unfortunately, having fallen for bin Laden's rhetoric, apparently believes this also, putting him completely out of touch with all common sense and making him a seriously misguided victim of wacky terrorist rhetoric.

Bin Laden's version of things doesn't have to be true. His powerful holy warriors who are going to overthrow western civilization could also be defined as thugs that we can more or less control with responsible police work and homeland security while we continue enjoying Western civilization at the mall every weekend. Sometimes in the future we will face threats: this is unavoidable; this is life; sociopathic political zealots and hurricanes are some of the risks we accept by living on the planet. But we give these zealots the power if we believe what bin Laden says about them – and we don't have to do that. We don't need bin Laden's permission to declare victory.

In his speech, Bush accuses those who disagree with him of being the misguided ones, the victims of terrorist propaganda. But we're not. It's him.

Here's the speech transcript, in which our President urges us to consider this war to be an apocalpytic ideological struggle because the terrorists have said it is:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060905-4.html

In a recent thoughtful, provocative, and generally fantastic article in the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows laid out an alternative strategy for the wars on terror and in Iraq, one that I believe common sense moderate Americans of both parties can get behind, and that is centrally focused on taking back control of the rhetoric from the terrorists and re-defining victory on American terms:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200608u/airline-plot

(The link goes to a follow-up written by Fallows after the recent terrorist arrests in London; the link contains a link to the actual article which, alas, requires a subscription to read. But the follow-up itself summarizes Fallows' main points, which he developed after interviewing many, many, many experts, conservative and liberal. Read it, because it says what I'm trying to say way better than I can say it.)

"Holly" — Wed, 9/6/06 8:02pm

Exactly. To clarify, I certainly agree that underestimating the threat would be a bad idea – but (as you basically say) I think we've so thoroughly overestimated it at this point that it's time to return to the world of common sense. And I think it's fascinating and disturbing that the other group of people – besides the Bush administration – who want us to overestimate the threat are the terrorists themselves: in this case, Bush and his Evildoing Enemies agree. Which is why he can cite them now (as in your last paragraph) to justify the Iraq war as if it were always part of the war on terror. But c'mon! That's just creepy!

I really recommend the Fallows article for further discussion of all these points, if it's possible to find it in your local library or someplace. He does not advocate an instant, irresponsible departure from Iraq, nor does he advocate naively pretending that terrorism doesn't exist. His point is rather that we've come dangerously close to allowing the bad guys to define our conflict for us. His argument is that as soon as we start reclaiming the moral and pragmatic high ground (through words and actions... better diplomacy, stealthier/cooler international criminal investigations, a proud moral refusal to stoop to torturing or humiliating prisoners, ultimately a lower profile in Iraq, etc), the sooner we can declare victory on our terms and start marginalizing these thugs, making them uncool again, as they deserve. What we're doing now is amplifying the impact of their attacks by our overreactions, as well as aiding their recruitment because people see us (and especially our leader) treating them as worthy opponents... and being scared of them... and talking as if they really could Bring Down Western Civilization... and suggesting that these wars are really The Place To Be for all supercool holy warriors who want a piece of the Great Ideological Struggle of the Twenty-First Century.

Great article. I liked it because it did answer so clearly the glaring question of what practical options exist that aren't Bush's failed plan and aren't knee-jerk reactions to Bush's plan. It's creative and very American and it just might work.

It also assumes that Americans have enough guts, moral integrity, and stiff-upper-lippiness to say, "Okay, we know we'll never be perfectly safe, because that's impossible, but because we're brave, rational people, we're going to stop lashing out like freaked-out bullies everytime something happens; we're going to go back to being confident, cool, laid-back, moral beacons of freedom and democracy who have fantastic TV shows while also giving away billions in foreign aid." Wooo.

Interestingly, in this speech, Bush quotes a bin Laden sneer about how the 9/11 attacks only cost the terrorists $500,000 yet cost us $5 billion in our various responses; Bush seems to quote this as a way of emphasizing how horrifically threatening the economic consequences of any attack are bound inevitably to be (to scare us more). I liked Fallow's take on it better, which I will quote here at length because I love him and want to marry him. (this comes from his follow-up to the article that I linked to in my previous comment.)

the greatest threat posed by these groups is not the damage they can do directly, but rather the self-defeating, irrational, or excessive responses they can goad a target country into making. Osama bin Laden has boasted that the attack of 9/11 cost at most $500,000 to launch and provoked more than $500 billion in military and security spending by the United States; a million-to-one “payoff.” As several military officers and strategists emphasized in the article, the United States can reduce but never entirely eliminate the threat of terrorist attack. What it can do is think about the way it will respond when threats arise – like the one this week [in England]. [...]

Immediately after news of the arrests broke, President Bush took the opportunity to remind the country that it was “at war with Islamic fascists.” No such reminder came from the British authorities, who had actually broken the plot. This is consistent with Britain’s response after the subway bombings one year ago, when the government, press, and public prided themselves on the speed with which life returned to normal – while the police and intelligence agencies hunted down the responsible parties. It is also consistent with the argument that an open-ended state of war has become a major handicap in the long-term effort to penetrate potential terrorist cells, dry up their supply of recruits, and deny them shelter and support from other Muslims.

Why? A state of war with no clear end point makes it more likely for a country to overreact in ways that hurt itself, especially by losing the moral high ground that was crucial to America's victory in the Cold War. It also makes it harder for the country to do the patient work of tracking down, catching, and thwarting the "copycat" groups, since that depends so heavily on relations with allied countries and with sympathetic Muslim groups. Remember: it was police work, surveillance, and patient cultivation of sources that broke the airline bombing ring – not speeches about a state of war.

If Americans lose their heads when they hear of a threat, they do the terrorists’ work for them. They can harm themselves in short- and long-term ways far more than any hostile group could do. The effort to destroy terrorist groups goes on. It is more likely to succeed if the war is over.

"krs(one)" — Sat, 9/9/06 11:49pm

I can rant too. Inarticulate ode to Bee Boy! You the shit!