August 03, 2006
Same story once again...
Dean Barnett, on the media, Same Old Story...
In the last three wars involving the Free World vs. the Terrorists, the media have described each war with the exact same pathetically off-base narrative. It goes something like this:PART I: Panic. We’re stuck in a quagmire! The obstacles are insurmountable! Victory is unachievable....
PART II: Ignorant second guessing of military strategy. And I mean “ignorant” here in a strictly non-pejorative sense. The people who were saying America’s plan to eliminate the Taliban was hopeless didn’t have the vaguest familiarity with either military history or modern tactics....
PART III: Self flagellation. This is the ugliest part of the narrative. Here, the focus shifts entirely away from the depravities of the enemy, both those achieved and those intended, and moves exclusively on to the damage done by the forces of freedom. A war photographer begins every day at a Gaza morgue to record the death poses of slain Palestinians....
PART IV: Whoops! Afghanistan was supposed to be the burial ground of empires. Whoops! Saddam could not be toppled without fierce block-by-block street fighting, the kind that American forces couldn’t do well at. Whoops!
And now the narrative is that Israel is doing poorly with Hezbollah.....[I've condensed all this; he's got lots more details.]
I actually think that these are not "three wars," but rather three campaigns in the same war. We've made a mistake in allowing leftists to define our terms here. We've allowed them to say that we are in a "war with Iraq," as if this were something with no connection to 9/11 or the general WoT. Even that Iraq is a "distraction" from the War (though al Qaeda obviously doesn't think so).
Anyway, it is fascinating to watch the media treating Israel the same way they treat America. And entirely appropriate. Israel is us. They are the one other country that built itself, out of the raw material of refugees from European religious and economic and political oppression.
Leftists hate Israel for precisely the same reasons that they hate America. Both are symbols of Judeo-Christian and capitalist values cut loose from the control of traditional elites, and showing by their success and alive-ness just how utterly false those elite ideologies are.
And leftists instinctively side with Arabs, even the most vile and brutal terrorists, because they are symbolically (and of course in reality) trying to preserve old dead tyrannies against the vigor of Israel and America. and, to a lesser extant, the Anglosphere in general.
It was absolutely predictable that the same people who think America has reacted too strongly to 9/11 also say that Israel has reacted "disproportionately" to unprovoked attacks and thousands of rockets raining down on civilian areas.
Posted by John Weidner at August 3, 2006 08:56 AM"We've allowed them to say that we are in a "war with Iraq," as if this were something with no connection to 9/11 or the general WoT."
Pardon my ignorance, but could you please explain to a "slimy", "addle-pate" blue-state "worm" such as myself exactly what involvement Iraq had with 9/11?
Is it that all countries that have lots of people named "Hassan" in them natually share an overarching objective of terrorizing us off the face of the earth, and so we needn't mind the niggling details of which ones actually support international terrorism or represent the level of threat to us that would justify a military response?
Can you name any nation-building exercises similar to the one we're currently prosecuting in Iraq (i.e. large size country with a politically balkanized and grievance-laden populace that didn't invite anyone to "help" rearrange their society) where a military invasion achieved the intended political end?
And why do you presume Iraq would be any different in face of the overwhelming body of expert opinion of early 2003 that stated that such a project would require a committment of troops 2-3 times the size of the one we deployed and consume several hundreds of billions of dollars in resources?
As an aside, frequent name-calling is usually a sign of insecurity. Forgive the armchair psychology, but if you really felt that your positions were as unassailable as you say you do, you would simply bolster them with well-sourced facts rather than constantly using derogatives to describe people with whom you disagree.
Posted by: Erik Midtskogen at August 9, 2006 01:45 PMI never said Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 attack. (Though with the evidence that is emerging of Iraq/al Qaeda ties, it's clearly possible.)
The war we are in is not the "War Against 9/11 Perpetrators," it's the War on Terror. We are at war with ALL the Islamic terror groups. (Which is simply good sense, since they can morph and change names at will, and often include the same personnel.)
Saddam's regime was openly supporting terrorist groups, which had helped kill both Americans and many citizens of our allies. (Including support to Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and bounties paid to terrorists who killed Jews.) So we had a perfect right to invade Iraq, (far more than we had to invade French Morocco or occupy Iceland in WWII) and the only question to ask was whether it was a correct move to help win the war.
I have listed my reasons why I think this was best move to make after Afghanistan.
"Can you name any nation-building exercises". Not quite like this, but democracy has taken hold in some pretty unlikely places, it has been growing at a rate of 1 1/2 countries a year for decades, and the mass of Iraqi people seem to grasp and like the concept. But it may fail. Yes indeed. And you know what? I reject with the utmost scorn and contempt your cowardly hand-wringing sniveling suggestion that we should not attempt anything bold and risky and un-tried. That we should never fail. You condemn yourself. That's one of the main reasons you lefties are out of power, and will remain so for a generation or two. (And by the way, we have a 12-trillion dollar economy. We can spend hundreds-of-billions without working up a sweat.)
And I sometimes call people names because I blog purely for my own fun, and it's fun to blow off steam. I don't give a damn what people think. If this was an important blog that might influence public opinion, I would be more disciplined in my rhetoric.
Posted by: John Weidner at August 9, 2006 05:37 PM
