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Paul Woodward – 7.20 AM Eastern, September 15, 2007
As Israel bombs Syria, the United States prepares to attack Iran
With contradictory statements coming from unnamed Bush administration officials, there continues to be speculation around the purpose and significance of Israel’s incursion into Syrian airspace last week. The New York Times reports that:
One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.
While Associated Press says that:
Israeli warplanes targeted weapons destined for Hezbollah in a strike last week in northeastern Syria, a U.S. government official said Wednesday, even as Syria and Israel remained silent on the incident. […] U.S. officials have declined to comment on whether the suspected weapons targeted might have originated in North Korea, whether the aircraft passed over Turkey on their way into or out of Syria or whether Israel had used weapons from the United States in the airstrike.
Given that North Korea has just opened up its nuclear facilities to American inspectors and it recently entered into a bilateral agreement with the U.S. saying it will disable its nuclear facilities by the end of this year, the North Korean angle to the Syrian story looks to me like a smokescreen.
In World Politics Review, Frida Ghitis points out that:
Israel is undoubtedly developing contingency plans in case it decides it must stop Iran’s nuclear program. If it decides to bomb Iran’s nuclear installations, a possible flight route could take it over the Syria-Turkey border, along Northern Iraq’s friendly Kurdish region, and into Iran. Flying safely over Syria would be key to the success of the mission against Iran.
It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that Israel will not need to follow through with such plans. Fox News reports that:
Political and military officers, as well as weapons of mass destruction specialists at the State Department, are now advising Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the diplomatic approach [to Iran] favored by [Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas] Burns has failed and the administration must actively prepare for military intervention of some kind. Among those advising Rice along these lines are John Rood, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation; and a number of Mideast experts, including Ambassador James Jeffrey, deputy White House national security adviser under Stephen Hadley and formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs.
Consequently, according to a well-placed Bush administration source, “everyone in town” is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months, after the presidential primaries have probably been decided, but well before the November 2008 elections.
The discussions are now focused on two basic options: less invasive scenarios under which the U.S. might blockade Iranian imports of gasoline or exports of oil, actions generally thought to exact too high a cost on the Iranian people but not enough on the regime in Tehran; and full-scale aerial bombardment.
On the latter course, active consideration is being given as to how long it would take to degrade Iranian air defenses before American air superiority could be established and U.S. fighter jets could then begin a systematic attack on Iran’s known nuclear targets.
Most relevant parties have concluded such a comprehensive attack plan would require at least a week of sustained bombing runs, and would at best set the Iranian nuclear program back a number of years — but not destroy it forever. Other considerations include the likelihood of Iranian reprisals against Tel Aviv and other Israeli population centers; and the effects on American troops in Iraq. There, officials have concluded that the Iranians are unlikely to do much more damage than they already have been able to inflict through their supply of explosives and training of insurgents in Iraq.
That is a mind-boggling assertion. Do these officials regard IEDs to be as powerful as Iranian missiles or that the latter are no more dangerous than an IED? The Iranians themselves have been quite blunt in their warnings:
[Former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard,] General Rahim Yahya Safavi, Jaafari’s predecessor and now special military advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had warned last week that the United States did not appreciate how at risk its troops were.
“It can not evaluate the vulnerability of its 200,000 troops in the region since we have accurately identified all of their camps,” said Safavi.
It’s hard not to believe that at the beginning of a war with Iran, the United States might lose more troops than it has over the course of four and a half years in Iraq.
But if anyone thinks that General Petraeus seems like far too prudent a commander to allow his forces to become so vulnerable, his comments in an interview given to The Independent on Monday offer no reassurance:
General Petraeus strongly implied that it would soon be necessary to obtain authorisation to take action against Iran within its own borders, rather than just inside Iraq. “There is a pretty hard look ongoing at that particular situation” he said.
See also, N. Korea: Israeli invasion of Syrian airspace ‘dangerous provocation’ (Ynet) and Nuclear? Chemical? Missiles? What was hit? (Joshua Landis).
Mysterious disappearances (and releases) in Pakistan
On July 13, 2004, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer engineer, was detained by Pakistani military intelligence. The following month a Reuters report quoted a Pakistani intelligence source saying that:
“After [Khan’s] capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send emails to his contacts… He sent encoded emails and received encoded replies. He’s a great hacker and even the US agents said he was a computer whiz.”
Last weekend US officials said someone held secretly by Pakistan was the source of the bulk of the information justifying the [elevated Homeland Security “orange”] alert [which, just by chance, coincided with the Democratic National Convention] .
The New York Times obtained Khan’s name independently, and US officials confirmed it when it appeared in the paper the next morning.
None of those reports mentioned that Khan had been under cover helping the authorities catch al Qaeda suspects, and that his value in that regard was destroyed by making his name public.
A day later, Britain hastily rounded up terrorism suspects, some of whom are believed to have been in contact with Khan while he was under cover.
Washington has portrayed those arrests as a major success, saying one of the suspects, named Abu Musa al-Hindi or Abu Eissa al-Hindi, was a senior al Qaeda figure.
But British police have acknowledged the raids were carried out in a rush.
For the following three years, Khan remained in detention — but was never charged. This week, his case — along with that of over 200 other missing people — came before Pakistan’s Supreme Court. It was then revealed for the first time that Khan had in fact been quietly released a month earlier (July 24, 2007). The New York Times reports that, “American officials declined to speak for the record on Monday, but said they were dismayed at the news of his release.” They may have been dismayed but that’s not quite the same as saying they weren’t already aware of what had happened.
This story is hard to unravel and so far no one in the U.S. media seems to think it’s worth the effort. But there are numerous questions that need to be answered. Did the Bush administration receive advance notice of Khan’s release? Does the administration support the efforts of Pakistan’s Supreme Court to uphold the law and secure the release of uncharged detainees? Or, is the administration currently looking for new venues of secret detention outside Pakistan in order to avoid the risk of detainees being granted their legal rights?
Given the focus that this administration has generally had in finding ways to maneuver around the law, one assumes that it is currently busy exercising its well-honed skills in the outlaw domain where it most comfortably operates.
But as for America’s attitude towards Pakistan’s invisible prisoners — what does it say about us if we have more concern about a government’s efficiency in clamping down on terrorism than we have about its use of what at other times would have been seen as the instruments of state terrorism?
Who wields the more dangerous power? The terrorist who might blow up innocent people, or the government that can make suspicious people “disappear”?
Maliki: Iraq ‘can find friends elsewhere’
In response to Senator Carl Levin’s call for the Iraqi prime minister’s ouster and President Bush’s expression of “frustration,” Nouri al-Maliki’s response was blunt:
“No one has the right to place timetables on the Iraq government. It was elected by its people,” he said at a press conference in Damascus at the end of a three-day visit to Syria.
“Those who make such statements are bothered by our visit to Syria. We will pay no attention. We care for our people and our constitution and can find friends elsewhere,” al-Maliki said.
After a recent trip to Tehran and while now being welcomed by President Bashar Assad, Maliki had no need to name the friends he is courting. And the more alienated he becomes from Washington, the more appealing it might seem to forge a Sunni-Shia alliance that unites Iraq, Iran, and Syria. That nightmare scenario is going to precipitate some serious back-peddling from Washington, but in the end geography is likely to be the decisive factor. 2000km of shared borders is a reality that Washington can’t change — unless that is, the partitionists win. But that’s an option about which even Cheney long ago made clear his skepticism.
The latest move in the U.S.’s escalating rhetoric aimed at Iran is Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch’s claim — no evidence provided — that 50 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are training Shiite militias, south of Baghdad, the area under Lynch’s command. He hasn’t caught any of them but he knows they’re there. He also confirms that after spending two months patrolling a 125-mile stretch of the Iraq-Iran border, his troops haven’t once intercepted shipments of illegal weapons. I guess it just goes to show what a devilishly cunning enemy Iran is: it can sneak in sophisticated bombs and train militias how to use them, all without getting caught.
What the U.S. seems to be doing is providing “proof” (threadbare as usual) as to why the Revolutionary Guard needs to be labeled as an SDGT (“specially designated global terrorist”). I’m sure Joe Lieberman thinks the argument is iron-clad.
What seems much less clear is whether there is any real strategic thinking going on here. Robert Baer says he has been told by an administration official, “IRGC IED’s are a casus belli for this administration. There will be an attack on Iran.” It’s a simple as that. Baer writes, “The feeling in the Administration is that we should have taken care of the IRGC a long, long time ago.”
Nothing better optimizes American hubris than the expression “taking care” — as though the solution to any problem merely hinges on whether the all-powerful U.S. of A. gets around to deciding to fix it. Meanwhile the world — convinced that the United States is much better at breaking than fixing — shudders at the prospect that the Pentagon is getting ready to engage in another bout of Middle East problem-solving.
As for how Iran is reacting to the administration’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric? It seems to be eagerly lapping it up.
The Ayatollah’s are far too sophisticated to use an expression like “bring ’em on,” but in effect, that’s what they are saying. Associated Press reports that last week,
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami [not to be confused with former president Mohammad Khatami], who does not hold a government post but once a month delivers the official Friday prayer sermon, told thousands of worshippers at Tehran University in a speech broadcast on radio that the designation [SDGT] showed that the Guards were doing something right.
“I believe the U.S. decision for including the Guards in the list of terrorist organizations is an honor and a golden card in their file,” he said. “Whenever your enemy is saying something bad about an organization, it shows that the organization has been effective,” he added.
Now, in a move that seems calculated to demonstrate who really holds greater political influence in Baghdad — Tehran or Washington — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted an invitation to the Iraqi capital. I doubt that President Bush will be able to avail himself of a similar photo opportunity.
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, August 20, 2007
Iraq Study Group ReportThe lie embedded in the conception of the “war on terrorism” was that it embodied the expression of American strength. On the contrary, what it did was capitalize on American fear by fostering the illusion that we could find safety through the might of the Bush administration. Anything that expanded that might would supposedly make us safer, while anything that diminished it would place us in jeopardy.
The goal of terrorism is and always will be to maximize the political scope and impact of isolated events. “Success” derives not from the act of violence itself but from the response that this triggers.
When Mariane Pearl was asked how the murder of her husband, Daniel Pearl, had changed her life’s purpose, her response was simple and resolute:
I think the point is that it hasn’t changed. That is my main achievement. Things like that happen to you, and the people that hurt you expect it to change your purpose. Part of my “revenge” was that my purpose wouldn’t change–not how I live, the work that I do or my approach to the world.
Historically, this is what “standing up to terrorism” has always meant and it is the reason politicians would insist, “we will not give in to terrorism.” But this is precisely what the Bush administration did — al Qaeda hoped to provoke a massive reaction; it was given exactly what it wanted.
Suppose the administration’s response had been low-key, bureaucratic, diplomatic, and political: air traffic halted for 24 hours; a comprehensive review and rapid improvement of airport and airline security procedures; likewise an overhaul of intelligence operations; a diplomatic initiative to lead an internationally coordinated response to terrorist threats; a regional political initiative drawing in support from Iran and Pakistan to apply pressure on the Taliban to shut down al Qaeda — not a shot fired. What rational person can dispute that had the administration adopted such a strategy the Middle East and the rest of the world would now be in much better shape and America would now be much less vulnerable to another major terrorist attack?
But that didn’t happen. Instead, President Bush declared a “war” and rather than performing an act of bold leadership, he capitulated to al Qaeda. A small organization that would never have the capacity to wage war was handed the greatest possible reward: it was elevated to the status of being an awesome global entity and absurdly treated as though it paralleled Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Al Qaeda’s limited organizational reach was transcended by its being provided with unlimited ideological reach.
The iconic power and political significance of September 11 was a product not simply of the events themselves, but derived from the reaction that those events elicited from the American government and the media. That response elevated and sustained a level of public fear sufficient to short-circuit reason, marginalize dissent, and subvert the democratic process. Six years later, the political damage persists and continues to shape American politics.
For this reason, the challenge for the next president goes beyond the need to reengage the world (a goal whose importance I would not diminish in the slightest way); it is nothing short of attempting to restore democracy within what — even before Bush and Cheney entered the picture — was already an enfeebled political system.
‘There is always something to be afraid of, because the threat is an ongoing threat’
“Vague Threat Prompts Steps by the Police,” says the small headline in the New York Times‘ NY/Region section. The mayor’s office issues a statement saying that the city’s threat level has not changed. Meanwhile, the New York Post, issues its own “terror alert” with the headline, “NYPD ON THE ALERT FOR QAEDA ‘BOMB’,” and reports that “officers were mobilized and checkpoints set up throughout the city – at the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and various locations in lower Manhattan, including the Financial District – to conduct searches and monitor suspicious activity.”
Did something happen or did nothing happen? The man who triggered the alert stated philosophically (or hysterically), “There is always something to be afraid of, because the threat is an ongoing threat.”
Whatever else might have happened (or not happened) yesterday, it’s hard not to wonder whether this was a practice run; an exercise to answer this question: If a notorious Israeli propagandist shouts BOO! can he make New York jump? The Giuliani campaign is perhaps already reflecting on the results.
Here’s how Israel’s Ynet reports what happened:
Be it true or false, imaginary or realistic, DEBKAfile’s Giora Shamis can rest easy on Saturday, after having spun New York police into a frenzy following a Debka report that al-Qaeda might be plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the city.
Moments before updating his site with new information obtained from world-wide sources, Shamis talked with Ynet and refused to take full credit for the incident.
“The New York Police didn’t have to take my information seriously,” he said. “They had other information, additional to ours.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said, “There’s no information that leads us to believe that there’s an imminent threat.” So, contrary to the DEBKAfile editor’s assertion that NYPD had “other information,” it does not sound as if this was the case.
What can we infer from this incident?
If the NYPD, in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security, is willing to deploy hundreds of police in response to nothing more than a dubious piece of “intelligence” from a highly politically-motivated Israeli web site, it appears that U.S. homeland counter-terrorism operations are extremely easy to manipulate.
Terrorist organizations will take note of this fact and be able to exploit it in a number of ways. They will understand that:
1. Provoking false alarms is economically draining.
2. The more easily security measures can be triggered, the less confidence the public will have that government agencies actually have access to reliable intelligence.
3. The more often false alarms happen, the more complacent the public will become.
4. The more often security services are unnecessarily deployed, the less attentive they will become.
5. Provided with a heightened level of complacency among security services and the public, it will become easier to launch a terrorist attack.
The bottom line is that fear-mongering makes America more — not less — vulnerable to terrorism.
To be strong on terrorism means refusing to be governed by fear. Even though there is always something to be afraid of, it does not serve our interests to live in perpetual fear. Necessary vigilance needs to be coupled with a sense of proportion and a measure of skepticism. In the long run, the fear of terrorism can pose a greater threat than terrorism itself. What was true before 9/11 remains true today: The average American is vastly more at risk of being killed by an automobile than by a terrorist. In the last six years approximately 250,000 Americans have been killed in traffic accidents. There are no reports that any of the vehicles involved were being driven by members of al Qaeda.
Who’s in the best position to play a constructive role in Iraq?
In his patronizing, familiar style, President Bush yesterday said he’d need to have a “heart-to-heart” with his “friend,” Prime Minister Maliki, if the latter continues to insist that Iran is playing a constructive role in Iraq. Then, to drive his message home, Bush switched from friendly to aggressive by saying, “Now, is he [Maliki] trying to get Iran to play a more constructive role? I presume he is. But that doesn’t – what my question is – well, my message to him is, is that when we catch you playing a non-constructive role there will be a price to pay.” Bush staffers were then forced to untangle Bush’s ambiguous syntax by saying that it was Iran — not Maliki — that will pay the price. Vice President Cheney has already volunteered that that price could include airstrikes against suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force.
With a casus belli such as “catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran,” the long-feared war against Iran now seems unlikely to start with a shock-and-awe strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead, a series of “incidents” spread out over a period of months might escalate into a conflict from which neither side can back down. If this happens, I would argue that it reflects a Cheney-inspired political strategy for circumnavigating high level dissent inside the Pentagon.
For some time, rumors have been circulating in Washington that a significant number of generals would resign rather than support military action against Iran. Yet in the scenario I describe, it would only be after the fact (and too late for anyone to preemptively threaten resignation) before everyone agreed that the threshold of war had already been crossed. The window of opportunity for a principled rebellion is rapidly closing.
Meanwhile, the White House’s more immediate preoccupation seems to be whether it’s going to continue treating Maliki as a friend or turn him into a foe.
If and when Maliki has this promised/threatened heart-to-heart with the president, he might consider asking Bush how Iraqis should interpret the following two contrasting images.
To Iran’s west we see an American-led reconstruction process in Iraq that after four years has yielded meager results. Oil production remains below pre-war levels, electricity supply in Baghdad is under a third of what it was, unemployment is around 50%, and 70% of Iraqis lack adequate water supplies. Until quite recently, the U.S. was characterizing “terrorism” — not Iran — as the primary obstacle to Iraq’s progress.
To the east of Iran, Herat (Afghanistan’s western-most city) is now being hailed as a demonstration of “the positive influence of Iran” — those being the words of Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, president of Herat’s Council of Professionals. Since 2001, “Herat has attracted $350 million in private investment for industry – more than any other Afghan city, including Kabul, which is some 10 times larger. In total, 250 medium- and large-scale factories have been built.” The driving force behind this economic boom has been Iran. It has built a highway to the nearby border and it has hooked Herat into the Iranian power grid.
No wonder that — unlike Bush — Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, views his Persian neighbors positively. At the same time, Nuri al-Maliki might well look forward to the day that Iraq is able to purchase cheap electricity from nuclear-powered Iranian power stations.
At the end of the day, what should be more important? Having friendly relations with your immediate neighbors or pleasing a distant, unpredictable and unreliable superpower?
We live in a culture marked by its inattention to the unseen. Small wonder that as we trample on other cultures we neither recognize the damage we are doing nor anticipate the unforeseen and unwanted consequences we will later reap.
In “Ancient Nomads Offer Insights to Modern Crises,” the New York Times provides a fascinating glimpse into some of the less-considered reasons why America got Iraq wrong.
Ilan Greenberg writes:
Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.
Instead, scientists like [Washington University archaeologist] Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.
While the view that tribe and clan — the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies — influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important “cultural intelligence,” like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.
“Families, tribes these are the things that matter here,” said Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. “Foreigners talk about these things, but it’s only talk. They don’t understand them.”
Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.
“In and of itself you can’t graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that’s what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces,” Dr. Frachetti said. “By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naive to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia.”
The United States military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar Province to fight the leading insurgent group there, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
Yet, despite calls for a deeper appreciation of cultures far from the mainstream, “the United States government hasn’t been willing to pony up the money to educate” policy makers on “these areas with deep nomadic traditions,” said a Central Asia specialist working for the United States government.
* * *
The conceit of those of us who inhabit technologically advanced societies is that we are as advanced as our technology. (Keep that thought in mind next time your computer or your car breaks down.)
I would contend, to the contrary, that the more we (as Thoreau said) become the tools of our tools, the more we lose our mastery of and appreciation for the real building blocks of culture. The advancement, sophistication, and development of our societies has brought with it an unremitting cultural impoverishment.
As we become expert in text messaging, we become less adept in conversation. We acquire megabytes of iTunes but never learn or pass along a single ballad. We know the storylines in many a TV show yet are barely acquainted with ancient narratives from epic verse and drama. The cultural repositories that once provided the primary stock in popular image, phrasing, and metaphor, have been marginalized by a mass media that operates in the thrall of manipulative advertising techniques and commercial imperatives.
Before we can be expected to respect and understand other cultures, we first need to appreciate culture itself. And while, with justification, we worry about the loss of natural resources and an imperiled environment, we need to pay closer attention to those equally fragile resources that can only be sustained within and between human beings. Otherwise we will end up impoverished and ultimately destroyed by our own wealth.
The future of democracy depends on abandoning the war metaphor
If presidential candidates can’t come up with some intelligent foreign policy positions, it’s time that they followed State Department advice: shut up — at least for a while.
In just three days we’ve heard candidates proposing sending troops into Pakistan, using nuclear weapons against al Qaeda, and threatening to bomb Mecca and Medina.
Campaign rhetoric is doing what ought to be impossible: make the Bush administration sound responsible. It is also sending a chilling message to the rest of the world: if you’re hoping that George Bush is going to be replaced by a president with a more enlightened view of the world and a more sophisticated approach to politics, don’t count on it.
In the latest instance of “precision bombing” gone wrong, women and children are among up to 300 civilians killed in air strikes in the Afghan province of Helmand. How many more times does the West have to be responsible for the indiscriminate killing of innocent people before it acknowledges that this is neither an effective nor legitimate means to counter terrorism?
The so-called “war on terrorism” has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Small wonder that in the Muslim world this war is regarded as a war on Islam. This perception is further reinforced by the fact that Western leaders persist in framing the struggle as one between religious extremists and secular moderates.
In a bold initiative in April, John Edwards posed a challenge to fellow Democratic candidates when he rejected the phrase “war on terror”:
“This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do,” Edwards said in a phone interview from Everett, Wash. “It’s been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there’s a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don’t think that’s true.”
In 2001, the neocons rapturously applauded President Bush’s “insight” (triggered by their prompting) that America was at war. What the last six years have demonstrated are the consequences of allowing “war” to become the governing metaphor in national and international affairs.
The inescapable effect of being governed by the war metaphor is that it fosters absolutist expectations. The goal of war is to crush, defeat, and eliminate the enemy.
When Bush declared that we will not discriminate between the terrorists and those who harbor them, he opened the door to a genocidal sentiment. Security analyist, Michael Vlahos notes:
I have had many “Defense World” conversations that have ended with: “the time may come when we will have to kill millions of Muslims,” or, “history shows that to win over a people you have to kill at least 10 percent of them, like the Romans” (for comparison, we killed or contributed to the death of about five percent of Japan from 1944-46, while Russia has killed at least eight percent of the Chechen people). Or consider the implications of “Freeper” talk-backs to an article of mine in The American Conservative: “History shows that wars only end with a totally defeated enemy otherwise they go on … Either Islam or us will quit in total destruction.”
Even if the majority of Americans might not believe that America is engaged in a war on Islam, Muslims have solid grounds for thinking otherwise. Images of the dead are not erased by empty rhetoric from American politicians who express their support for “moderate, peaceful Muslims.”
If the 2008 presidential elections are to going to open the possibility for a change of lasting political consequence then they should be focused on a campaign between those who support and those who reject the “war” metaphor.
George Bush declared his to be a “war presidency.” Because he faced no political challenge in doing so, America blindly submitted itself to being governed by war. The real wars in which the United States is now embroiled were not entered into in response to real acts of war. Terrorists can commit atrocities but they cannot start war; only nations can enter war. Not only the war in Iraq, but also the war on terrorism itself, were wars we embarked on by choice. We didn’t choose to be attacked on 9/11 but we did choose to turn a political challenge into a military one.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski eloquently stated in his seminal Washington Post op-ed earlier this year, “Terrorized by ‘war on terror’“:
The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves.
The 2008 presidential race is still in its early days. There is still time for Democratic candidates to follow John Edward’s lead (something they are clearly already eager to do in other ways). But if by the time it comes to election day we have no better choice than between candidates who are competing for the role of “strongest leader in the war on terrorism”, we might as well burn our ballot papers rather than vote.
Beware of Americans bearing gifts
In suggesting how … a brand strategy might be applied to the United States, Business for Diplomatic Action’s chair, advertising guru Keith Reinhard, suggests a simple yet elegant promise: “We will help you.”
This little gem comes from, “Enlisting Madison Avenue – The marketing approach to earning popular support in theaters of operation,” a RAND Corporation report [PDF] for which the Pentagon recently paid a handsome $400,000.
My guess is that someone dropped a copy on Karl Rove’s desk and he passed it along to Frank Luntz with a simple request: Please distill these 211 pages into a message we can use. Word came back: Get Bush and Rice to use the word “help” as often as possible.
So, when Bush recently made a half-baked effort to warm up the Middle East peace process, he managed five helps in five sentences. Quite impressive!
… all responsible nations have a duty to help clarify the way forward. By supporting the reforms of President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, we can help them show the world what a Palestinian state would look like — and act like. We can help them prove to the world, the region, and Israel that a Palestinian state would be a partner — not a danger. We can help them make clear to all Palestinians that rejecting violence is the surest path to security and a better life. And we can help them demonstrate to the extremists once and for all that terror will have no place in a Palestinian state.
Now, in the same spirit, Condi is touring the region and she’s intent on showing what a reliable helper the U.S. wants to be by handing out weapons like Christmas gifts.
What the administration is demonstrating — for the umpteenth time — is that the abuse of language has an effect: In short order your words come to mean nothing.
The only unambiguous message that this administration has managed to convey is that its word carries no weight. “Help,” “democracy,” “peace,” “progress,” — these have as much substance as bubbles floating in a breeze. They glisten, then vanish.