Ye Olde Trashfalke

by digby

If it weren’t for all the blood and death, this would almost be humorous:

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Robert Farley rightly notes:

while the challenge to Al-Qaeda’s manhood is charming in a fourteenth century kind of way, I seriously doubt that the insurgent leadership is as stupid as, say, Right Blogistan or the braintrust of the Bush administration. Indeed, the idea that fleeing superior numbers, firepower, and technology is somehow “unmanly” is rather quaint; I suspect that insurgents would be happy enough if we threw down our tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets, and armored personal carriers and settled this dispute by Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Yes indeed. But as humorous as this is, the startling truth is that the Bush administration’s entire GWOT strategy is based upon this kind of silliness. They actually believe that these ayrabs only attacked us cuz they thought we wuz a buncha lily-livered pansies. They’re primitives who don’t have our kinda suffisticated unnerstandin’ so we gotta git down tah their level and show em wut a real man is.

Don’t take my word for it. This is the group that distributed a discredited “anthropological” tome from the 70’s called “The Arab Mind,” to members of the administration and the military, the thesis of which dwelled to an unseemly degree on the idea that Arabs (who are all alike by the way) are so hung up on sex that the way to get to them is through sexual humiliation. (Good thing that crackpot idea was never put into practice, eh?)

If you are still not convinced, perhaps the neocon granddaddy, Norm-Pod himself will convince you. All of em, from Nixon to Carter to St Ronnie to Clinton were nothing but a bunch of big babies who let those brown bastards get away with murder. Real men lash out in violent rage at the least provocation, lest 20 years later, some loser in Afghanistan thinks he’s soft:

[T]o the extent that American passivity and inaction opened the door to 9/11, neither Democrats nor Republicans, and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in a position to derive any partisan or ideological advantage. The reason, quite simply, is that much the same methods for dealing with terrorism were employed by the administrations of both parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon in 1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes, Ronald Reagan), George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to the pre-9/11 George W. Bush.
The record speaks dismally for itself. From 1970 to 1975, during the administrations of Nixon and Ford, several American diplomats were murdered in Sudan and Lebanon while others were kidnapped. The perpetrators were all agents of one or another faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In Israel, too, many American citizens were killed by the PLO, though, except for the rockets fired at our embassy and other American facilities in Beirut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), these attacks were not directly aimed at the United States. In any case, there were no American military reprisals.

Our diplomats, then, were for some years already being murdered with impunity by Muslim terrorists when, in 1979, with Carter now in the White House, Iranian students—with either the advance or subsequent blessing of the country’s clerical ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini—broke into the American embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans as hostages. For a full five months, Carter dithered. At last, steeling himself, he authorized a military rescue operation which had to be aborted after a series of mishaps that would have fit well into a Marx Brothers movie like Duck Soup if they had not been more humiliating than comic. After 444 days, and just hours after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were finally released by the Iranians, evidently because they feared that the hawkish new President might actually launch a military strike against them.

Yet if they could have foreseen what was coming under Reagan, they would not have been so fearful. In April 1983, Hizbullah—an Islamic terrorist organization nourished by Iran and Syria—sent a suicide bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still.

Six months later, in October 1983, another Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.

Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity).

It goes on, if you can stomach it. This article lays the neocon case out in all its glory. Of course, the neocons barely mentioned terrorism prior to 9/11, obsessed as they were with Israeli politics, China, Iraq and North Korea, but after the attacks they suddenly discovered that this had been the animating feature of global politics for decades.

But I don’t think we are talking about policy at all. We are talking about psychology. And it isn’t confined to the neocons, although they gave this psychology an intellectual veneer. The conservatives generally, evidently including members of the top military brass, seem to be driven by a primitive fear not of attack or physical violence, but of humiliation. This is what makes them tick and it’s the essence of what’s gone wrong since 9/11.

Terrorism is a tactic for spreading fear, to be sure, but because it is an elusive, nettlesome sort of warfare, it’s also quite effective at tweaking the massive egos of these manly western warriors who seem to have extreme difficulty dealing with the juvenile taunts and sophomoric trash talk that characterizes so much of the Islamic extremist rhetoric. I get why the extremists do it — chest pounding rhetoric is all they have. But it is unworthy and counterproductive for a great nation to play their game. Yet from the moment George W. Bush stood on that rubble and shouted puerile threats into the bullhorn like the high school cheerleader he was, that’s exactly the game we’ve been playing. The invasion of Iraq was just a massive exercise in preening, unctuous, muscle flexing.

The problem, of course, is that once you prove you are too muscle bound to move quickly and effectively, calling the other side “cowards” for failing to confront you actually is humiliating. And stupid. Your opponent just laughs while he runs circles around you.

If you need further proof of stunted wingnut psychology, Jonathan at ATR has the latest on Fred “the surge” Kagan, who is now whining that the Democrats didn’t properly taking Bush to task for his conduct of the war. (Yeah… I know.)

Oh, and Stormin Norman Podhoretz is still trash talking with the best of them: we must bomb Iran. As a way of “sending a message,” of course, to wogs everywhere who deign to challenge the size of America’s huge swinging manhood.

Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought. Alas, we are far from knowing what the outcome of World War IV will be. But in the meantime, looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization: it has been called, rightly, Islamization. Consider, for example, what happened when, only a few weeks ago, the Iranians captured fifteen British sailors and marines and held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that it ruled the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were immediately released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, using force was the last thing in the world the British contemplated doing, as they made sure to announce. Instead they relied on the “soft power” so beloved of “sophisticated” Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the UN, under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express “grave concern.”

Enough, already. These Republican grown-ups are all a bunch of emotionally damaged head cases. We are in desperate need of mature leadership.

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