Monday, February 20, 2006
Bin Ladin Owes Us Big Time
Osama Bin Ladin owes us big time, and here’s why.
We are fighting a war of public relations for the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East. Our opponent is doing exactly the same. If you think he gave a camel’s behind about the World Trade Center per se, you need a refresher course in thinking about PR. What he wanted was a really good symbol, which he got in those (actually pretty ugly while they stood) towers in lower Manhattan. Aside from what we hear domestically (like “they hate us for our freedom) what he got was one heck of a visual showing him bringing down a huge symbol of “the great Satan” (I’m still flattered by that) that made great evening news material all over the world, and better news fodder in Moslem countries. What a coup for him, huh? Of course, the fact that within months we had him on the run and living in a cave somewhere while we drove his troops out of Afghanistan was a bit of a blow. Truth to tell, we pretty much put the lie to his claim of great power against us. Until, that is, we hit Iraq.
Now, the truth is, Saddam Hussein is a lousy human being. He deserves worse than he’s gotten. But I could say the same about a number of people in the world, like that joker in North Korea for example. An important point about Saddam Hussein, lost completely on those not up on Middle Eastern history, is that he is a Sunni. Osama Bin Ladin is a Shiite. So what, you say? That schism was created when Mohammed died, in the eighth century. For a non-believer in Islam it seems silly: it’s a dispute over who is the rightful heir to Mohammed’s empire. That is, the Sunni say it’s one branch of the family (literally a branch of Mohammed’s descendants) and the Shiites say it’s a different branch. It may seem silly to me (and it does) but it was enough to ignite a civil war well over a millennium ago that is still going on today in parts of Moslem society. Not, interestingly enough, amongst American Moslems. They may give each other the hairy eyeball on the way to the Mosque, but they don’t actually attack each other in any other way. Not here, I mean. But, in the Middle East, the war is hot and active.
What I’m saying is that Hussein and Bin Ladin have an innate hatred for each other. This means that, bad as Hussein is, there was not any compelling reason to stir up a war against him until we had dealt with Bin Ladin. In fact, you could say that there was a compelling argument for leaving him alone until that time, since he was, in addition to doing all the evil stuff he was doing domestically, keeping Bin Ladin’s followers out of his country. Hussein started out pushing for a civil pan-Arab union, and even for a while was pretty much fair (so far as a guy like that is ever fair) to his Shiite citizens. I guess he figured they had the Kurds to pick on, so they could take it easy on each other in Iraq. (That the Kurds are suppressed is an interesting thing in itself. Saladin, the famous opponent of Richard the Lionhearted, was a Kurd. I guess the Kurdish stock has fallen a bit, so to speak.) But for whatever reason, the fact is that there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to our invasion. For a while there we had taken away most of Bin Ladin’s operating theatre, and then we invaded Iraq and gave him Mesopotamia to use as a recruiting and training base. We were not so smart at just that time, and that’s the truth.
But beyond providing Bin Ladin with a new playground, we also played right into his PR campaign about how evil we were. We find some idiots torturing prisoners and, sure, it wasn’t sanctioned, and we’ve punished those responsible, but not by the lights of fundamentalist Islam. According to the laws as set forth in the Koran, those people deserved a lot worse than dishonorable discharge and maybe some jail time. No public humiliation, no lopping off limbs, no beheadings, I mean, from the point of view of the average oppressed Muslim, we slapped those people on the wrist and let them go. And, we were evil in doing what we did (through those people) in the first place. Now there’s the flap over Gitmo which, surprise, plays right into the same PR game. You can say all you want that we don’t torture, but when those Abu Gahrib photos are shown again on TV in Damascus, you look like a liar. Since that scandal happened in Iraq, there’s a big PR opportunity for the bad guys that would never have happened if we’d waited to take Hussein out until we had Bin Ladin in a cage in Times Square.
Sometimes you can’t help the PR disadvantage. Those controversial cartoons are not nearly as bad as some of the stuff you see aimed at Jesus or Christians, so as an American of course we say “what’s the big deal?” And that’s true. Screw ‘em, but it’s a PR blow all the same. Which makes all the more important to watch our other moves to make sure we aren’t simply multiplying the effect things like stupid editorial cartoons have on the situation. We say we like democracy, but when Hamas gets duly elected we state flatly that we’ll never deal with them. I guess Israel would be upset with us if we did, but there’s one heck of a PR piece for the other guys. The PR line is that we say we like democracy until the election goes against us. Boy howdy, it has all the look of truth doesn’t it? I’m not sure that fighting rigid ideology with an opposing rigid ideology is the way to go in a guerilla war, but apparently our government thinks so, because they are the ones refusing to deal with the duly elected government of Palestine.
Why is this stuff about PR wars important? Consider the American Revolution, a war we were destined to lose by any conventional analysis. The British army was the best fighting force in the world, and Britain was the richest country in the world. There was no way a bunch of ragtag American irregulars could possibly defeat the greatest fighting force ever assembled. Until they did, that is. And they did it not by winning most of the battles, because in truth they lost most of the battles. They won some big ones that tended to demoralize the British public, though, until the Brits finally simply lost interest and King George had to let us go. In fact, after Yorktown there was virtually no more fighting, although the Treaty of Paris that ended the war officially came several years later. The British lost the will to keep going in what they saw as an expensive and difficult effort in a distant land.
If that sounds familiar, it may be because of the similarities to the situation in Vietnam forty years ago. Once again the greatest fighting force ever assembled was sent packing by a ragtag army of irregulars. Once again it was the PR that did the trick. Many people still like to argue about loyalty, patriotism and sympathizing with the enemy to explain that defeat. Okay, that’s true enough, but the fact is that it’s true because the PR aspect of the war, that was the increasing appearance of futility and expense, wore down the foreigners’ resolve (we were the foreigners, remember) until they finally left the place to the guerillas. It didn’t help that the war started due to what has since been shown to be a plain lie, either, but we didn’t know that at the time so I don’t think it counts.
Now here we are, a foreign force facing an insurgency, which is just another way of saying a guerilla army trying to undo what we’re trying to do. The administration, bless their pea pickin’ hearts, is concentrating really hard on domestic PR, putting the best spin possible on everything, and maybe they’re even right a lot of the time. (Although when you talk about the “throes of the beginning of the end” or however they phrased it, one has to wonder.) The trouble is, though, that the real PR war is on the other end, in the countries where Bin Ladin gets his recruits. He’s got a sort of underground cachet going for him, and then we do things that make it easy for him to spin us as not just the agents of Satan, but as “the Great Satan” himself. Nice complement, but not one designed to get rid of many insurgents.
So, wise guy, you say, what would you do? Well, for one thing, I’d talk to Hamas. Frankly, after World War Two, the biggest reason Israel got established was a sort of guilty feeling about those death camps. The camps were among the worst atrocities of an atrocious century, but you know, America didn’t do it. Also, the Romans ran the Jews out of Israel in the first place. We didn’t do that, either. So, it’s a fair thing to contend that Israel is only there due to the support of the West, and not due to any inherent virtues of its own. That’s the basis for much of the anti-American PR that is prevalent in the Middle East. Today, I doubt that there’s any politically viable way to get rid of Israel. I’d hate to be the American politician to suggest it, so I’m here and now disavowing any such notions. But, I do advocate being realistic about the origins of modern Israel. The Zionists really did blow up some innocent people, in terrorist acts, prior to the establishment of their country. That’s not propaganda, it’s just the truth. If we don’t start by acknowledging that truth, we’ll never understand our enemies’ point of view, and we’ll have no chance of ever defeating them. Simply acknowledging that Israel was born of the Allies’ actions right after World War Two, and distancing ourselves from the ideological baggage surrounding Israel, would go a very long way toward deflating the claims of blowhards like Bin Ladin.
There are other ways we could help ourselves as well. Biting the bullet and spending the bucks needed to actually rebuild Iraq instead of pretending that the “democracy loving Iraqi’s” will do it as soon as we leave, for instance. Speaking simple truth instead of idealistic platitudes when discussing the situation over there is another. One thing is for sure, though, the PR tide at home is turning, even though it would be a pretty lousy (and bad-looking) thing to do to abandon Iraq at this juncture. Pulling out would not only let Bin Ladin have the place more or less to himself (or at least enough of it to give him what he needs) but would also give him a whole ton of ammunition about how we “hate Islam” and all that sort of rot. I hope that the next election will give us a choice besides the usual “blindly follow the ideology” crowd and the “we hate those guys so vote for us” crowd. I’m not really optimistic, but you never know. Otherwise, it looks like we’re going to forget the lessons of our own origins and get ourselves “PR’d” right out of another one.
Swell.
We are fighting a war of public relations for the hearts and minds of the people of the Middle East. Our opponent is doing exactly the same. If you think he gave a camel’s behind about the World Trade Center per se, you need a refresher course in thinking about PR. What he wanted was a really good symbol, which he got in those (actually pretty ugly while they stood) towers in lower Manhattan. Aside from what we hear domestically (like “they hate us for our freedom) what he got was one heck of a visual showing him bringing down a huge symbol of “the great Satan” (I’m still flattered by that) that made great evening news material all over the world, and better news fodder in Moslem countries. What a coup for him, huh? Of course, the fact that within months we had him on the run and living in a cave somewhere while we drove his troops out of Afghanistan was a bit of a blow. Truth to tell, we pretty much put the lie to his claim of great power against us. Until, that is, we hit Iraq.
Now, the truth is, Saddam Hussein is a lousy human being. He deserves worse than he’s gotten. But I could say the same about a number of people in the world, like that joker in North Korea for example. An important point about Saddam Hussein, lost completely on those not up on Middle Eastern history, is that he is a Sunni. Osama Bin Ladin is a Shiite. So what, you say? That schism was created when Mohammed died, in the eighth century. For a non-believer in Islam it seems silly: it’s a dispute over who is the rightful heir to Mohammed’s empire. That is, the Sunni say it’s one branch of the family (literally a branch of Mohammed’s descendants) and the Shiites say it’s a different branch. It may seem silly to me (and it does) but it was enough to ignite a civil war well over a millennium ago that is still going on today in parts of Moslem society. Not, interestingly enough, amongst American Moslems. They may give each other the hairy eyeball on the way to the Mosque, but they don’t actually attack each other in any other way. Not here, I mean. But, in the Middle East, the war is hot and active.
What I’m saying is that Hussein and Bin Ladin have an innate hatred for each other. This means that, bad as Hussein is, there was not any compelling reason to stir up a war against him until we had dealt with Bin Ladin. In fact, you could say that there was a compelling argument for leaving him alone until that time, since he was, in addition to doing all the evil stuff he was doing domestically, keeping Bin Ladin’s followers out of his country. Hussein started out pushing for a civil pan-Arab union, and even for a while was pretty much fair (so far as a guy like that is ever fair) to his Shiite citizens. I guess he figured they had the Kurds to pick on, so they could take it easy on each other in Iraq. (That the Kurds are suppressed is an interesting thing in itself. Saladin, the famous opponent of Richard the Lionhearted, was a Kurd. I guess the Kurdish stock has fallen a bit, so to speak.) But for whatever reason, the fact is that there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq prior to our invasion. For a while there we had taken away most of Bin Ladin’s operating theatre, and then we invaded Iraq and gave him Mesopotamia to use as a recruiting and training base. We were not so smart at just that time, and that’s the truth.
But beyond providing Bin Ladin with a new playground, we also played right into his PR campaign about how evil we were. We find some idiots torturing prisoners and, sure, it wasn’t sanctioned, and we’ve punished those responsible, but not by the lights of fundamentalist Islam. According to the laws as set forth in the Koran, those people deserved a lot worse than dishonorable discharge and maybe some jail time. No public humiliation, no lopping off limbs, no beheadings, I mean, from the point of view of the average oppressed Muslim, we slapped those people on the wrist and let them go. And, we were evil in doing what we did (through those people) in the first place. Now there’s the flap over Gitmo which, surprise, plays right into the same PR game. You can say all you want that we don’t torture, but when those Abu Gahrib photos are shown again on TV in Damascus, you look like a liar. Since that scandal happened in Iraq, there’s a big PR opportunity for the bad guys that would never have happened if we’d waited to take Hussein out until we had Bin Ladin in a cage in Times Square.
Sometimes you can’t help the PR disadvantage. Those controversial cartoons are not nearly as bad as some of the stuff you see aimed at Jesus or Christians, so as an American of course we say “what’s the big deal?” And that’s true. Screw ‘em, but it’s a PR blow all the same. Which makes all the more important to watch our other moves to make sure we aren’t simply multiplying the effect things like stupid editorial cartoons have on the situation. We say we like democracy, but when Hamas gets duly elected we state flatly that we’ll never deal with them. I guess Israel would be upset with us if we did, but there’s one heck of a PR piece for the other guys. The PR line is that we say we like democracy until the election goes against us. Boy howdy, it has all the look of truth doesn’t it? I’m not sure that fighting rigid ideology with an opposing rigid ideology is the way to go in a guerilla war, but apparently our government thinks so, because they are the ones refusing to deal with the duly elected government of Palestine.
Why is this stuff about PR wars important? Consider the American Revolution, a war we were destined to lose by any conventional analysis. The British army was the best fighting force in the world, and Britain was the richest country in the world. There was no way a bunch of ragtag American irregulars could possibly defeat the greatest fighting force ever assembled. Until they did, that is. And they did it not by winning most of the battles, because in truth they lost most of the battles. They won some big ones that tended to demoralize the British public, though, until the Brits finally simply lost interest and King George had to let us go. In fact, after Yorktown there was virtually no more fighting, although the Treaty of Paris that ended the war officially came several years later. The British lost the will to keep going in what they saw as an expensive and difficult effort in a distant land.
If that sounds familiar, it may be because of the similarities to the situation in Vietnam forty years ago. Once again the greatest fighting force ever assembled was sent packing by a ragtag army of irregulars. Once again it was the PR that did the trick. Many people still like to argue about loyalty, patriotism and sympathizing with the enemy to explain that defeat. Okay, that’s true enough, but the fact is that it’s true because the PR aspect of the war, that was the increasing appearance of futility and expense, wore down the foreigners’ resolve (we were the foreigners, remember) until they finally left the place to the guerillas. It didn’t help that the war started due to what has since been shown to be a plain lie, either, but we didn’t know that at the time so I don’t think it counts.
Now here we are, a foreign force facing an insurgency, which is just another way of saying a guerilla army trying to undo what we’re trying to do. The administration, bless their pea pickin’ hearts, is concentrating really hard on domestic PR, putting the best spin possible on everything, and maybe they’re even right a lot of the time. (Although when you talk about the “throes of the beginning of the end” or however they phrased it, one has to wonder.) The trouble is, though, that the real PR war is on the other end, in the countries where Bin Ladin gets his recruits. He’s got a sort of underground cachet going for him, and then we do things that make it easy for him to spin us as not just the agents of Satan, but as “the Great Satan” himself. Nice complement, but not one designed to get rid of many insurgents.
So, wise guy, you say, what would you do? Well, for one thing, I’d talk to Hamas. Frankly, after World War Two, the biggest reason Israel got established was a sort of guilty feeling about those death camps. The camps were among the worst atrocities of an atrocious century, but you know, America didn’t do it. Also, the Romans ran the Jews out of Israel in the first place. We didn’t do that, either. So, it’s a fair thing to contend that Israel is only there due to the support of the West, and not due to any inherent virtues of its own. That’s the basis for much of the anti-American PR that is prevalent in the Middle East. Today, I doubt that there’s any politically viable way to get rid of Israel. I’d hate to be the American politician to suggest it, so I’m here and now disavowing any such notions. But, I do advocate being realistic about the origins of modern Israel. The Zionists really did blow up some innocent people, in terrorist acts, prior to the establishment of their country. That’s not propaganda, it’s just the truth. If we don’t start by acknowledging that truth, we’ll never understand our enemies’ point of view, and we’ll have no chance of ever defeating them. Simply acknowledging that Israel was born of the Allies’ actions right after World War Two, and distancing ourselves from the ideological baggage surrounding Israel, would go a very long way toward deflating the claims of blowhards like Bin Ladin.
There are other ways we could help ourselves as well. Biting the bullet and spending the bucks needed to actually rebuild Iraq instead of pretending that the “democracy loving Iraqi’s” will do it as soon as we leave, for instance. Speaking simple truth instead of idealistic platitudes when discussing the situation over there is another. One thing is for sure, though, the PR tide at home is turning, even though it would be a pretty lousy (and bad-looking) thing to do to abandon Iraq at this juncture. Pulling out would not only let Bin Ladin have the place more or less to himself (or at least enough of it to give him what he needs) but would also give him a whole ton of ammunition about how we “hate Islam” and all that sort of rot. I hope that the next election will give us a choice besides the usual “blindly follow the ideology” crowd and the “we hate those guys so vote for us” crowd. I’m not really optimistic, but you never know. Otherwise, it looks like we’re going to forget the lessons of our own origins and get ourselves “PR’d” right out of another one.
Swell.
