Truth - Al Franken [117]
Hmm. Something good is going on in Jordan. Maybe it was that Queen Noor book.
Back to the Defense Science Board report. After being delivered to Wolfowitz in September of 2004, the incredibly important document was somehow held for weeks, only to be released after the election. And not just after the election, but on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when news takes a well-deserved holiday. Because so few Americans ever heard about it, I think the report is worth quoting at some length. Remember, this isn’t an open letter from Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. This is a formal report from an advisory board to Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon.
The larger goals of U.S. strategy depend on separating the vast majority of nonviolent Muslims from the radical-militant Islamist-Jihadists. But American efforts have not only failed in this respect: they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.
Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states. Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.
Furthermore, in the eyes of Muslims, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. U.S. actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination.
Therefore, the dramatic narrative since 9/11 has essentially borne out the entire radical Islamist bill of particulars. American actions and the flow of events have elevated the authority of the Jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims.
Finally, Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic—namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is—for Americans—really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game. This perception is of course necessarily heightened by election-year atmospherics, but nonetheless sustains their impression that when Americans talk to Muslims they are really just talking to themselves.
So, to summarize the conclusions of the Defense Science Board:
Worse, not better
Hypocrisy
Noor
9/11
Ulterior motives
Chaos
Narcissistic
That last one, narcissistic, I find particularly intriguing. I think about narcissism a lot. One of the things people like most about my books is how I relate politics and global events to anecdotes about myself, especially my USO tours and the repeated confrontations in which I get the better of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. But enough about me. Let’s talk about my conclusions.
Muslims aren’t crazy to think that, as things have gotten worse and worse, the conduct of the global war on terror has devolved into an exercise in self-serving political ass-covering in the United States.
On May 30, 2005, Dick Cheney told Larry King that the Iraq insurgency was in its “last throes.” That was less than a month before Rumsfeld said on Fox News Sunday that the insurgency would last “five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.” Which is it, guys? Inquiring families of soldiers would like to know.
Let’s face it. You can’t count on them to give you straight information. You can’t count on them to tell us straight why we’re going to war. You can’t count on them to tell us what’s happening over there.
You can’t count on them to do their homework. To keep track of our money. You can’t count on them to punish war profiteers. You can’t count on them to protect our troops.
You can’t rely on them for much of anything. Armor. Veterans’ benefits. You can’t count on them for the true story of how Jessica Lynch