Sunday, July 08, 2007
A question of nomenclature: The al Qaeda "in Iraq" argument
A couple of weeks ago I predicted that Clark Hoyt, the new Public Editor at the New York Times, would "carefully defend the Times from the grave risk that it tilts too far to the right." Judging by today's column -- "See al Qaeda Around Every Corner" -- my cynicism is exceeded only by my prescience.
Hoyt's basic argument is that the White House is promoting the threat of "Al Qaeda in Iraq" in yet another attempt to confuse the Great Unwashed into believing that we, the people of the United States of America, have actual enemies inside Iraq. Journalists, Hoyt believes, have to stand guard against this deception:
[I]n using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.
There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.
Nobody is more in favor of nuance in counterinsurgency than I am. By all means let's refer to "Al Qaeda in Iraq" to distinguish it from "Al Qaeda in a cave" somewhere in western Pakistan. Let's educate Americans as thoroughly as we can in the details of the al Qaeda matrix of organizations.
Our agreement that we could do with more nuance in the discussion of jihadi sub-groups does not mean, however, that the president is inflating the threat, as Hoyt all but accuses him of doing. Al qaeda means "the base." Its founding purpose was to be the root of a global network of terrorist cells with varying degrees of command and control and other affiliation. Al Qaeda in Iraq is one of its branches. Yes, it would not have emerged in Iraq when it did without the invasion -- accepted -- but it is there now. If it wins -- in the sense of forcing the United States to withdraw without an effective counterinsurgency in its place -- we can rest assured that "al Qaeda in a cave" will exploit that victory as widely as possible. We can also be sure that al Qaeda in Iraq will not bend its swords into plowshares. War is too damned fun compared to the lives most of these losers would lead in peace. Even if contained inside Iraq, it will look elsewhere for new ideological and military conquests.
The New York Times, of course, has decided that there are essentially no forseeable consequences of an American retreat from Iraq that are worse than remaining there.
Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.
The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.
I read the whole editorial twice and I do not understand its reasoning. Fortunately for the editors of the New York Times, they do not actually have to prove that keeping "troops in Iraq will only make things worse," because their regular readers have absorbed this as an article of faith. Even more fortunately, their own Public Editor has told those same readers that any argument to the contrary is probably just more Bush administration propaganda.
Others: Don Surber's pissed; me, I'm just tired. Jules Crittenden: "Genocide preferred." Natan Sharansky, who knows tyranny when he sees it and has the scars to prove it, argues powerfully that even with all the bloodshed it is terribly misguided to argue that Iraqis were better off under Saddam.
Of course, Hussein's removal has created a host of difficult strategic challenges, and numerous human rights atrocities have been committed since his ouster. But let us be under no illusion of what life under Hussein was like. He was a mass murderer who tortured children in front of their parents, gassed Kurds, slaughtered Shiites, started two wars with his neighbors and launched Scud missiles into downtown Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The price for the stability that Hussein supposedly brought to the region was mass graves, hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, and terrorism and war outside it. Difficult as the challenges are today -- with Iran and Syria trying to stymie democracy in Iraq, with al-Qaeda turning Iraq into the central battleground in its holy war of terrorism against the free world, and with sectarian militias bent on murder and mayhem -- there is still hope that tomorrow may be better.
Not according to the American Democrats and the New York Times, Mr. Sharansky. You obviously know not whereof you speak.
CWCID: Some of those links are from Glenn Reynolds.
2 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Mon Jul 09, 11:38:00 AM:
It is good that the Times believes it has an “obligation to ask tough questions” to the President. I am looking forward to the day when they ask the same tough questions to the Democrats, particularly if we wind up with a President of that ilk. And even more looking forward to the day when they ask tough questions of the Terrorists.
“And bravely, the mice went forth to bell the cat…”
By 
, at
Mon Jul 09, 02:41:00 PM:
Why doesn't the Times just come out and argue forcefully for a fortress America approach to the difficulties of foreign affairs? After all, that's the obvious result we can expect if any government actually adopted any of these ideas.
Iran should be "subjected to intense international pressure" (paraphrasing)? Good idea, except that's already the case, as the Times well knows and it hasn't had any effect at all except in a perverse way to practically legitimize the Iranian desire to build nuclear weapons. Public intellectuals on the left are starting to ask with increasing frequency "what's so bad about a nuclear-armed Iran, anyway"? Presumably, the use of those weapons won't shock the Times too too much, so long as no really important government programs are damaged.
Iraq "should be abandoned post haste" (again, I'm paraphrasing)? Well, why not? All the death, destruction and the new Caliphate that would predictably result can be blamed on BushCo and help gain a larger Democrat congressional majority. We can build some vital new government programs sooner. Nothing could be more important, and the ultimate sacrifice required of Iraqis to create these critical new programs is a but a small price to pay.
We can always fight jihadist Islam later on. No worries.
