Topic A

[mmcirvin]

My apologies in advance if you find that you didn't need to read this. I suspect most of the people on my LJ friends list won't: either they already agree with everything I'm going to say (my usual cheering section can probably stop reading now), or they disagree so vehemently that nothing I say is going to convince them, or they don't live in this country anyway. But I think there are some people out there in the American part of Internetland who might see themselves in the following, and those people happen to be of historic importance right now, so I'm going to talk to them whether they are listening or not.

So you step into the voting booth on Tuesday, you see that space on the ballot for President, and, just like everyone, you have all sorts of sad and angry thoughts swirling around in your head.

You think of yourself as a moderate. You don't vote straight party tickets. You don't like the idea of being reduced to a collection of knee-jerk responses, of reducing every candidate to an R or a D. You're not like that condescending hipster stereotype of the undecided voter as ignoramus; you follow the news, you see campaign ads, you like to know what's going on around you—and all this has led to conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, were there not still a war on, you'd probably be voting for Kerry, or, at any rate, against President Bush. Having made all the noises about shrinking government, carrying out a humble foreign policy, being a uniter and maintaining the budget surplus of the 1990s, he's done none of these things. He's generally run hard to the right, and not in a libertarian or small-government federalist sense either, but in more of a theocrat-cronyist sense, enriching his friends and riling up his cultural-conservative base with coded words of intolerance. You don't give a rip about gays, don't think the government should be poking its nose in your religion. This isn't what a uniter does.

The economy stinks. That probably wasn't initially Bush's fault. But it sure doesn't seem like Bush is helping much to respond to the situation. Hiring might be picking up a little, but you probably know some people, good, competent people, who are still out of work or working terrible jobs way beneath their qualifications. Bush's response was to cut taxes for the very rich, and you don't see how that helped. There just doesn't seem to be any end in sight.

And then there's the war in Iraq. Maybe you thought it was justified in 2003, maybe you didn't. In any event, it looks like the rationale for going in there has evaporated, if it ever really existed in the first place, and it's going very, very badly, people dying pointlessly by the tens of thousands. We got Saddam himself, the Butcher of Baghdad, and somehow that didn't help; the fighting goes on against enemies you never even heard of before the war started. Maybe you know people who are already over there or are on their way, and they know this as well as you do.

But on the other hand... on the other hand... you remember September 11th, 2001.

That murdering bastard Osama bin Laden just popped up on the TV again. He's bragging about how he killed 3,000 people in New York, turned the biggest and most famous city in America into a charnel house—I hardly have to spell out the details. He's being very canny, not endorsing any candidate, but you suspect nevertheless that if Bush loses to Kerry, he'll take it as a victory. And you don't want to hand him a victory, even a symbolic one. There in the voting booth, it seems as if this just might outweigh all your other concerns. You're strongly, strongly tempted to vote for Bush just to stick it in bin Laden's face.

That was the wind-up. Now I throw the pitch: Do not vote for Bush just to stick it to bin Laden. Resist this temptation. You will feel better in the long run if you do.

The only reason this is even an issue is that bin Laden is still alive and on the loose, and, perhaps more importantly, his terrorist network is still going strong, three years after Bush publicly vowed to get him and shut them down. Sure, their terrorist attacks these days tend to be overseas. But they were mostly overseas before Bush, too. Clinton's administration can share some of the blame, particularly for allowing the first WTC bombing; but al Qaeda's single biggest attack on the United States happened on Bush's watch, after some of their most spectacular previous attempts—Bojinka, the millennium plot— had been foiled under Clinton.

It seems strange to have to state the obvious, but here it is: when Bush uses September 11th in his campaign, he is trying to get political capital from his own greatest failure. In a democracy we are supposed to punish failure with our votes, not reward it.

You shouldn't care who bin Laden wants you to vote for. Bin Laden wants you dead, and you might as well return the favor. Bush hasn't managed to kill or capture bin Laden in three years of trying. Had he kept his eye on the ball, and not concentrated on invading Iraq, he might have done so.

Will Kerry? I can't predict the future; I have no idea. But I do think that Kerry is serious about fighting terrorism in a way that Bush is not. As I've mentioned earlier, it continues to mystify me that we aren't making a bigger deal of the BCCI investigation, in which Kerry led the effort to shut down a Pakistan-based, terrorist-funding financial octopus with connections all over US government and industry (at the same time that some of its minor tentacles were cutting deals with unwitting associates of George W. Bush). Kerry hung onto this at what seemed like considerable cost to his career, and he succeeded. This is tenacity; this is resolve, and it's actually more to the point than Kerry's youthful war experience. The story is a bit abstract, but it's the kind of thing we need to be doing today.

The epitome of Bush's counterterrorism strategy, on the other hand, is the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. This is the guy supposedly behind most of the videotaped beheadings of Americans and other foreigners in Iraq. He's also associated with most of the bombings inside Iraq (though this connection may be exaggerated), and, possibly, with the Madrid bombings (though that connection sounds pretty tenuous to me).

At any rate, he's a very bad man, and we are currently bombing the crap out of the town of Fallujah, with untold numbers of civilian dead, just in order to capture this man. The reason we have to do this is that before the Iraq war, the US declined to attack Zarqawi's base inside the Kurdish no-fly zone (in an area essentially free of Saddam Hussein's control), apparently to bolster the political case for invading Iraq.

Bush's people were so sure they had the right course of action—a course that has gone disastrously wrong in every way—that they gave up a shot at a genuine victory in the terror war, at a price that we are currently paying every day, in blood and treasure and hearts and minds. This is what happens when you leave the reality-based community.

What's done is done, and a Kerry administration will have a tough time cleaning up all the damage that's happened already. I don't envy him and I don't expect miracles. But when you're in a hole, the first step is to stop digging.

Pay no attention to what you think Osama bin Laden wants. You don't know what he wants, other than to kill you, and he's clearly a slick, lying character. If you vote for Bush to stick it to bin Laden, what you're giving up is the chance to fight him more effectively.

Comments

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Bin Laden, if he is even alive, will say 'That's what I wanted!' no matter how the election turns out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think this is the first time in over a year that I've agreed with you completely about something related to this.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I knew that'd happen sooner or later.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Don't forget, the latest news says the tape has yet to be authenticated. (Did I spell that correctly?)

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't care who bin Laden wants you to vote for. Bin Laden wants you dead

Exactly. Besides, there's a case to be made for bin Laden wanting Bush in office, too. He doesn't really care, except to further his own ends.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Bin Laden, Bin Schmaden. Those who thought he was only the tool of some terrorism-sponsoring state were wrong; those who (like George W. Bush) think capturing him will be the end of Al Qaeda are wrong too. Bush brags that he's captured two-thirds (or is it three-fourths?) of Al Qaeda's top council; what he doesn't say, and perhaps hasn't figured out, is that they've all been replaced. When, or if, he finally brings Bin Laden in, or down, al-Zarqawi or al-Whoever will replace him, and Al Qaeda will still be there--maybe not quite as well-connected, but still deadly. If killing the leaders of terrorist groups stopped terrorism, Israel would be at peace by now.

I'm not saying we should lie down and sue for peace; that would be futile. But I am saying that this litmus test, "Will he be tough on the terrorists?" is a delusion. Terrorism arises from social conditions, and until we change those social conditions and our approach to them we'll continue to create enemies faster than we can kill them.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And that's another big piece of it too. bin Laden seems to be mostly an ideological leader and figurehead; if we do nothing but kill these guys it's just infinite Whack-A-Mole.

Mind you, that was also part of the big neocon argument for invading Iraq: that by establishing a stable democratic state in the Middle East we could change the social conditions underlying Islamic terrorism. But the method was all wrong.