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Saturday, October 30, 2004
THE POLITICS OF TERRORISM.
The re-emergence
of Osama bin Laden raises a
natural question three days before the presidential election: who
benefits politically? This is dicey territory, and it's easy to come
off as flip or disrespectful. But since bin Laden almost certainly
wants to influence the outcome of the election, we ought to
try to figure out what he's looking for. Not that it should change our minds about anything.
I can't seem to find the link this
morning - I remember seeing it on Slate, but maybe it was
elsewhere - but I subscribe to the bipartisan view that bin Laden
would like to see George W. Bush win, because he's such a great
recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, but that the Iraqi insurgents would
like to see John Kerry win, because they're convinced he'll cut a
deal (or cut and run). So, terroristically speaking, it's a wash.
Now, if it's true that bin Laden
wants Bush, then it's fascinating to see how he weaves in bits from
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, including the part about Bush
continuing to read My Pet Goat to the schoolchildren after the
second World Trade Center tower had been hit. Kerry has adopted some
of this rhetoric in his own campaign. Nothing wrong with that - Bush
should be criticized for his seeming inability to excuse
himself politely and get to work in the midst of Pearl Harbor II.
Atmospherically, though, it can't help Kerry to have bin Laden
delivering the same lines during the campaign's final
hours. Is that deliberate on bin Laden's part?
And by the way, Kerry has been
getting ripped lately for being a Monday-morning quarterback by
criticizing Bush for "outsourcing" the job of killing bin Laden after
he'd escaped to Tora Bora. The New York Times' David Brooks
has a column
today that's typical.
Well, fine. But shouldn't Kerry's
critics point out that Monday morning took place not during this
campaign but in June 2002? That's when Kerry appeared on Meet the
Press and leveled that criticism for the first time.
Kerry
said:
Al Qaeda, a thousand
strong, was gathered in one single mountain area, Tora Bora, and
we turned to Afghans, who a week earlier had been fighting for the
other side, and said, "Hey, you guys go up there in the mountains
and go after the world's number-one terrorist and criminal who
just killed 3000-plus Americans." I think that was an enormous
mistake. I think the Tora Bora operation was a failed military
operation.... And the fact is that the prime target, Al Qaeda, has
dispersed and in many ways is more dangerous than it was when it
was in the mountains of Tora Bora.
HUMAN TOUCH. The stakes in
this election are so high that it's almost impossible not to
personalize everything. If you're a regular Media Log reader, then
you know that I think Bush is the worst president since Richard
Nixon, and that the war in Iraq was by far the biggest foreign-policy
blunder since Vietnam - maybe bigger. And on and on: tax cuts for the
rich, the environment, civil liberties, etc., etc. You know the
drill.
Anyway, I want you to read
this
post ("Bush for President")
by John Ellis about his cousin. I know Ellis a bit and like him. He
has been unfairly skewered for doing his job at Fox News four years
ago - that is, calling Florida for Bush and, like everyone else,
getting it wrong. Ellis does not change my mind about anything. But
it's a useful reminder that Bush is human, and that - though I find
his arrogant, bird-flipping,
good-old-boy act incredibly off-putting - in his private life he's a
perfectly fine person.
When it's all over, be it Wednesday
morning or January 2009, I think the tragedy of the Bush presidency
will be that he lacked the wisdom, the judgment, and the maturity to
know enough not to surround himself with the likes of
Dick
Cheney and Karl Rove, and to do everything they tell him.
Bush is not my kind of guy. Remember
his mocking
Karla Faye Tucker after her
execution? I think the country's future depends on his losing on
Tuesday. But still, we should remember that there's an actual person
behind the caricature.
WHO'S WINNING? Oh, who
knows? Electoral-Vote.com:
Bush, 280; Kerry 243. Slate:
Kerry, 272; Bush, 266. Zogby:
Kerry, 47 percent; Bush, 46 percent. (Four years ago at this time:
Bush, 46 percent; Gore, 42 percent.) Real
Clear Politics: Bush, 48.7
percent; Kerry, 46.2 percent.
posted at 10:58 AM |
5 comments
|
link
5 Comments:
Did OBL have to see Farenheit 9-11 to learn about "My Pet Goat" and the other stuff? It's certainly possible, but those 7 minutes were well known before Moore's bit of agitprop ever came out and it's not like the film was anything but a compilation of already known facts/conspiracy theories. It just seems to be a conclusion a lot of the pundits are wetting themselves over.
What I find amazing is this passage - something that could have come out of the halls of any of our country's major universities. Think Chomsky, Zinn, Vidal, all people I happen to admire. But bin Laden's comments here are eerily similar to the rantings of the American left:
"We didn't find difficulty dealing with Bush and his administration due to the similarity of his regime and the regimes in our countries. Which half of them are ruled by military and the other half by sons of kings and presidents and our experience with them is long. Both parties are arrogant and stubborn and the greediness and taking money without right and that similarity appeared during the visits of Bush to the region while people from our side were impressed by the U.S. and hoped that these visits would influence our countries. Here he is being influenced by these regimes, royal and military. And was feeling jealous they were staying for decades in power stealing the nations' finances without anybody overseeing them. So he transferred the oppression of freedom and tyranny to his son, and they call it the Patriot Law to fight terrorism. He was bright in putting his sons as governors in states, and he didn't forget to transfer his experience from the rulers of our region to Florida to falsify elections to benefit from it in critical times."
Is this actually bin Laden on the tape? It is a digitally enhanced video, like they did with Tony Soprano's mom after she died but was still needed on the series? Could they have cooked this up somewhere like "Capricorn One" or something?
Of course Osama wants Kerry to win. Osama will look strong and America weak if Bush loses. It would give Osama an incredible boost. He would get far more recruits and money than he could ever hope to gain from his hopeless struggle against America's military might.
And, yo, Anon, don't fool yourself into thinking that there's anything imaginative about the raging ant-Americanism of your university heroes. Their non-sensical babbling was old before they started.
I object only to the vilification of Richard Nixon. While personally unpleasant and perhaps a tad paranoid, he did amazingly un-Republican things as president: opening China, detente with Russia, wage and price controls, greatly expanding the Great Society. Sometimes all we remember is Watergate - the political nastiness - or Vietnam, a war he inherited, but as federal policymaker he wasn't really that bad.
Unlike, say, just to pick someone at random - oh, George W. Bush ...
Whether you think the bin Laden video helps Kerry or Bush is pretty meaningless to me. It was the immediate reaction to the video from each candidate that surprised me. Or in Bush's case his press secretary. The Bush camp basically did the same old song and dance about 'hating our way of life' and 'hating freedom'.
People don't seem to connect the fact the 9/11 attack was revenge and not preemptive on the part of al Qaeda. George Bush refuses to acknowledge the real reasons for 9/11 and it is that arrogant [or naive] attitude that I think makes Bush the biggest threat to our security in America.
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
