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Fri 14 May, 2004 10:05 pm
I've been sitting on the sidelines not wanting to throw gasoline on a raging fire until I ran across this article which I must share with you. To me it is a searingly honest and brutal analysis of the battle this country is losing in the war on terrorism. Some of you will scoff at every premise and the conclusion because you have a closed mind to any rational analysis. More of you will dismiss it's truth and will express happiness it is happening only because it will ensure the defeat of Bush. Some of you will, like me, realize with anguish the consequences , that losing this battle , will bring to this country and the world.
Lee Harris
Contributing Editor, TCS
The War of Images
By Lee Harris Published 05/13/2004
It is often said that we are fighting a war of ideas. We are not. We are fighting a war of images, and right now our enemy is winning this war, while we are losing it, and losing it badly.
Consider the images that have worked their way into our collective mind since the beginning of April: the images of the massacre at Fallujah; the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; the images of the decapitation of an American civilian. Now compare the overwhelming intensity of these images with the "idea" that the Bush administration is invoking in order to fight against them, namely, the abstract ideal of justice.
First, the Bush administration pledged to "bring to justice" those who committed the massacre at Fallujah; then it pledged to "bring to justice" those who were responsible for the prison abuse; and now, it has pledged to "bring to justice" the men who videotaped the killing of Nick Berg. How can such an abstract idea hold its own against such vividly concrete images? How can the pledge of due process hope to exorcise the searing memory of a severed head held aloft in triumph?
What is worse, the odds are that the only culprits who will be brought to justice are those Americans who abused Iraqi prisoners. They will be brought to justice in open and public show trials that the Bush administration feels will prove to the Iraqis that we Americans are really the good guys, after all.
Unfortunately, the justice to which these Americans will be brought will fail to satisfy the Iraqi people. No matter what verdict the military court hands down, the Iraqi street will go wild with anger and indignation at the perceived lightness of the punishment. For us, justice lies in the fairness of the process; for them it lies in the rightness of the outcome -- and how can any punishment short of death be appropriate for the Americans who defiled them?
Meanwhile, back on the home front, those Americans who instinctively believe in supporting our troops in far away lands, and supporting them "right or wrong," will watch with mounting exasperation as the Bush administration tries to appease the unappeasable Iraqi streets by putting Americans on trial in Iraq. At which point those Americans at home will began to ask themselves: Why are we bringing our guys to justice, while their guys, whose crimes are infinitely worst, not only remain at large, but are busily doing whatever they can to kill even more of us? Why are we punishing our own, in a futile attempt to pacify the Arab world, at the very time when we should be sticking together to fight an enemy whose collective will is to destroy us?
So we must be prepared to brace ourselves, not only against more images of Arab atrocities and American prisoner abuse, but against the inflammatory images that will emerge from the spectacle of Americans being exhibited in public trials in Iraq -- images that will have much the same impact on the collective mind of middle America that the images of prisoner abuse had on the collective mind of the Arab world.
When the average American sees images of other average Americans on trial in Iraq, howled and screamed at by mobs of Iraqis, whose side you do think he will be on -- the side of the Iraqis or the side of men and women whose only difference from himself is that they were assigned to a miserable job in a hellhole of a prison in the midst of a war that isn't quite a war, fighting an enemy who isn't quite an enemy.
Liberals complain that the Bush administration's approach is too simplistic. Quite frankly, it is nuanced to the point of incoherency. It asks of Americans that they hate only "the bad guys" in the Arab world, while it simultaneously calls on Americans to be willing to sacrifice their sons and their pocketbooks in order to create a happy future for "the good guys" in the Arab world. Yet our television and computer screens are full of the images of the bad guys of the Arab world doing unspeakably ghastly things to us, while we search in vain for the image of even one of the good guys for whom our nation has staked its resources and its prestige. Show us just one photograph of Iraqis publicly denouncing this gruesome act as a slander against Islam and a blasphemy against God.
From the photographs of men and women jumping from the World Trade Center to the videotape of Nick Berg's butchery, our enemy has flooded us with images that will haunt us all until our dying day. But Americans have been given no images of our friends in the Arab world; and certainly none that can match the potency of the images offered by our enemies.
The enemy's compelling images show what we are fighting against in Iraq; but there are no equally compelling images that show us what we are fighting for -- an "image gap" that is already causing many well wishers of the administration to question a policy in which we are endlessly willing to help a people who refuses to offer us even a single image of themselves caught in the act of displaying friendliness toward us -- a people who, on the contrary, take every photo opportunity given to them to show how much and how deeply they hate us; and who, when not given such an opportunity by us, are quite able to make one for themselves.
Most Americans are from Missouri: we must see it before we believe it. And we are not seeing why we should be fighting in Iraq for the good guys; indeed, we are not seeing the good guys at all, and many of us are beginning to wonder if there are any good guys, in our sense, to be found there; and if so, why they so adamantly refuse to show their faces to the camera.
Right now the Middle American psyche is being overwhelmed with reasons to hate the entire Arab world; and yet the Bush administration insists that we are in Iraq to help the Arabs. Unfortunately, the administration seems to be completely unaware of how sick and tired of Arabs the average American has become, unaware because it is politically incorrect to express such sentiments of outright hostility: but what is politically incorrect to express is all too often the motive force behind those sudden and spontaneous movements of the popular psyche that only seemed to come from nowhere because they came from a place unfamiliar to most pundits and paid prophets, namely, the gut level feelings of the average guy.
Many Americans simply wish the Arabs would go away; others wish to blow them away -- and wish to blow them away not because they see this step as inevitable and tragic, but because they rejoice at the prospect of getting them back for what they have done to us. Most normal Americans today just don't care any more about the Arabs and their welfare, or about their humiliation, or about their historical grievances, simply because all the images that come to us from their world horrify and appall us, including the disturbing images of Americans doing things that no normal American would ever dream of doing to other people back at home, if only because they would never be given the opportunity.
This is how most normal Americans now feel, but they dare not express it in public. But make no mistake, this feeling will be expressed -- somehow, somewhere: a fact of which our leaders and the world must be made aware before it occurs.
Lee Harris recently wrote for TCS about 9/11 Meets the Son of Election 2000. He is the author of the book Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History.
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Muslims
The perceptions are simplistic and so is the Pres. Another image that Iraqis will see is Amerikan Troops rolling over Iraqi graveyards with tanks.
People also don't quite understand that Muslims are not only in the ME. There are millions of Muslims in Africa, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Amerika and even China.
I strongly suspect the beheading was done to a corpse and by Mercs working either for Special Forces or the CIA. The reason there has been little outrage elsewhere, except in Amerika over this is because most likely many believe it was not Iraqis or Al Q. that has committed the excecution. No group has come orth to claim this act. If they wanted to be sure that the Muslim world knew that they did this wouldn't they have announced it?
There are many inconsistencies regarding this event but the Western Media has not questioned them.
The US and UK are Occupiers and until they pull their Militaries out of Iraq they will be viewed as such by most of the ME people.
I had a long and thoughtful response prepared but it was lost in a terrible Windows clipboard accident. I agree with pistoff (for probably the first time ever) that the conclusions are simplistic. I also think the writing was disjointed and contained one of the longest run-on sentences ever seen in Western civilization. Americans do care about Arabs. What we're tired of is seeing all the negative pictures. If you would like to see some positive pictures,
look here.
perception! Great to see you!
The writer speaks to something quite real, I think. Images, particularly the sorts of images we've seen (for me, that excludes the beheading, I've decided I can get by just fine without ever viewing one) strike the consciousness with far more immediate whallop than abstract notions such as fairness or equity or justice. For a similar reason, sensationalist tabloid press/news is proving to be more successful in drawing viewers/readers than, say, PBS documentaries.
But that is a double edged reality. I could argue that the administration was quite happy to fill the news a year ago with dramatic pictures of bombs hitting targets or soldiers speeding through the desert, etc, or with big dramatic scares about mushroom clouds, but not doing the more difficult task...of really seriously and HONESTLY engaging the citizens (in the US and elsewhere) as to why this war was necessary and right.
There's an unpleasant notion in the piece that Americans are coming to hate Arabs. The writer apparently is, and there are surely some more like him/her, but it isn't showing up here or in conversations I have.
Most importantly, perc, the writer is making the error of blaming the images and the Arabs for this disaster we are now in. But you were around here when guys like me were arguing that this was a foolish and misguided war, that the administration wasn't being honest with us, and that the consequences might be very negative - including the consequence of further hatred against the US and the terrorism problems that might stem from that. Not to mention the utter blindness regarding the continuing Israel/Palestine issue which Sharon and Bush have just made worse. Arghhhh! I want to scream.
I'm deeply saddened by all these events. But it's rather like having tried to stop one's cousin when he set out to start a brawl with a stranger. Afterwards, as you help the bloody mess up from the sidewalk, you just shake your head sadly that he was such a dunce, and take him home.
I guess the big problem I see with this whole article is that it assumes the American public is influenced by nothing but photographs. Yah we is all dumbasses and we wants to see comic book pictures of warssss. The article says that no American ever reads a book or researches an issue on the Internet or thinks for himself other than looking at pictures. And that's the same degrading opinion that assumes that Arabs are enraged by pictures and can't understand the written word. So I don't think the article is worth a lot in the real world.
Quote:Right now the Middle American psyche is being overwhelmed with reasons to hate the entire Arab world; and yet the Bush administration insists that we are in Iraq to help the Arabs. Unfortunately, the administration seems to be completely unaware of how sick and tired of Arabs the average American has become, unaware because it is politically incorrect to express such sentiments of outright hostility: but what is politically incorrect to express is all too often the motive force behind those sudden and spontaneous movements of the popular psyche that only seemed to come from nowhere because they came from a place unfamiliar to most pundits and paid prophets, namely, the gut level feelings of the average guy.
perc
I think this paragraph is worth study. First off, the chap makes the sort of general claim which isn't really possible to even measure, let alone be certain regarding. How does this fellow know that the 'average' american is sick and tired of Arabs?
And then he suggests (he really is doing this) that such a response to Arabs (it's racism) is appropriate, and the only reason not to speak publicly about that is, he feels, that it will get you in trouble. Yes. But it should. We probably ought to be wary of suggesting that anti-racism is merely politically correct.
Hope all is well with you and yours
I like your analysis, blatham.
I don't buy this "war on terrorism".
It seems like the two people who benefit from this so-called war are Osama Bin Ladin, and George Bush. No one can doubt that attacks by Bin Ladin, including 9/11 greatly strengthen Bush. Likewise Bush's actions in Iraq have been some of the best things that have every happened to Bin Ladin and his movement.
I am against this war that Bush and Bin Ladin want to prolong as long as possible.
The images we are seeing are anti-violence and anti-brutality. They may be anti-Bush, but they are neither pro-terrorist nor anti-American.
Iraq was a mistake! It is in Americas interest to get out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Any true patriotic American will support these images since they make this conclusion very clear. How can the deaths of hundreds of American youth be good.
But the fact is it is impossible to "win" the war on terrorism. No one seems to be able to say what "winning" even means.
As far as losing-- you need to define what this means. We have already lost in Iraq. This has nothing to do with any attempts to prevent further domestic attacks.
We should simply end the "war on terrorism".
Hi Blatham
As always you have given a thoughtful response and it deserves the same but unfortunately I don't have the time today. I really hadn't expected anything except "kneejerk" anti bush replies which are not worthy of any comment.
So, if you can wait until tomorrow I will attempt to craft a meaningful response.
Hey perc, I didn't read the article (I'm on my way out the door) but just wanted to say hi. Long time no see.
perc
Absolutely. It's a tough set of questions for me too.
And I like ebrown's analysis even more.
Hi yourself Craven-----the last time we spoke was less than pleasant. I said I wouldn't be back------I lied.
Seems I missed the "Interaction". I also like the great platform you have built-----I hope it is now "In the black"
Quote:I hope you will forgive me if I vehemently reject your premise that it is somehow immoral for the US to fight images with images-----you and others immediately want to label it as propaganda-----you then immediately want all of us to feel guilty about ---- using------propaganda.
You and the liberals have been able to turn PROPAGANDA into a dirty word and absolutely politically incorrect. In wartime what do you think psychological warfare is? In the time of Sun Tzu he would have used it to make the enemy lay down their arms before the war even began. Now we must use it to salvage what remains of a noble enterprize-----to bring stability to the ME.
Perc
I do forgive you. But mainly because you're rejecting a premise that isn't really the one I tried to forward.
You are right in that 'propaganda' seems disagreeable when somebody else is effective at it and agreeable when we are. But I was really just pointing to the truth of the relative power of sensationalistic pictures and stories as compared to analysis, as the author had stated. I wasn't really suggesting that a government ought to feel guilty for using images, just making the point that where they do (to the degree they exclude more sophisticated and thoughtful discourse) they will end up with a less educated and thoughtful electorate, which I consider a bad outcome.
I had read Brooks' column before, and I read his column each time it runs. I have a fondness for the fellow. He's smart and witty, and he despises Ann Coulter and Limbaugh. Three essential criteria for a conservative to land up in my good books. I've argued here that the US can't hightail it now. The consequences of a power vaccum in Iraq are too potentially dangerous, I think. Mind you, I've also argued that they must internationalize the project, and place it under non-US control.
But I gotta tell ya that I disagree with a key argument he tries to make here.
Quote:But we can't wield power without sometimes being corrupted by it. Therefore, we can't do good without losing our innocence.
This is a very sly attempt to deny the administration has any responsibility for anything but foolish romantic good intentions. He may as well have said "When pure good fights evil, there's bound to be some infection." Or, "whatever bad you might see in this war didn't originate in us, but in them."
He admits (and that's laudable, and it's rare) that many of his arguments pre-war and post-war have proven false, and that other folks who argued against the war have been proven correct. Yes. But as one of those who argued in opposition to his views, let me tell you that it was evident from very early that something other than pure-heartedness was behind the drive to war, and the explanations of why we went.
I am not sure why, but somehow this image seems appropriate to this discussion.
Blatham wrote:
------I wasn't really suggesting that a government ought to feel guilty for using images, just making the point that where they do (to the degree they exclude more sophisticated and thoughtful discourse) they will end up with a less educated and thoughtful electorate, which I consider a bad outcome."
I'm surprised that you seem to want to
persuade our readers that the US wants or should use propaganda to influence the electorate. Propaganda is used to influence the other side-----you know that very well.
I did chuckle at your remarks regarding Ann Coulter and Rush the Lush but they are intellectual giants compared with Al Franken and Michael Moore. I know you despise all four ------ right Blatham????? I might add that even though they are mental midgets they tower over that fat pig "Ted Kennedy" from Chapaquidic where he abandoned a car at the bottom of a lake ------ trouble is there was a young girl in it. Unfortunately he saved himself but somehow couldn't save the girl. I have to laugh now that Kerry is trying to distance himself from the his "Pal" Kennedy!
Also I like the selective wording you used and I quote: "Mind you I've argued that they must INTERNATIONALIZE the project, and place it under non- US control". You seem to have shifted from insisting that we must turn everything over to the UN. Were you not impressed by the way the UN fled the country when they spurned US protection and Promptly got themselves blown up----- or maybe the allegation of the biggest fraud in international history somehow makes the UN a little less appealing. Who exactly should we "INTERNATIONALIZE" the project to????? Who should we place in control of our troops????? I know----France on both counts!!!!
Blatham----- I would regret the cynicism but I know you will blow me out of the water shortly so I want to get in a few licks first.
perc
It's fun to talk with you once again. We are a model example of two people who hold seriously divergent views, yet who share much affinity and mutual respect. We are also a model example of the prime danger in having weaponry in the home...we'd both be bullet-ridden years ago.
Quote:I'm surprised that you seem to want to
persuade our readers that the US wants or should use propaganda to influence the electorate. Propaganda is used to influence the other side-----you know that very well.
It's one thing to drop brochures on a country where we are having PR problems ("Beautiful Las Vegas! Come one, come all. Freedom like you've NEVER dreamed!") or to set up Radio Free Uzbekistan. There are good moral reasons to promote the positives of America.
But, sure, the term propaganda can be used to describe certain PR techniques and strategies directed at an electorate. Normally though, we tend to consider that 'propaganda' connotes a degree of deceit, moreso than the other term 'Public Relations' (making good works well known).
So propaganda, with its negative connotation, is applicable. WOMD being the sparky example right now. But another is Bush's support of Sharon's move to retain settlements in the West Bank/Gaza. That is horrid PR everywhere outside of America (excepting the minority radical parts of the Israeli electorate...there's a great piece in Ha'artez on just how dumb Sharon's stance is) but Bush's support isn't designed to have influence outside of America, it is designed to capture the Jewish vote. That's propaganda.
Quote:I did chuckle at your remarks regarding Ann Coulter and Rush the Lush but they are intellectual giants compared with Al Franken and Michael Moore. I know you despise all four ------ right Blatham?????
Actually, no, I don't. There are criteria by which I judge political voices. First is care about facts and claims. With either Coulter or Limbaugh, I could fill pages of their factual mistatements. That's not the case with Franken (particularly) but also with Moore. A second part to this criterion is the willingness to correct factual mistakes when they are presented. Again, Coulter and Limbaugh fail this test with remarkable consistency.
Another criterion is the quantity of logically fallacious argument per column inch. A third is the quantity and species of innuendo - unsubstantitated character assassination statements.
This takes some careful analysis. When that is done, both Coulter and Limbaugh do not have comparisons with Franken and Moore.
The mistake is to avoid such analysis. Usually, that avoidance is facilitated by an unreflective formula....these guys are over on that edge and the other guys are on the other edge, so they are equal. I had a similar argument with georgeob some months ago. George was arguing that what he saw as the 'center' in political stance in present America was somehow actually a real objective thing. I made the point that, in relation to the rest of the western world, what he (and many in the US) consider the center is rather like what Keith Richards considers a reasonable daily drug intake.
Quote:Also I like the selective wording you used and I quote: "Mind you I've argued that they must INTERNATIONALIZE the project, and place it under non- US control". You seem to have shifted from insisting that we must turn everything over to the UN.
Actually, my argument is the same now as earlier. Unilateral action by any single state is an invitation to many of the problems we are witnessing. Most obviously, it is dictatorial, not democratic, so it is in violation of the most fundamental principles of America and western democracy. Secondly, it give licence to any other state to do the same. Thirdly, because rule by dictate is single-minded (that's the temptation...it looks 'efficient' and it is particularly subject to mistakes of pridefulness) it is not tempered by checks/balances and is poorly geared to seriously listening to other viewpoints. That's what Brock come close to admitting. It is also what these conservative folks are struggling with
HERE
David Brooks wrote:
Quote:Now, looking ahead, we face another irony. To earn their own freedom, the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory over us. If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose.
Quote:McG wrote: This is called a "False Dilemma" - when a limited number of options are given when in reality there are more options. The choices are more than just "Iraqis win over Saddam" or "Iraqis win over us." Another possible choice would be "Iraqis united with Coalition win over terrorists." I like that one the best. And I'm not so sure Mr. Brooks is such a great writer after all, if he misses an obvious fallacy like this one.
McG
I'm pleased to see you on the lookout for the false dilemma fallacy. But I think that this is the most astute and subtle point Brock makes. It's an example of why I do like the guy, though he doesn't always achieve this level.
What he talks about here isn't so much range of outcomes as it is about the response any peoples have to being occupied. Considered that way, it is an either/or situation. Even if there is a period where the occupation by US forces is marked by co-operative intent and endeavor, your hope and mine and Brock's, it will become a matter of US must leave.
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