Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said a litany of comments by Democratic elected officials and their liberal allies underscored Rove’s point. “It is outrageous,” he said, “that the same Democratic leaders who refused to repudiate or criticize Dick Durbin’s slandering of our military are now attacking Karl Rove for stating the facts. . . . Karl didn’t say the Democratic Party. He said liberals.”
I think the thing that gets me the most is this kind of insulting nonsense, particularly after enduring years of snotty whining about “what the definition of is, is.”
For the record, the president ran entire campaign last year on the premise that the Democratic party’s nominee was a liberal. He was chosen, pretty much without challenge after February, by Democrats throughout the land. More people voted for him than any Democratic nominee in history. I know it seems like years ago, but it was only eight months ago that the president was saying this sort of thing every single day on the stump:
THE PRESIDENT:My opponent now has a running mate. I look forward to a spirited debate. Senator Kerry is rated as the most liberal member of the Senate, and he chose a fellow lawyer who is the fourth most liberal member of the Senate. Back in Massachusetts, that’s what they call balancing the ticket. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: There is a mainstream in American politics and John Kerry sits on the far left bank. (Applause.) He can run from his liberal philosophy, but he cannot hide. (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: But you’re not going to have fiscal sanity if John Kerry is the President. He’s been the most liberal member of the United States Senate, which means he likes to spend your money. That’s what that means. Now, he can try to run from his record, but I’m not going to let him hide. (Applause.)
He isn’t the only one:
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: On the core values of this great country, it’s a choice between our President, who has advocated and supported these values throughout his career, and his opponent, who is the most liberal member of the United States Senate.
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY:But the problem has been, frankly, that the Senate Democrats including Senators Kerry and Edwards — have consistently supported that filibuster that kept Bill Myers off the 9th Circuit; kept Priscilla Owens, of Texas, from getting to the floor for a vote; it kept Charles Pickering, from Mississippi, from getting to the floor for a vote. Anybody that might disagree with their liberal philosophy isn’t allowed to come up to a vote on the floor of the Senate, and that’s wrong. (Applause.)
JOHN MCCAIN: And someday, the Democrats will be in the majority. And then the scenario would be, a liberal Democrat president, liberal Democrat judges-liberal judges, and great damage.
You can go to the link and find scores of quotes from Republicans in which liberal and Democrat are interchangeable and which it is claimed that John Kerry the nominee of the Democratic party for president is an extreme liberal. I think it’s pretty clear that when they are talking about “liberals” they are talking about the Democratic party.
And that’s just fine with me. The Republicans wear their “conservative” label with pride and go out of their way to claim it. It’s one of their strengths. We, on the other hand, run from the name they have turned into an all around epithet for their political opposition. There’s no getting away from it — that is a fantasy — so we might as well embrace it. I never stopped.
lib·er·al
1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. 2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. 3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of liberalism. 4. Liberal Of, designating, or characteristic of a political party founded on or associated with principles of social and political liberalism, especially in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.
Karl Rove was talking about the Democratic Party. If Ken Mehlman wants to start distinguishing among us then it’s time to name names. Just who are the “liberals” who wanted to give bin Laden therapy?
I’m going to be very rude here and quote an entire post from Glen Smith on BOP. (Do click over to read the comments.) I think it’s important that people think about this:
Karl Rove’s un-American attacks on those who disagree with him deserve the condemnation they’re receiving. I’ve known him for 20 years, and I’m not surprised he said them. He’s a socially inept but patient thug whose willingness to haunt the nation’s dark political alleys for years, waiting for the right time and the right victims, is too often taken for unparalleled political intelligence.
Being attacked by Rove is a little like being criticized by the Boston Strangler. At least you know you’re alive. If we want to understand Rove, maybe we should get an FBI profiler.
Rove’s a hack. His strength comes from his immorality. There are no barriers. If power didn’t corrupt, Rove would have corrupted it.
I’ve been on the road in America for much of the last two years. I’m asked all the time about the need for Democrats to find their own Karl Rove. If we ever find such a monster in our midst, we should exile him.
I like the black hat Rove wears, but it troubles me that so many people believe he really is a political genius. He’s just pathological.
For years I’ve suspected that Rove is stuck in an adolescent rage, taking revenge upon the Civil Rights marchers (whose courage he couldn’t match), the anti-war organizers (who beat him), and those who believe in and struggle for democracy (who drove off Nixon).
I don’t recommend therapy for Bin Laden. But Rove might give Dr. Laura a call.
I am currently working on a project about Rove and have done a lot of research on how people perceive him as compared to his actual success. I agree with the assessment above. He is highly overrated as a strategist — indeed Democrats have imputed to him almost magical powers to shape events in the most complicated ways. It’s much simpler than that.
He is just someone who has no limits. And he has a client and a party that are willing to do as he advises. That is a powerful thing, but it is not genius. It is useful in elections, but it is a disaster in governance, as we are seeing. Brute force cannot accomplish every task, as any plumber or mechanic can tell you.
But barring a total meltdown, which is unlikely, Rove is going to be running the Republican party for some time to come. We need to start looking at this man realistically. The key is that the Republicans think he’s magical too.
Q Scott, just again on Karl’s remarks last night, when he talked about the indictments, was he simply reflecting the sentiments of the President, who, as we know, in many, many speeches, perhaps in jest, talked about referring to the terrorists as saying maybe they thought after 9/11, we would just file a lawsuit?
MR. McCLELLAN: The war on terrorism brought us, to our shores — let me back up, because the President — this was talked about at length over the course of the last four years, Ed.
[snip]
And I think all Karl was talking about last night was the different approaches to how you go about winning the war on terrorism. So, you know, some can try to make more out of it than they should, but he was simply talking about the different approaches.
Q So when the President many times in the past actually has evoked laughter from his audiences when he talked about they thought we’d just filing a lawsuit, was he saying that in jest or not?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, Ed. In fact, he was saying it with all seriousness, because if you look back to how things were dealt with prior to 9/11, people knew exactly what he was talking about. When we were attacked previously on our own shores, people were prosecuted.
Of course, it wasn’t exactly “filing a lawsuit.” It was a federal terrorist prosecution. And the perpetrators are locked up for life. We gave them due process and convicted them without any torture at all. There is no question of their guilt, the American people and the entire world have all the facts and we didn’t have to use the constitution as toilet paper to do it. What a failure. We should have picked them up, thrown a bag over their heads, rolled them in their own excrement and put them in a naked pyramid to blow off some steam. Perhaps then 9/11 could have been prevented.
And please don’t tell me that Republicans still think we should have invaded Iraq after the first World Trade Center Bombing. The nutball Myleroie cabal have said for years that Ramsi Yousef, the missing conspirator, is really an Iraqi operative under an assumed identity and Wolfowitz and Perle both blurbed her books about it glowingly. It’s total delusional crap and the fact that these high level Bush officials put their impramatur on it should have been a huge tip-off to the entire world that the Bush administration had some scary freaks in charge of the war machine. Fifty years from now they’ll still be insisting this nonsense is proof of a conspiracy and will probably be saying that martians hijacked the WMD on orders from Barbara Boxer.
As for 9/11, I think it’s just a little bit presumptuous for anyone to blame the criminal trials of the first world trade center bombings for it when the Bush administration didn’t think the August PDB was worth shortening the Pres’s vacation for. There is ample proof that Bush and the Iraq obsessed retreads didn’t give a busted fuck about terrorism until 9/11.
Oh, and by the way, we still don’t have Osama bin Laden even though the head of the CIA says we know where he is. And we can’t get him because it might upset some sensitive relations with “sovereign nations” which is really rich considering that we have put forth a doctrine that says we can invade any sovereign nation we please if we think a “threat is gathering” or “they hate us for our freedom.” It’s called the Bush Doctrine and it pretty much puts to rest any illusions anyone in the world should have about “sovereignty” or international law. Sovereighty and international law is what we say it is.
And can there be any doubt that Al Jazeera is broadcasting Porter Goss’ words all over the arab world and making the US Government look weak and ineffectual? Talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy:
CIA Director Porter Goss says he has an “excellent idea” where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the al Qaeda chief will not be caught until weak links in the war on terrorism are strengthened.
In an interview with TIME magazine published Sunday, Goss said part of the difficulty in capturing bin Laden was “sanctuaries in sovereign nations.”
The magazine asked Goss when bin Laden would be captured.
“That is a question that goes far deeper than you know,” he said. “In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we’re probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice.
“We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you’re dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play.
Yeah, that Republican “philosophy” on terrorism is very impressive. The mastermind of 9/11 is holed up in a “soverign country” and we know it, but we can’t do anything about it. Meanwhile, we have low-level nobodies down in Guantanamo being forced into excruciating immobile positions for 18 hours a day, sitting in their own urine and feces, being slowly driven mad. This is a very interesting interpretation of international obligation and “fair play.”
Amd of course, we have Iraq — the inexplicable war that nobody really understands, including those who willingly spew happy horseshit about “freedom and democracy” every five minutes — a war that’s costing us our future (to the tune of a billion a week) and the future of America’s kids, for no good goddamned reason.
So, please let’s talk some more about how liberals don’t know how to fight the war on terror. Tell us again how tough the Republicans are and how only they know how to protect the United States because all I’m seeing is fuck-up after fuck-up after fuck-up. In fact, what I’m seeing is the biggest non-stop fuck-up in American history.
But who knows, maybe they stomped their little feet and held their breath til they turned blue and insisted in no uncertain terms that bin Laden be denied “therapy and understanding” in his friendly sovereign haven. That’s what separates the men from the boys, my friends. Therapy.
And, by the way, here’s one of Bush’s quotes about “filing lawsuits” from 2002. Perhaps Democrats ought to arm themselves with this for when the Republicans start trotting out the “file a lawsuit” line:
I can’t imagine what was going through the minds of the killers when they hit America. Oh, they must have thought we were so materialistic and selfish, so self-absorbed that after September the 11th we’d file a lawsuit or two. (Laughter.)
But they found out that we’re thinking a little differently in America, and that when it comes to our freedom we will do what it takes to defend freedom. And I want to remind you all that this is a long struggle that’s going to take a while, that there are al-Qaida killers still on the loose. There are people who hate America, they hate what we stand for, they hate the fact that Democrats and Republicans both love our country equally. They hate the idea that we worship freely. They hate the concept that we debate issues in open. They hate freedom. They just hate it. And they are going to try to hurt us; they are.
That makes this Rove spew an official shitstorm. When a sanctioned “good Democrat” who is known for his support of the war and his moral rectitude says that Karl needs to apologise, the somnambulent establishment wakes up. (If only he’d step up on torture and presidential lying to get us into the war we might really get someplace.)
The big question is whether we are seeing miscues by the administration or whether they are simply trying to rile up the base to change the conversation. Some signs point to a tactical decision. Bush himself recently gave quite a petulant little speech recently in which he blamed all his troubles on the Democrats (I guess having a majority in both houses just isn’t what it used to be) — although he didn’t stoop to puerile Ann Coulter level snottiness as Rove did. The message is pretty consistent:
President Bush on Tuesday unleashed his harshest criticism yet on Democrats for thwarting his second-term agenda, demanding they put forward ideas of their own or “step aside” and signaling a more aggressive administration strategy of attack.
[…]
Bush said the Democrats, in contrast, were employing a “philosophy of the stop sign” and an “agenda of the road block,” and warned: “Political parties that choose the path of obstruction will not gain the trust of the American people.”
He issued a challenge to the Democrats: “If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let’s hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.”
Their timing is off, though, if this is by design. In the post below, I wrote that Durbin’s forced apology was just the most recent ritual humiliation of many.It’s a patented technique — outraged phony sanctimony over something obscure and misunderstood. It’s theoretically possible that because of the very recent strong-arming of Durbin, a very popular senator, that the Democrats are still smarting and have decided to pull out their big guns and go for it. I don’t know how many of you saw John McCain’s very smug and threatening “prediction” last Sunday that Durbin would apologise, but it was kind of chilling. It was obvious that the Republicans were going for blood, and they luckily found good old meathead Richie Daley to be their useful idiot for them.
For Rove to go after the Democrats so explicitly by saying that liberals wanted to give bin Laden therapy and understanding after 9/11 is throwing down the gauntlet. Those are fighting words and they know it. Check out the gaggle to see just how ridiculous it is to try to spin them. Also check out the video over on Crooks and Liars to see how nervous and flat Rove sounds. Perhaps he always sounds nervous and flat, I don’t know. But his remarks didn’t seem to penetrate to the crowd, so maybe the red meat isn’t working all that well. Or maybe it’s because he chose conservative New Yorkers who aren’t quite as convinced that liberals are all traitors. They likely know quite a few. In fact many of them are probably intermarried with them and everything.
The press looks like it’s willing to chase this story and the White House is acting very flat-footed. Look for Bush to dig in his heels, however. He does not like to be challenged. I suspect that yesterday’s Frist freakshow was a function of Bush simply refusing to accept reality. He had to jettison Kerik and I think he’s still pissed about it. Bolton is also his boy — a snarling bully. (How much do you want to bet that Bush would love to rip off that rug and rub that bald head until it shines? Just as a show of manly affection … and to make sure he knows who’s boss.)
If Rove is crumbling publicly, I’d love to see what’s going on behind the scenes in the White House. Social Security privatization, a Rovian pet project, is dead. The polls are showing serious weakness only 6 months into his second term. Being a lame duck for three and a half years would be excruciating, particularly with a dead albatross named Iraq around your neck. Let’s just say I don’t think they are able to “compartmentalize” very well.
Now’s the time for reporters who have so carefully maintained maintained their access, to call in some chits. This is when all the whoring is supposed to pay off — when things go to hell on the inside. I’ll be watching for it with bated breath.
In the meantime, it’s probably a very good idea to communicate with your representatives on this as Atrios and others are advising — and not just the Republicans. The Democrats also need to know that their constituents are behind them.
Or, if you’re so inclined, sign the Fire Karl Rove petition.
Update: According to John Aravosis, who is as astute about these things as anyone around, says this is a coordinated plan. It’s risky. They are going to try to bludgeon their way through these poor poll numbers and convince people that Bush is a great president because he is so tough and strong. The question is whether they can squeeze out one more drop from 9/11. My sense is that this is pretty thin gruel and the people are tired of it. We’ll see.
What we are looking at here is a stark illustration of what political speech is in this country, what the right wing has known for some time, and what liberals and centrists are belatedly coming to understand – it is a way of expressing and exerting power. I’m not saying that reasoned political debate is useless – it is essential to democracy – I’m saying that the O’Reilly-ized political climate is so pathological at this point that to treat political discourse with the right as anything other than an exercise in brute force is to concede without a fight. So, sticking with the torture issue, it is worse than pointless to get into the debates that the right wing wants to have – what if there was a ticking bomb? how can one define torture to infinite precision? what are appropriate and inappropriate historical analogies? – are distractions, and distractions by design. Guantanimo Bay is a fantastic place where all guilty brown people recieve far better than they deserve and anyone who says different hates America; then, lose a few contracts and stir up some bad publicity and, suddenly, there are all these shades of grey you never considered. Amazing, that.
Yeah. And don’t count on the press to sort it out. Like Monsignor Tim sez “You get it from the left and the right, and I think that kind of confirms you’re doing a pretty good job..”
How convenient, eh? Gray is the color of dirty dishwater, no matter what the shade.
Check out BagNewsnotes’ deconstruction (click on the picture to the left) of the Bill Clinton “mouth-kissing” photo from Ed Klein’s hatchet job — which Drudge took to the next level by cropping and darkening it, completely changing its context. It turns out the photographer is none too pleased about what either of the rightwing scumbags Klein or Drudge did to his picture.
(And it turns out that this photo was taken right after Clinton’s heart surgery at a huge outdoor Kerry rally. Is that Clinton a real man or what? Soul kissing poor unsuspecting Kerry supporters with photographers all over the place and his heart barely pumping. Damn.)
I haven’t read the full hatchet job and probably won’t until I can find it at a used book store where I won’t be lining his (or Sentinel’s) pockets. The Vanity Fair excerpt was enough to make me puke. From what I can tell, the whole book is a thinly disguised “outing” of Hillary Clinton, which after reading the excerpt, one would surely believe — and yet not exactly know why. He doesn’t come out and say it, he just says things like this:
Over the years, Thomases had become Hillary’s best friend, alter ago, and chief enforcer. She looked the part. With her frizzy salt and pepper hair, frumpy clothes, down-at heels shoes and expletive laden vocabulary, Thomases was just the kind of tough, strong-willed, ideologically passionate woman Hillary had always admired…Thomases was anything but a traditional political wife: she kept her own name after marrying carpenter-turned-artist, [the late] William Bettridge, who stayed home and took on many of the child care responsibilities.
This is the same guy who claimed in his “Walter Scott” parade column that Chelsea was a slut — “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He is a despicable prick.
But what’s interesting here is that the anti-Hillary forces haven’t yet settled on a storyline. For some reason, some of the big kahunas are distancing themselves from it.. I don’t know if it’s because all this lesbo talk makes Hillary look “tough enough” to lead the war on terror or because they are squeamish about saying Hillary is a lesbian who to all intents and purposes has done exactly as they say gays should do — marry a man and live as a straight woman. I certainly understand that many of them may be a little bit worried that a lot of this sounds an awful lot like an attack on working women. Hillary has always benefitted from these kinds of attacks on her.
LIMBAUGH: Yeah, I think that’s a distinct possibility. I mean, if you want to talk about conspiracies, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this whole thing is a left-wing idea — put the book out there, label it a right-wing hatchet job, and use that to inoculate any information in the book or to inoculate her against any criticism down the road. Forget what’s in the book, but just say, “Well, you can’t believe the critics. They’re all right-wingers.”
It’s sort of like good old Donovan McNabb. The guy is very lucky. Because I deigned to criticize the media’s coverage of McNabb, McNabb is now inoculated against any criticism whatsoever by media people in the NFL. Because they don’t dare risk being on the same side of the issue with me. So, you know, that’s why McNabb wants to hire me or should hire me as his marketing agent because he’s been inoculated against criticism.
Well, the same thing with Hillary here. Hillary, because of this book, the real risk is that after this book comes out and if the press successfully tars and feathers the right for having anything to do with this it’s gonna — any further criticism of her down the line after this book will be shrugged off as, “Ah, it’s no big deal,” to personalize it again.
[…]
What really ticks me off about this is that this whole Hillary book has nothing to do with anybody in the conservative wing of any party. It has nothing to do with a bunch of right-wingers. No right-winger wrote the book. No right-winger collaborated — well, there might have been.
I don’t know about that, but I do know that no right-winger wrote it and no right-winger works at this publishing house, and it’s not a right wing publishing house. They may have a conservative imprint, and that’s another thing. I forget who published this book, but this is the first book in their new “conservative imprint.” Well, that alone is designed to discredit the thing. Don’t you think? With the mainstream — “Oh, yeah, probably just another one of these Regnery books. Ah, it’s probably just somebody from Human Events. Ah, it’s something out there from The American Spectator. You can’t trust these people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
[…]
And it’s the same thing — that if I can go back to it — this Hillary book. This Hillary book, even though it’s written and published by a bunch of left-wingers, this Hillary book is all of a sudden the fault of Republicans and conservatives — conservatives are trying to trash Hillary. We had nothing to do with this book.
It just shows up in the stores today, so it’s just the same old thing. Democrats accuse Republicans of doing what they, the Democrats, do.
(I’m always shocked at how incoherent he is. But anyway…)
The only time I remember a book being pre-emptively discredited and thus innoculating a politician from further inquiry into a personal matter was the Bush book by J.H. Hatfield, which a lot of people believe may have been a set-up to do exactly what Limbaugh suggests. If Hillary’s people have actually engineered this the way Limabugh says they have, then hallaujah. We’re finally playing by the same rules. Go Hillary.
Needless to say, I really doubt it. The Bush stuff was never fully aired, but if anybody thinks there’s even one thing about Bill and Hillary’s sexuality that hasn’t been cut up and autopsied by the entire alumni of the Barbizon School of blond former prosecutors, they are kidding themselves. Hillary doesn’t need to innoculate against being called a lesbian — she is already widely referred to on the right as Hitlery fergawdsake. If innoculation requires that a scurrilous accusation against someone is discredited due to lack of credibility of the accuser, then Hillary has been vaccinated and innoculated against every fetid Republican lie imaginable. They’ve all been said a million times, by the entire right wing establishment, for more than 15 years. It’s not like Ed Klein’s swill is anything new.
Clearly, there is something about this book that is spooking the right. It’s a full-on smear job in the best tradition of Republican smear jobs, so even if it isn’t a sanctioned Regnery character assasination, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t love it anyway. All that gay bashing and rape talk and sexy analysis of Clinton’s mighty member. You just know it’s the kewl kidz’s and the punditocrisy’s favorite “private” reading material. Yet, the big wingnuts are distancing themselves very publicly and probably hurting sales among the target demographic. The question is, why?
Update: it could be as simple as the right wing noise machine trying to muscle out the competition. That Clinton hating pie is not infinite — there is a limit to how many slices they can get out of it.
Hesiod does an admirable job of addressing the shame, impotence and anger many of us feel every time one of these faux outrage fests on the right result in a Democrat giving a teary eyed apology for something he didn’t actually do. This has become a political form of ritual humiliation and it is one of the main reasons why we are having so much trouble politically in this macho era.
Indeed, these ritual humiliations actually serve as proxies for a political war in which it is not only required that a Democrat grovel, but that he grovel insincerely — it’s important that he be seen by his own party to be rejecting reality and embracing the Republican (also insincere) alternate version of the truth. It is an exercise of purer power in which the cackling courtiers of the media also hold the Democrat’s metaphorical feet to the fire as a measure of their own fealty to the established order.
The ritual also requires that one Democrat, if not more, join the chorus of condemnation. He or she is publicly acclaimed for “courage” and “integrity” for agreeing that the truth is not the truth. But their real function is to serve as as living examples of disloyalty and weakness to both sides. They are humiliated as well, although they often don’t know it, and many times they continue to serve as universally loathed sycophants to be trotted out as “the good Democrat” whenever the Republicans wish to congratulate themselves on their broadmindedness.
Dick Durbin was reciting from an FBI file, not a story in Pravda. It was a US government document. The contents of that file have not been disputed. They are horrible. His crime was pointing out that if one were to read that file without knowing which country it described, one would assume it from was a repressive regime like Hitler’s Germany. This is indisputably true.
Mayor Daley played the executioner for the right wing humiliation shaman:
“It’s a disgrace and [Durbin] is a good friend of mine. But I think it’s a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military acts like [Nazis] or that a report is like that,” Daley said. “You go and talk to some victims of the Holocaust, and they will tell you horror stories and there are not horror stories like that in Guantanamo Bay.”
It just doesn’t get any worse than that. The report was “like that.” People in the government are acting like that — many of them unwillingly, like the FBI agent who filed that report. Or like Sergeant Joseph Darby who reported the activity at Abu Ghraib (and was treated as a pariah in his home town for doing it.)
I think that it’s time, however, to find a better analogy for what is going on down in Gitmo and Iraq (and the rest of the ghost prison system.) “Gulag” is out. Comparisons to Nazi torture techniques are out. Dick Durbin died for our sins. But I think I have the answer.
We can’t point out the ways in which we are acting like the Nazis or the Russians so perhaps we should just point out all the ways in which we are acting like the … gasp … French. (And I suspect the French would be the first to agree.) From now on, when we or any of our elected representative draw parallels to repressive regimes and their interrogation and torture methods, I think we should specifically cite the French in Algeria.
I don’t know if you remember, but the Pentagon held screenings of “The Battle of Algiers” In August of 2003 (just as we were beginning to realize that the cakewalk had been left out in the rain) for officers and others to discuss the challenge of putting down an “insurgency” in an occupied Muslim country. The interesting thing is that the point of the screening was to show that the French failed strategically because of their tactics. Here’s the Pentagon flier about the movie:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. … Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.
(This wouldn’t be the first time that Bush administration officials used TV and movies to guide their tactical military decisions:
Following one White House meeting at which he’d asked for more time and more troops, Stormin’ Norman reports, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. “My God,” the official supposedly complained. “He’s got all the force he needs. Why won’t he just attack?” Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who’d made the comment “was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he’d been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert.”
And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: “(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns’s PBS series, The Civil War.”
)
The Slate article to which I link above, discusses why “The Battle of Algiers” as a movie is not particularly illustrative of why the French ultimately lost. There were larger issues at play. But even this skeptical view of the film admits that the one thing it gets right is the fact that the French tortured insurgents in Algeria.
What does any of this have to do with Baghdad?
Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called “people’s war.” Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: Its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. “Wars aren’t won with terrorism,” says one key revolutionary. “Neither wars nor revolutions.” But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.
This is where The Battle of Algiers is potentially most valuable and most dangerous as a point of comparison for the U.S. military. While The Battle of Algiers has next to nothing to say about overall French strategy in Algeria, its most obvious military lesson—that torture is an efficient countermeasure to terror—is a dangerous one in this particular instance. Aside from its moral horror, torture may not even elicit accurate information, though the film seems to suggest it is foolproof.
The French military view of torture is articulated by Col. Mathieu in the course of a series of exchanges with French journalists. As reports of torture spread, the issue becomes a scandal in France. Mathieu, however, is unwavering in defense of the practice: To him it is a military necessity. Informed that Jean-Paul Sartre is condemning French tactics, for example, Mathieu responds with a question that would warm Ann Coulter’s heart: “Why are the liberals always on the other side?”
That sure sounds familiar. Colonel Mathieu in the movie is based upon a real French General named General Massu:
In 1971, General Massu wrote a book challenging”The Battle of Algiers,” and the film was banned in France for many years. In his book General Massu, who had been considered by soldiers the personification of military tradition, defended torture as “a cruel necessity.” He wrote: “I am not afraid of the word torture, but I think in the majority of cases, the French military men obliged to use it to vanquish terrorism were, fortunately, choir boys compared to the use to which it was put by the rebels. The latter’s extreme savagery led us to some ferocity, it is certain, but we remained within the law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”
In 2000, his former second in command, Gen. Paul Aussaresses, acknowledged, showing neither doubts nor remorse, that thousands of Algerians “were made to disappear,” that suicides were faked and that he had taken part himself in the execution of 25 men. General Aussaresses said “everybody” knew that such things had been authorized in Paris and he added that his only real regret was that some of those tortured died before they revealed anything useful.
As for General Massu, in 2001 he told interviewers from Le Monde, “Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well.” Asked whether he thought France should officially admit its policies of torture in Algeria and condemn them, he replied: “I think that would be a good thing. Morally torture is something ugly.”
It seems to me that the Pentagon planners who held that screening of “The Battle of Algiers” were, perhaps, trying to get that message across, at least if one were to take the movie at face value. Its central premise is that it was French tactics (like torture) that fueled the FLN rather than defeated it in the long run. But, as the Slate article points out, it also shows (incorrectly) that torture works in the short run — and that may have been the lesson that was taken to heart.
But regardless of whether the Pentagon actually studied and approved of French tactics in Algeria, or if anyone took those screenings seriously, it’s pretty clear that we’re on the same path. (And don’t be too sure they didn’t. Apparently, half of Washington was devouring “The Arab Mind” a completely discredited piece of sociological crap, so it wouldn’t be surprising. These Republican Intellecutals, after all, tend to believe what they want to believe.)
And, since Nazis, Soviets and Commies of all stripes are off limits when describing our failing and immoral tactics, I think we should just fall back on every Republican’s favorite whipping boy — the cheese eating surrender monkeys.
I can’t wait to hear Orrin Hatch stand up in the Senate, bursting with wounded national pride as he reflexively clutches his antique pearl choker, and dolefully expresses his outrage that the Democrats would ever say that Americans are like the French. I have no doubt that the high priests of right wing radio would start speaking in tongues and the FOX News analysts would go into full-on head spinning, green vomit, Linda Blair mode.
And maybe, just maybe, the absurdity of it all will finally hit home with the Democratic establishment, the press and the American people. After all, in the “who’s the traitor” game, the Democrats are supposed to love the French, who hate America just like they do only…now they hate the French? Whose side are we on again?
And if that doesn’t work, there’s always Canada.
Update: My ironic style is much too inscrutable this week — perhaps I shouldn’t have given up coffee.
Having the Dems denounce the US as being like France is a rhetorical device — more than half tongue in cheek. We could just as easily be tarred for comparing America to Heaven — or even itself (which is better than heaven, apparently.) Imagine if we said that our tactics were like the tactics used on slave plantations. The outcry would be the same. It’s not about the substance of the charge, it’s about, as one of my commenters says, speaking heresy. Which is what speaking the truth has become. Heresy.
I do not sincerely suggest that we take to the Senate floor and denounce America as being like the French. They could do it, and there are ample historical parallels, but it won’t do any good. We are not allowed to make any historical parallels with America today because we are the greatest country in the history of the world and we are incapable of doing the kinds of things that others have done. Period.
The only way we will ever stop this is to stop apologising for telling the truth and just tell it. It’s that simple.
Via Jack O’Toole I see that Governor Schwarzenegger’s toppling poll numbers have led him to take a new tack, finally proving that he is a real Republican. (Nice work Maria. Uncle Jack would be so proud.)
The governor unveiled the strategy Tuesday before the earnest faces of elderly homeowners seated in folding chairs in the backyard of a well-worn ranch home outside San Diego. He derided what he called an insidious Democratic effort to overhaul the landmark Proposition 13 property tax limit.
“They want to back us into a corner so eventually they can force us to raise taxes,” he added. “From now to election day, I want to talk about all the specific taxes (they) want to change.”
[…]
Clearly, Schwarzenegger is appealing to the Republican base with this talk on taxes,” said Tony Quinn, a GOP political analyst. “No one really knows much about the upcoming election, so he has to find something to get his supporters motivated.”
That strategy was outlined by the governor’s media expert, Don Sipple, in campaign calls this month to wealthy contributors. Sipple said that “based on a lot of polling,” the governor’s special election campaign will aim to create a “phenomenon of anger” among voters, particularly toward public employee unions, which the governor has charged are behind much of the Democrats’ push for more spending and higher taxes, according to a recent Los Angeles Times report.
A separate initiative, one largely financed by the Republican Party and people close to Schwarzenegger, to limit the ability of public employee unions to contribute to political campaigns also has qualified for the ballot.
Going after the public employee unions has worked awfully well for him so far. I suppose he can pull off making it impossible for them to contribute to campaigns. But he can’t force them off TV. And they are killing him. People like nurses and firefighters and teachers. They depend on them in times of crisis. They trust their children to their care. They don’t see them as members of the Soprano family. In fact, when you put them up against Schwarzenegger, you are reminded that he made his name playing an evil cyborg.
Believed in WMDs they hyped? Perhaps. Believed in the threat they hyped? Nope.
They didn’t believe in the WMD’s they hyped either and we know this for a fact. Gene Lyons pointed out the obvious at the time:
The administration’s strategy of loudly proclaiming that Iraq poses a dire threat to U.S. security while making a public spectacle of massing troops along its border as if it were scarcely capable of self-defense makes no sense.
Clearly, they didn’t really believe that Saddam had any WMD capability. The governments of the US and Britain would have leveled Iraq before they put over a hundred thousand soldiers out in the open on the Kuwait border if they had. They knew.