5th Anniversary of Iraq Invasion — GOP Pundit Fears the Jihad
Iraq is important, and on the fifth anniversary of the Bush invasion of the country, one might expect to see a GOP pundit using the word “jihad.” But the article I’m talking about has nothing to do with Iraq. It supports John McCain and accuses Clinton and Obama of “jihad.” Yes, more ugliness in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
It is important to look at Iraq here on the 5th anniversary of George Bush’s invasion of the country, especially given that the next President is going to have to clean up after Mr. Bush. The Philadelphia Inquirer does a good job in presenting a retrospective and a look forward, and any sane person looking at this article has to come away condemning the GOP, whether mainly focused on George Bush or focused on the entire party. The articles are by Dick Polman, who examines the war fatigue felt by Americans, by Trudy Rubin, who examines the burden of Iraq George Bush has forced on the next President, and by Joseph Stiglitz, who discusses the short and long-term economic impacts of George Bush’s failed war. What struck me here is that none of these folks are talking about jihad anymore. They’re too sane. Indeed, few of the right-wingers pundits are discussing jihad either, at least in connection with Iraq.
Yeah, it’s coming up on election time, and those right-wing pundits still think that getting the crackpot radical right-wing “values voters” out is the way to push John McCain into office. Rick Santorum advised McCain last week that if he didn’t get on the social conservative bandwagon then he’d have no chance. Brian Tierney must have been proud presenting the failed Rick Santorum as an expert on winning elections, but today he goes one better. On a day we should be contemplating Iraq and the completely failed policies of the GOP in this country, Brian Tierney brings us a GOP apologist who actually argues that the Democrats, if they win in the Fall, will bring us a jihad.
No, I’m not kidding, that’s what Robert P. George says in his fluffer piece about John McCain in today’s Inquirer. Of course, he’s got zero evidence to back himself with, but that’s par for the course with GOP pundits. Here’s the “jihad” bit from the Inquirer:
Similarly, some key pro-life provisions in each year’s federal budget would be in grave danger if a Democratic president and Congress were producing the budget: Amendments prohibiting the use of federal dollars to fund abortion (the Hyde amendment), to support international organizations involved in coercive abortion programs (the Kemp-Kasten amendment), to discriminate against health professionals who refuse to perform abortions (the Hyde-Weldon amendment), to fund abortions through the federal employee insurance program (the Smith amendment), to issue patents on human embryos (the Weldon amendment), and other crucial provisions will all be in peril if John McCain is defeated. Every pro-life citizen needs to think about that in considering what to do on Election Day.
And there is more. A Clinton or Obama administration would lead a jihad against the key pro-life legislative achievements of the last decade, including the partial-birth abortion ban, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (which forbids the heinous practice of killing or failing to administer life-saving care to babies who survive attempted abortions and are born alive), and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. McCain supported all these initiatives and would work to protect them from a hostile Democratic Congress.
Oh, it didn’t surprise you that the subject Mr. George was discussing when he accused Democrats of a “jihad” was the subject of abortion, did it. And please note that while Mr. George fears repeal of those restrictions on choice that Republicans and the stacked courts have put in place in recent years, there’s not one major Democrat who has talked with any kind of detail about doing so. Sure, if he was an honest scholar Mr. George would have listed all the initiatives Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were proposing to bring forth in carrying out this so-called “jihad.” George fails to even attempt to do so. Brian Tierney brought an incompetent to his paper last week to show McCain how to win, and this week he brought an author who is either incapable of honestly backing up his point or is too lazy to do so.
But Brian Tierney, the publisher of the Inquirer, has a responsibility to keep the ugliness out of his paper, if he can’t keep it out of politics in general. Robert George’s use of the word “jihad” is highly charged. (Gee, that’s an understatement.) George uses the word to excite Republican “values” voters. He tells them they are going to war. The problem with his logic, though, is that “jihad” reminds virtually every American with terrorism, and the only side on the debate about choice that has committed acts of terrorism are the murderous Paul Hills and the cowardly clinic bombers of the anti-choice side. Robert George dishonestly and conveniently forgets that the closest thing to “jihad” on this issue was perpetrated by those on the anti-choice side he’s trying to appeal to.
Again, though, I’d say this is Brian Tierney’s problem. As Publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer he’s got responsibilities, and he’s really screwing up. Tierney should bring us competence in his writers, and what he brings is a Santorum giving election advice a bare 20 months after his own defeat of historic proportions. He should bring people who are level-headed and don’t resort to divisiveness, but instead Brian Tierney brings us Robert George, who uses the ugly word “jihad” with no logic or evidence to back up his ugliness.
I wake up this Sunday, once again, ashamed that all my neighbors know I read the Inquirer. Once upon a time it was a fine, fine newspaper. I mourn.
steven, good points, all.
the stiglitz book was discussed on al jazeera (via jun cole’s blog http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOLeavbN3yE&eurl=http://www.juancole.com/ croll ddown to al jazeera ), where i heard phyllis bennis “try to debate” jack burkman — only by listening to it can you get a sense of what the repubs use to justify — employing the jingoistic, “war on global terrorsim” — their jihad against the middle east.
it was no debate; instead it was two people talking at one another, with burkman sticking resolutely to his arguments, especially the one justifying “out-sourcing the war” with “contractors” — to real people, “mercenaries” — a supreme example of euphemistic rhetoric as a put down to anyone voicing a contrary opinion.
this use of words as a weapon is captured succinctly in david browmich’s article, “Euphemism and American Violence”, in the current issue of the “new york review of books”.
bromwich, i think, captures the whole sad dilemma with this phrase:
“… Indeed, the single greatest propaganda victory of the Bush administration may be the belief shared by most Americans that the rise of radical Islam—so-called Islamofascism— has nothing to do with any previous actions by the United States.”
selections from “Euphemism and American Violence”, by David Bromwich
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21199
…If one extreme of euphemism comes from naturalizing the cruelties of power, the opposite extreme arises from a nerve-deadening understatement. George Orwell had the latter method in view when he wrote a memorable passage of “Politics and the English Language”:
Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Orwell’s insight was that the italicized phrases are colorless by design and not by accident. He saw a deliberate method in the imprecision of texture. The inventors of this idiom meant to suppress one kind of imagination, the kind that yields an image of things actually done or suffered; and they wanted to put in its place an imagination that trusts to the influence of larger powers behind the scenes. Totalitarianism depends on the creation of people who take satisfaction in such trust; and totalitarian minds are in part created (Orwell believed) by the ease and invisibility of euphemism.
Before launching their response to Islamic jihadists in September 2001, members of the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney gave close consideration to the naming of that response. The President has been reported by Bob Woodward and Robert Draper to have said to his staff that they should all view the September 11 attack as an “opportunity.”[1] His sense of that word in this context is hard to interpret, but its general bearings are plain. Imaginative leadership, the President was saying, must do far more than respond to the attack, or attend to the needs of self-preservation. Better to use the attack as an opportunity to “go massive,” as Donald Rumsfeld noted on September 11. “Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” A similar sense of Bush’s purpose has recently been recalled by Karl Rove. “History has a funny way of deciding things,” Rove said to an audience at the University of Pennsylvania on February 20, 2008. “Sometimes history sends you things, and 9/11 came our way.” But so, all the more pressingly: how to name the massive and partly unrelated response to a catastrophe which was also an opportunity?
The name must admit the tremendousness of the task and imply its eventual solubility, but also discourage any close inquiry into the means employed. They wanted to call it a war; but what sort of war? The phrase they agreed on, the global war on terrorism, was at once simple-sounding and elusive, and it has served its purpose as nothing more definite could have done.
The “global war on terrorism” promotes a mood of comprehension in the absence of perceived particulars, and that is a mood in which euphemisms may comfortably take shelter. There is (many commentators have pointed out) something nonsensical in the idea of waging war on a technique or method, and terrorism was a method employed by many groups over many centuries before al-Qaeda—the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, the Irgun, to stick to recent times. But the “war on crime” and “war on drugs” probably helped to render the initial absurdity of the name to some degree normal. This was an incidental weakness, in any case. The assurance and the unspecifying grandiosity of the global war on terrorism were the traits most desired in such a slogan.
Those qualities fitted well with a style of white-lipped eloquence that Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson had begun to plot into his major speeches in late 2001. It made for a sort of continuous, excitable, canting threat, emitted as if unwillingly from a man of good will and short temper. Gerson, from his Christian evangelical beliefs and journalistic ability (he had worked for US News & World Report and ghostwritten the autobiography of Chuck Colson), worked up for the President a highly effective contemporary “grand style” that skated between hyperbole and evasion. The manner suggested a stark simplicity that was the end product of sophisticated analysis and a visionary impatience with compromise.
This was exactly the way President Bush, in his own thinking, turned his imaginative vices into virtues, and he intuitively grasped the richness of a phrase like “the soft bigotry of low expectations” or “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”—resonant formulae which he approved and deployed, over the challenges of his staff. What did the phrases mean? As their creator knew, the mode of their nonmeaning was the point. Like “pacification” and “rectification of frontiers,” these markers of unstated policy were floating metaphors with a low yield of fact. But they left an image of decisiveness, with an insinuation of contempt for persons slower to pass from thought to action.
Euphemism has been the leading quality of American discussions of the war in Iraq. This was plain in the run-up to the war, with the talk of “regime change”—a phrase welcomed by reporters and politicians as if they had heard it all their lives. Regime change seemed to pass at a jump beyond the predictable either/or of “forced abdication” and “international war of aggression.” Regime change also managed to imply, without saying, that governments do, as a matter of fact, often change by external demand without much trouble to anyone. The talk (before and just after the war) of “taking out” Saddam Hussein was equally new. It combined the reflex of the skilled gunman and the image of a surgical procedure so routine that it could be trusted not to jeopardize the life of the patient. It had its roots in gangland argot, where taking out means knocking off, but its reception was none the worse for that….
Americans born between the 1930s and the 1950s have a much harder time getting over the shock of learning that our country practices torture than do Americans born in the 1970s or 1980s. The memory of the Gestapo and the GPU, the depiction of torture in a film like Open City, are not apt to press on younger minds. But the different responses are also a consequence of the different imaginings to which people may fall prey. Many who fear that their children might be killed by a terrorist bomb cannot imagine anyone they know ever suffering injustice at the hands of the national security state.
This complacency suggests a new innocence—the correlative in moral psychology of euphemism in the realm of language. And if you take stock of how little general discussion there has been of the advisability of pursuing the global war on terrorism, you realize that this country has scarcely begun to take stock of the United States as an ambiguous actor on the world stage. Those who said, in the weeks just after the September 11 attacks, that the motives of the terrorists might be traced back to some US policies in the Middle East were understandably felt to have spoken unseasonably. The surprising thing is that six and a half years later, when a politic reticence is no longer the sole order of the day, discussion of such matters is still confined to academic studies like Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback and Robert A. Pape’s Dying to Win,[3] and has barely begun to register in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, or on CNN or MSNBC. Ask an American what the United States may have to do with much of the world’s hostility toward us and you will find educated people saying things like “They hate the West and resent modernity,” or “They hate the fact that we’re so free,” or “They hate us because this is a country where a man and a woman can look at each other across a table with eyes of love.” Indeed, the single greatest propaganda victory of the Bush administration may be the belief shared by most Americans that the rise of radical Islam—so-called Islamofascism— has nothing to do with any previous actions by the United States. …
Thanks to both of you for your sanity and your ability to express what many (I hope most) Americans only feel.
As a Viet Nam-era vet, I find myself returning to the same thought again and again: if those in power now had served honorably in Viet Nam, they would not be so insistent on repeating precisely the same errors now. They would not be so eager to squander our nation’s moral authority in the world on the same follies