Counter Spin

Last week brought the best news progressives and activists have seen in five years. Off-term elections resulted in the defeat of conservative Republican gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia by Democrats who based their campaigns on opposition to discredited Bush Administration policy. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board of fundamentalist Christians who had insinuated intelligent design into their high school science curriculum were drummed out of a job. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $250 million attempt to end run the Democratically dominated state legislature by putting conservative proposals to the ballot went down in flames; all four measures soundly defeated. And finally, the Republican dominated House was forced to pull the proposal for drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge from its budget package after all but five Democrats voted against it.

On Tuesday the non-partisan Pew Research Group released a poll showing that 43% of Americans believe they were lied to about Iraq’s WMD to justify the invasion, and an ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 60% think George W. Bush is dishonest and untrustworthy. Democratic legislators, smelling blood and recovering some spine, leveled a new round of accusations at the Bush Administration regarding the use of questionable intelligence as false pretenses for starting the war. Bush countered on Friday, at a tightly wrapped Veterans Day speech at an army depot in Pennsylvania, with typical spin and revisionism, much more of which we are sure to see shoveled through the media in coming weeks.

These are the main charges neoconservatives level at their critics:

Democratic Legislators voted for the war based on the same intelligence. 21 of 50 Democratic Senators and one Republican voted against the Iraqi War Resolution on October 11, 2002. To their shame, 29 Democrats voted to approve it, and with 49 Republicans, that was enough for President Bush to circumvent the War Powers Act and start a war based on an imminent national threat (the false intelligence.) However, persuading dubious, inside-the-beltway politicians post 9/11 with a threatening dichotomy of “you’re either with us or against us,” and bombarding their constituents with fearful propaganda was malfeasance. Anybody who sat through the televised presentation by Colin Powell before the United Nations Security Council and came away saying they were convinced by that shaky power-point display was too traumatized or too deep into the establishment to stay objective. Ultimately, arguments regarding the validity of intelligence are moot since at that time UN inspectors had full access within Iraq, were doing work of such thoroughness that it garnered the Noble Peace Prize, were finding no WMD, and thus had Saddam Hussein completely contained.

Critics of the war are demoralizing the troops. The American soldiers aren’t paying attention to this debate or even given the opportunity to have, or voice an opinion. Neither are they fighting day after day, tour after tour to advance an aggressive foreign policy. They’re fighting to survive, and to protect the soldiers next to them. We owe it to those who have died, those who have been wounded, and those who are still fighting to resolve this mess as quickly and truthfully as possible. If anyone at home has endangered American soldiers, it’s those who have lied in order to send them to war.

Critics and dissenters are excuse makers who find terrorism understandable. This is the rhetorical trickery often used by reactionary conservatives seeking to avoid real debate: falsely portraying as repellent caricatures those whose ideas they would attack, just so they can easily knock them down. It’s standard procedure in the Rovian White House to launch personal attacks to avoid the issues. Thus those who recognize that the War On Iraq has revived the Jihadist logic of total conflict against the west are accused of claiming that there is some kind of justification for terrorist attacks. Likewise, those who call for a cessation of US offensive tactics and a timetable for withdrawal are accused of giving comfort to the enemy.

The War On Iraq has made us safer. Neoconservatives and terrorists are co-dependents; extremists whose ideological madness feeds each on the other, leaving the civilized world to pick up the pieces. Since March 2003, when the hunt for Bin Laden was deprioritized for the sake of invading Iraq, we've been picking up the pieces from Al Qaeda network attacks in Jakarta (Aug.03), Casablanca (May 03), Istanbul (Nov.03, Dec.03) Riyadh (May 03, Dec. 04), Khobar (May 04), Jeddah (Dec.04, Jan.05), Madrid (Mar.04), Taba (Oct.04), Sharm-el-Sheik (July 05), Jakarta (Sept.04), London (July 05), Bali (Oct.05) and Amman (Nov.06). The sad fact is, the War On Iraq has legitimized Al Qaeda in the radical Muslim world and made a greater target of America and every nation whose misguided leaders enabled this pre-emptive war against a non-existent enemy in an oil-rich country.

Al Qaeda network terrorism is not in response to actual Mideast events. This charge has several components. First they point out that terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and the first Bali bombing in ’02 preceded the Iraq war. Oh really…which one? This is the second, and after the first, Desert Storm, there was a decade of draconian sanctions that cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi children. Another long standing argument attributes Islamic attacks as being the result of poverty or unemployment, and psychologically profiles terrorists as alienated, frustrated and conflicted by the temptations and successes of modern western life. But take for example the London suicide bombers of 7/7/05…ordinary midland Brits; cricket-playing sons of upwardly mobile immigrants. What radicalized them to the extant where they could be exploited was that even on the quiet streets of Leeds they must have felt under attack from the actions of British and American Forces in this second War On Iraq, where tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and torture has become routine. That level of injustice brings tribal, racial and religious affinities to the fore, just as 9/11 did with Americans; massacre upon massacre in a cycle of violence. Extremism breeds extremism, ideology is reaction to policy, and as long as the neoconservative offensive continues in the Mideast we will never see the end of it.