Our foreign policy is run by idiots. This is the simplest way I can describe the level of ignorance and fanaticism driving the country today. Bush’s “major address” on “the nature of the enemy” is just the latest example.
What the hell kind of policy focuses on “the nature” of something? Bush uses the phrase constantly, press-monkey Scott McClellan must have used it a dozen times during his conference last week, Kathryn-Jean Lopez over at The Corner laps it up....and it’s all bullshit. Let’s start with the faulty assumption that al-qaeda is an actual organization, as opposed to, say, a brand-name, or as Juan Cole puts it, “a loose set of radical ideas that fringe groups can take up at will.” According to K-Lo and Scott McClellan, this group is defined by something internal, inherent, and immutable. Bush seems to view a lot of things and people in this way, constantly referring to “the soul of X” or “the character of Y.” (See all his talk about knowing "the heart" of Harriet Miers.)
The problem with this is that it completely ignores any external factors. Like, I don't know, logic. This is why we never get any serious discussion about terrorism. According to the “Nature of the Enemy” theory, terrorists espouse no goals, no political views. There is no such thing as cause and effect. Not only are grievances not legitimate, they don’t even exist. Nothing anyone does could possible alter the actions of a terrorist because you can’t alter something inherent. It’s evil in a vacuuum, sprung from the ground without source, without history, and certainly without reason. It’s the 21st century example of the devil.
The theory is so pernicious because it cuts off any solution that’s not some crude version of “let’s kill ‘em all.” If evil has nothing underlying it, no motives, no reasons, then all you’re left with is brute force. The net result is a foreign policy based “rooting out the terrorists” and other fantasies.
Bush’s speech is full of this nonsense, as well as all the usual nonsense, not least of which is the parallel idea of a single “terrorist ideology.” Chechnya, Kashmir, Beirut....these places all make appearances in the speech and are treated as One Big Evil Thing. They’re all just terrorists, and they’re all the same.
Juan Cole breaks apart the speech over at his site. I recommend the whole thing, but here is one of the more important points:
Bush: The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They have been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of convenience like Syria and Iran that share the goal of hurting America and moderate Muslim governments .
Cole: This line is the most lunatic thing in Bush's speech. It is outrageous. It is the Big Lie. Syria has a secular Baath Arab nationalist government. The regime killed 10,000 Muslim activists at Hama in 1982. It tortured al-Qaeda members for the United States after September 11. Syria, a small country of only 18 million, has no ability to harm the United States and it most certainly is not in alliance with radical Muslim fundamentalists!
As for Iran, its brand of fundamentalism is Shiite. Al-Qaeda is made up of Sunnis and Wahhabis, who despise Shiites. Iran supports the new, Shiite-dominated government in Iraq. It supported the Jan. 30 elections. It supports the new constitution and the referendum. Iran hated the Taliban and very nearly went to war against them, backing the Northern Alliance instead. The Shiite Iranians hate the radical Salafis like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has called for a war of extermination against the Shiites.
Bush's attempt to conflate the regimes he doesn't like with al-Qaeda makes nonsense of his whole vision.
It would be as though someone who disliked the United States and France should posit Southern Baptist American support for the Catholic Irish Republican Army because France is a US ally and is Catholic. To anyone who knows anything at all about the Middle East, Bush has made a mishmash of unrelated things and attempted to construct a bogeyman out of them.”
Elsewhere, Bush raises the specter of dead schoolchildren in Russia to claim that actions in Iraq do nothing to further radicalize the region. Hey, Russia wasn’t in Iraq, right? Look what happened to those kids! Over at Tapped, Yglesias nails it succinctly:
Bush: The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.
Yglesias: I'll grant the president this much. If the United States were to withdraw from Iraq and commence a much more brutal occupation of Chechnya, that would accomplish very little in terms of reducing the appeal of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.
For Bush, it’s sad that a grown man believes this nonsense. For the rest of us, it’s a tragedy.
http://www.juancole.com/2005/10/arguing-with-bush-and-gwot-bush.html