Protest Too Much
In Is Elusive, Taped Bin Laden Manipulating U.S. Domestic Politics?, Joe Gandelman of "The Moderate Voice" asks, ... well, the title says it. He uses the Basque terrorists of 1970s Spain as an example:
Anything Osama says in public is calculated to weaken America, whether it's rhetoric to rouse the Arab street, or, as this seems to be, a shiv thrust into the U.S. body politic.
So, Joe and I agree that Osama's tape is meant to harm America. Joe sees Osama playing some kind of insider's game, where he accurately assesses the fault lines and shifting balances between the various domestic positions in the United States and calculates how to surgically intervene, using the domestic press to amplify his attack.
I just don't see any evidence that he's that savvy about us. In fact, in reading bin Laden's pronouncements over the years, I see plenty of evidence that he does not understand us at all. Or rather, he understands us partly and imperfectly. His essential view of America is "decadent, soft, and ruled by Jews." We were supposed to flounder in impotence after 9/11. We were supposed to fail and flee in Afghanistan.
That's not to say Osama's stupid. I suspect George Bush's address to the Arab world is just as puzzling to its audience, and Bush doesn't have the excuse of being stuck in a cave somewhere above Peshawar.
But Osama's cartoonish vision of America suffers from double-distortion. First, he sees through the ideological filter of Islamism. Hitler, Stalin, and the Imperial Japanese made the same mistake, and they all paid for it. Ideological filters historically give a house of mirrors view of America.
The other mistake Osama makes is trying to figure out what is going on in America's head by reading its media. He has no choice. Unlike the ETA, al-Qaida cannot monitor its enemy nation from within. Even if al-Qaida were fluid among us, its ideological rigor and contempt for kafirs would block it from correctly reading the vast stretches of American outside the Beltway. Even Europeans, who know us better than Osama ever can hope to, have a difficult time seeing us.
Osama has to try to play us, and he does try. But he does so by the direct path of encouraging what he sees as a surging anti-Bush, anti-war majority that will weaken the faction in America that is hurting him.
Joe's suggestion that Osama is playing a sophisticated game is based on references to other blog postings. But the sites Joe quotes don't offer any reason to believe Osama has in mind the political strategy they claim. We're arguing with each other more now, but that doesn't mean that's what bin Laden wanted all along. You can't measure his intent simply because the right side has noticed how much Bin Laden's points resemble those of the angry left. Yet that's what the people cited in Joe's post do:
I agree that polarized slagging is bad for America, but the rest of this is just nonsense.
Osama doesn't have to be a "fan" of Moore or Dean to note that they agree with him on many points, and many Americans agree with them. One thing he can see, even from a cave, is that tens of thousands of Americans paid money into Michael Moore's pockets, and tens of thousands backed Howard Dean for president.
Some on the left tirelessly trumpet the fact that bin Laden's Islamist social critiques of the liberal West tend to converge with those of American Christian fundamentalists. But he doesn't condemn homosexuality simply to try to break up the West into squabbling factions, does he? Sometimes a fatwa is just a fatwa.
The man has a consistent position. It happens to agree in some matters with positions embraced by assorted folks in the West. But it has the largest terrain of agreement with those who consider Bush a bigger threat to themselves than bin Laden. Why is that surprising? Why does it require some grand conspiracy theory that he's only pretending to agree with people who have arrived at conclusions that favor his goals?
Joe quotes Glen Greenwald of Crooks And Liars:
First of all, which journalists are those? And don't tell me talk show blowhards are "journalists" just because they're on TV, sitting at desks.
Second, being a dissenter in a time of war against an enemy who wants to destroy your culture puts you in an inconvenient place. You have to accept that your principled stand inevitably aids, or at least comforts, that enemy. It takes a mature mind to confront that hard choice. Just as it takes a mature mind to support a risky war that could go spectacularly wrong and is sure to kill innocent people.
You have to be a dissenter knowing that you'll unwillingly serve something you hate, but you believe it is worthwhile to do this, because the alternative is worse, and you accept the consequences.
Yet an awful lot of people seem to want to skip right past this difficult decision. They seem to want to avoid even discussing it, or being forced to confront it. This is understandable, since such people often are motivated by a quest for a moral purity. And the decision to oppose a mildly religious president who is in a death match with a fanatical religious killer is a highly compromised place to be, if you allow yourself to see it plainly.
To avoid that they strangle interlocutors' voices with nonsense like the chickenhawk meme. Or they attack every questioning as a bid to "eliminate dissent." Some opponents in fact will be traitors. It's not a moral crime to attempt to distinguish honest dissent from wanna-be treason, in fact it's a necessary mental activity as a citizen of a nation at war. Yes, I may question your patriotism, politely, but it's in hopes you'll have an answer for me. If I don't question it, you won't have the chance to explain to me how this works.
Greenwald goes on:
Joe, a veteran journalist, really ought to be embarrassed to repeat this tripe. The media "was intended to" serve as an independent anti-propaganda force in America? What the hell does he think we are in this business, some Roosevelt-era agency? The media of 1787 was the original political propaganda pump in America, and that's exactly why it was granted protection from official interference.
When I hear that it is "no longer tolerable" for the media to point out something obvious, then I recognize the path to totalitarianism. I'm sort of surprised that Joe lends his imprimatur to this.
And would one of those "few" more important things be actually defeating bin Laden, bringing a coherent effort to a long war against Islamist terrorism, and placing long-term civilization survival above partisan advantage in the next electoral cycle? Greenwald doesn't say so. I honestly doubt it was in his head at the time he wrote that passage.
This is not a winning tactic for the angry anti-war left: Focus on the little dispute inside the big one. Elevate it to be the main dispute. "You splashed water on me!" "But the house is on fire, and I'm trying to put it out." "No, you splashed water on me, and you did it on purpose!"
Back to Joe:
I don't believe bin Laden is a stupid man. But imagining him choosing this over-elaborate tactic in the place of the much more obvious one that also aligns with the text of his recent speech really makes him out to be an incompetent.
Bin Laden sees a White House that is committed to making life difficult (literally) for him and his friends, and a U.S. military that is capable of doing so. Yet he sees, through the lens of the media, that his enemies in the White House rest on a shaky foundation of a population that wrings its hands over the human cost of war, is seething with hatred of Bush, is eager to disengage from the Islamic world, and has the power to topple the present administration.
The ugly truth is, bin Laden does start to make sense to a big chunk of the angry left when he talks like this. Andrew Sullivan found an example at Daily Kos before the comment disappeared, perhaps due to the unwelcomed attention:
Kos' readership is huge and diverse, and his defenders decry attempts to paint them all with one cherry-picked color. But this poll on the site itself, measures the percent of readers who despise Bush more than Bin Laden at 41 percent.
Such people can help bin Laden. That's as much a fact of war as the image damage from the Abu Ghraib photos. He wants to persuade more of us to think as they do and act as they have acted. They will have to live with this unpleasant fact. As Mennonite conscientious objectors in World War II had to live with the truth that they were doing Hitler a small favor and Hitler would have clapped them in Dachau without a thought. No one said it was easy to make adult choices.
That's just lame, Joe. "Every time you criticize the anti-war left, the terrorists have already won." Talk about stifling dissent.
Prediction: independent voters don't give a flick about whether anti-war zealots get their feelings hurt when people notice they talk like bin Laden. We're more interested in actually making progress in getting bin Laden to be either irrelevant or dead.
[Tweaked for clarity, 1/25]
But many analysts inside and outside the Spanish government contended part of ETA's strategy — particularly under the Franco regime — was to cause its statements and acts to get the government to clamp down which would serve several purposes: (1) It would divide the country even more, (2) It would cause the government to perhaps overreact and be branded as represssive, and make new enemies (3) It would accentuate existing political divisions and heighten polarization — thus weakening the central government.
Could that be part of bin Laden's goal here as well?
Anything Osama says in public is calculated to weaken America, whether it's rhetoric to rouse the Arab street, or, as this seems to be, a shiv thrust into the U.S. body politic.
So, Joe and I agree that Osama's tape is meant to harm America. Joe sees Osama playing some kind of insider's game, where he accurately assesses the fault lines and shifting balances between the various domestic positions in the United States and calculates how to surgically intervene, using the domestic press to amplify his attack.
I just don't see any evidence that he's that savvy about us. In fact, in reading bin Laden's pronouncements over the years, I see plenty of evidence that he does not understand us at all. Or rather, he understands us partly and imperfectly. His essential view of America is "decadent, soft, and ruled by Jews." We were supposed to flounder in impotence after 9/11. We were supposed to fail and flee in Afghanistan.
That's not to say Osama's stupid. I suspect George Bush's address to the Arab world is just as puzzling to its audience, and Bush doesn't have the excuse of being stuck in a cave somewhere above Peshawar.
But Osama's cartoonish vision of America suffers from double-distortion. First, he sees through the ideological filter of Islamism. Hitler, Stalin, and the Imperial Japanese made the same mistake, and they all paid for it. Ideological filters historically give a house of mirrors view of America.
The other mistake Osama makes is trying to figure out what is going on in America's head by reading its media. He has no choice. Unlike the ETA, al-Qaida cannot monitor its enemy nation from within. Even if al-Qaida were fluid among us, its ideological rigor and contempt for kafirs would block it from correctly reading the vast stretches of American outside the Beltway. Even Europeans, who know us better than Osama ever can hope to, have a difficult time seeing us.
Osama has to try to play us, and he does try. But he does so by the direct path of encouraging what he sees as a surging anti-Bush, anti-war majority that will weaken the faction in America that is hurting him.
Joe's suggestion that Osama is playing a sophisticated game is based on references to other blog postings. But the sites Joe quotes don't offer any reason to believe Osama has in mind the political strategy they claim. We're arguing with each other more now, but that doesn't mean that's what bin Laden wanted all along. You can't measure his intent simply because the right side has noticed how much Bin Laden's points resemble those of the angry left. Yet that's what the people cited in Joe's post do:
My DD's Scott Shields notes the content of bin Laden's recent tape and how it helped spark a furor over MSNBC's Chris Matthews comparing bin Laden's comments to filmmaker Michael Moore:
When bin Laden cites domestic polling figures or mainstream criticisms of Bush, he's not doing it because he's a fan of Michael Moore or Howard Dean or reads the New York Times, as Matthews and his fellow talking heads Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson insist....He obviously doesn't care about the political affiliation of the people he kills. The reason bin Laden says these things is to create tension among the American electorate. It's a standard tactic of war and it's frustrating to see the media take the bait without question.
Bin Laden's goal is tearing America down. He doesn't care if it takes airplanes crashing into buildings or fomenting a civil war. It's all just means to an end. On this front, it seems that he might be having some success, as evidenced by the rhetoric coming from the right and accepted as conventional wisdom by people like Matthews. I've seen a few commenters question why we are so worked up over Matthews' stupidity. This is why. The narrative that he is pushing is the one bin Laden wants out there.
In other words, in this view, bin Laden wants the right to start pointing fingers at the left...which will infuriate the left...which will cause another reaction from the right. And no one benefits from bitter polarization, even though it might be beneficial in a given election.
I agree that polarized slagging is bad for America, but the rest of this is just nonsense.
Osama doesn't have to be a "fan" of Moore or Dean to note that they agree with him on many points, and many Americans agree with them. One thing he can see, even from a cave, is that tens of thousands of Americans paid money into Michael Moore's pockets, and tens of thousands backed Howard Dean for president.
Some on the left tirelessly trumpet the fact that bin Laden's Islamist social critiques of the liberal West tend to converge with those of American Christian fundamentalists. But he doesn't condemn homosexuality simply to try to break up the West into squabbling factions, does he? Sometimes a fatwa is just a fatwa.
The man has a consistent position. It happens to agree in some matters with positions embraced by assorted folks in the West. But it has the largest terrain of agreement with those who consider Bush a bigger threat to themselves than bin Laden. Why is that surprising? Why does it require some grand conspiracy theory that he's only pretending to agree with people who have arrived at conclusions that favor his goals?
Joe quotes Glen Greenwald of Crooks And Liars:
The Matthews smear illustrates the fact that it has become routine in our national political dialogue, and among our nation's journalists, to equate opposition to George Bush with subversiveness, treason, and support for Al Qaeda....
This tactic of equating Democrats with bin Laden is designed to eliminate dissent and to stigmatize Bush’s opponents as traitors.
First of all, which journalists are those? And don't tell me talk show blowhards are "journalists" just because they're on TV, sitting at desks.
Second, being a dissenter in a time of war against an enemy who wants to destroy your culture puts you in an inconvenient place. You have to accept that your principled stand inevitably aids, or at least comforts, that enemy. It takes a mature mind to confront that hard choice. Just as it takes a mature mind to support a risky war that could go spectacularly wrong and is sure to kill innocent people.
You have to be a dissenter knowing that you'll unwillingly serve something you hate, but you believe it is worthwhile to do this, because the alternative is worse, and you accept the consequences.
Yet an awful lot of people seem to want to skip right past this difficult decision. They seem to want to avoid even discussing it, or being forced to confront it. This is understandable, since such people often are motivated by a quest for a moral purity. And the decision to oppose a mildly religious president who is in a death match with a fanatical religious killer is a highly compromised place to be, if you allow yourself to see it plainly.
To avoid that they strangle interlocutors' voices with nonsense like the chickenhawk meme. Or they attack every questioning as a bid to "eliminate dissent." Some opponents in fact will be traitors. It's not a moral crime to attempt to distinguish honest dissent from wanna-be treason, in fact it's a necessary mental activity as a citizen of a nation at war. Yes, I may question your patriotism, politely, but it's in hopes you'll have an answer for me. If I don't question it, you won't have the chance to explain to me how this works.
Greenwald goes on:
That the GOP has transparently wielded this tactic almost from the moment the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center is reprehensible enough. But it is simply no longer tolerable for the media – which was intended to serve as a Fourth Estate check against government propaganda of this type – to continue to be the primary instrument for the dissemination of this smear.
Joe, a veteran journalist, really ought to be embarrassed to repeat this tripe. The media "was intended to" serve as an independent anti-propaganda force in America? What the hell does he think we are in this business, some Roosevelt-era agency? The media of 1787 was the original political propaganda pump in America, and that's exactly why it was granted protection from official interference.
When I hear that it is "no longer tolerable" for the media to point out something obvious, then I recognize the path to totalitarianism. I'm sort of surprised that Joe lends his imprimatur to this.
There are few things more important than combating this notion, so prevalent among the Chris Matthews of the world, that opposing George Bush is tantamount to supporting Al Qaeda, or relatedly, that it's perfectly acceptable to equate Bush opponents with bin Laden but it is terribly crass - even treasonous - to aggressively criticize the President.
And would one of those "few" more important things be actually defeating bin Laden, bringing a coherent effort to a long war against Islamist terrorism, and placing long-term civilization survival above partisan advantage in the next electoral cycle? Greenwald doesn't say so. I honestly doubt it was in his head at the time he wrote that passage.
This is not a winning tactic for the angry anti-war left: Focus on the little dispute inside the big one. Elevate it to be the main dispute. "You splashed water on me!" "But the house is on fire, and I'm trying to put it out." "No, you splashed water on me, and you did it on purpose!"
Back to Joe:
So if one of bin Laden's intents is indeed to sow and accentuate divisions and bitter polarization within the United States we can assume he's getting reports of what the right and media types such as Matthews are saying and how it's angering those on the left, which causes more anger on the right.
I don't believe bin Laden is a stupid man. But imagining him choosing this over-elaborate tactic in the place of the much more obvious one that also aligns with the text of his recent speech really makes him out to be an incompetent.
Bin Laden sees a White House that is committed to making life difficult (literally) for him and his friends, and a U.S. military that is capable of doing so. Yet he sees, through the lens of the media, that his enemies in the White House rest on a shaky foundation of a population that wrings its hands over the human cost of war, is seething with hatred of Bush, is eager to disengage from the Islamic world, and has the power to topple the present administration.
The ugly truth is, bin Laden does start to make sense to a big chunk of the angry left when he talks like this. Andrew Sullivan found an example at Daily Kos before the comment disappeared, perhaps due to the unwelcomed attention:
"I realized that I empathized and agreed with bin Laden's hatred of Bush and all he stands for. Bush is not America and while Binny may just be baiting us, I would welcome a truce if it included the impeachment of Bush as part of the bargain. You know the state of the nation is bad if it can get me to look at Binny boy in any light other than a fundamentalist wacko mass murderer. But, at this point in time, I honestly feel more disdain for Bush and his administration than I do for bin Laden."
Kos' readership is huge and diverse, and his defenders decry attempts to paint them all with one cherry-picked color. But this poll on the site itself, measures the percent of readers who despise Bush more than Bin Laden at 41 percent.
Such people can help bin Laden. That's as much a fact of war as the image damage from the Abu Ghraib photos. He wants to persuade more of us to think as they do and act as they have acted. They will have to live with this unpleasant fact. As Mennonite conscientious objectors in World War II had to live with the truth that they were doing Hitler a small favor and Hitler would have clapped them in Dachau without a thought. No one said it was easy to make adult choices.
Is it therefore stretching it to conclude that he'll do whatever he can in coming months to inspire more comments from the right and media types, to cause more fingerpointing and to cause more negative reaction and polarization? Wouldn't he want to see the water boil a bit more — especially during an election year?
That's just lame, Joe. "Every time you criticize the anti-war left, the terrorists have already won." Talk about stifling dissent.
Prediction: this will play well with the GOP base but it's going to scare independent voters away from the GOP in droves.
Prediction: independent voters don't give a flick about whether anti-war zealots get their feelings hurt when people notice they talk like bin Laden. We're more interested in actually making progress in getting bin Laden to be either irrelevant or dead.
[Tweaked for clarity, 1/25]
Labels: Bin Laden, Glenn Greenwald, media, terrorism
