Jonathan Chait: A Fighting Image Is Everything

IsrAmeriPrius · Sep 12, 2006

From the Los Angeles Times:

[Highlights]

Jonathan Chait:
A Fighting Image Is Everything
Bush helping Republicans by highlighting the war on terror is like Clinton running on his record of marriage fidelity.
September 10, 2006

FIVE YEARS AGO, President Bush stood on the pile of rubble that had been the World Trade Center and announced, "The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!" Remember that? Well, the people who knocked down those buildings just won.

Last week, in a news story that was buried by all the major newspapers, Pakistan signed an agreement to "allow militants to operate freely in one of Pakistan's most restive border areas in return for a pledge to halt attacks and infiltration into Afghanistan." Which is to say, Pakistan surrendered. The border areas of Pakistan are where thousands of Al Qaeda militants and (almost certainly) Osama bin Laden himself reside. On Thursday, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a not very reassuring statement that he'd go after the insurgents' command structure.

It's worth briefly refreshing our memories as to why Bin Laden and his closest friends are hiding out in Pakistan. In 2002, we had them surrounded near Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but Gen. Tommy Franks, the former head of U.S. Central Command, persuaded our commander-in-chief to rely on poorly equipped, ill-trained Afghan mercenaries of dubious loyalty, rather than U.S. soldiers, to finish the job. (Apparently the operating theory was, if you can't trust mercenaries, who can you trust?) Shockingly, as Peter Bergen reported in 2004 in the Atlantic Monthly, Bin Laden paid off the mercenaries, who let him escape to Pakistan. And now the Pakistanis, who were at least nominally trying to hunt him down, have thrown in the towel.

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Bush's defenders insist that his paramount contribution to the war against Islamic radicalism is "moral clarity." Moral clarity means keeping in mind that even if we're not perfect, we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. The president's defenders are correct that having moral clarity is a necessary condition for fighting evil. What they fail to realize is that it's not a sufficient condition.

There are millions of teenage boys who have moral clarity but who are nonetheless unqualified to lead the free world against jihadists. If your leader has moral clarity but lacks the other relevant intellectual qualities, you end up with a president whose foreign policy doctrine is expressed in statements such as: "I intend to kick [Saddam Hussein's] sorry â€¦ nice person all over the Mideast." (This Bush quote comes from Michael Isikoff and David Corn's new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.")

Los Angeles Times[/b]
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Jonathan Chait: A Fighting Image Is Everything

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Jonathan Chait: A Fighting Image Is Everything

IsrAmeriPrius Progressive Member