Recently I had a vivid recollection of a cartoon from my childhood. Many of the surrounding details are hazy (was it Mickey Mouse?) but what I recall so clearly is a Dutch boy standing near a dike when it springs a leak. He plugs the leak and almost immediately, a second leak appears. He plugs that one. Within short order, multiple leaks have appeared, while the cartoon character twists himself into contortions trying, unsuccessfully, to plug the holes and save his community. I don't recall how the cartoon ended but the image has been coming to mind with more regularity recently.
While driving in a torrential rain on Friday, I had a bit of a reverie. I had the radio on and the news came on; with half of my attention, I vaguely heard of another attack in Baghdad, with many casualties, including an American soldier. A few minutes later, I found myself wondering if it might not be time to give up in Iraq. Maybe we can't win; maybe the Iraqis are incapable of democracy. Maybe Arab culture is incompatible with democracy and freedom. I felt some lethargy and a bit of despair; after all, I know that if we declare defeat and abandon Iraq, it will reverberate in horrific ways down the road. Clearly al Qaeda and the Baathists, not to mention the Iranian Mullahs, know very well that Iraq is the crucial theater of operations at the moment. Furthermore, everything suggests we are winning in Iraq by almost any metric. So why was I musing about surrender?
I thought of a patient of mine from many years ago, a man I had not thought of in years. His treatment had been quite difficult, frustrating, and painful for both of us. For almost the first two years of his analysis, I had not been able to make one single interpretation which was not met with an attack. Nothing I had to say was of any value; my comments were not only worthless but were also stupid, foolish, inane, etc. He had an excellent vocabulary and constantly found new ways to attack and denigrate everything I did or said. I did, from time to time, wonder why he continued coming to see me since I was so unhelpful and intolerable to him. I tried every kind of interpretation; nothing helped. I began to despair of ever being able to find a way to work with this man on his very considerable difficulties. I considered the possibility that I was the wrong therapist for him and began to wish that he would conclude the same thing. Eventually he was able to recognize how his attacks on me hurt him (after all, if he destroyed my ability to help him, he would ultimately be the one to suffer for it) and we were able to accomplish considerable work in his therapy.
What brought the patient to mind was the experience of being attacked on an almost daily basis; his unrelieved aggressive attacks were not only unpleasant, but often led me to doubt my own abilities, not just to help this particular patient, but to help any patients. Beyond everything else, his sessions with me were exhausting.
It seems to me that something similar has been happening in our cultural struggles since 9/11. After a brief period of time in which the country rallied, the President and the Congress agreed that we needed to depose the Taliban and counter-attack al Qaeda. Following the Afghanistan campaign, the Congress agreed with the President, based on intelligence from multiple sources, that the status quo with Saddam Hussein was untenable and, after exhaustive efforts to obtain a consensus in the UN failed, the United States led the way in deposing Saddam Hussein. Since almost the second week of the war, when the MSM became fixated on stories of our troops getting bogged down, the narrative as presented by the media and the Democratic opposition, has been consistent and consistently spreading. Initially, it was the fringes of the Democratic party and some of the more oppositional media, that decried every move the Bush administration made; by now, the initial trickle has become a torrent. Perhaps my perceptions have been skewed but it seems as if, according to the MSM, George W. Bush has not done a single thing right in the last 2 years. Furthermore, anything that is connected to the defense of our nation has been put under a microscope in order to find fault, an examination curiously neglected when the subject has been the actions of the opposition.
Our enemy is a distributed network of cells with nodes in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and new nodes springing up in Somalia, Indonesia, and now Canada and the UK; the list is endless and growing. The war we are fighting is certainly an asymmetrical war in terms of military capabilities; however, in one particular theater of this global conflict, it seems that we are the ones at a disadvantage. There is no other way to present this: in the information theater of this war, we are losing.
Consider some of the fronts in the Information War on Islamic fascism:
Haditha: The military is guilty even before the investigations are complete. The anti-American MSM is not beyond overt lies and distortion if it will tar our troops, UK TIMES SMEARS OUR MARINES. "First the verdict, then the trial," said the Red Queen or The New York Times. The Times editorial is fisked by Don Surber. Riehl World View points out the imbalance in the coverage of Haditha and what one might assume is a more crucial story of a terrorist ring busted right next door.
Iran: MSM HELPS IRAN COVER UP GROWING UNREST. If you don't read the blogs, you probably didn't know that Iranians are risking torture (real torture, not humiliating panties on the head) and death right now in Iran, Despite Martial Law, 10,000 Protest in Tabriz, Iran.
The fighting in Somalia, where Islamic fascist militias are currently winning the battle with more traditional warlords, doesn't even make the front pages of the major press organs.
Meanwhile, the West continues to have trouble even naming the enemy. In From London to Toronto: Dismantling Cells, dodging their ideology, Walid Phares points out that our enemies have declared war on us:
Over the past nine months, speeches by Usama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, other Jihadi cadres and the documents found after the arrest of Terror-architect Abu Mus’ab al Suri all put the West and democracies on notice: the second generation al Qaida is marching. The “Jihad country-list” includes those countries whose troops are engaged in battles against the Terrorists around the world or whose police force is attempting to disrupt the cells at home. Beyond the "regular" countries-targets such as the United States, UK, Australia, Russia, India, Jordan and Israel, many others "infidel" countries made it to the top 20: Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Canada etc. The first type of countries, those who are engaged directly in confrontations with Jihadi networks on battlefields such as Afghanistan and Iraq, are “open targets.” This is the A list. However, countries on the B list are “enemies of the cause” but decisions to strike them fall into the hands of the “local emirs.”
While an "A" list country, England, and a "B" list country, Canada, have both dodged the bullet in the last week, the press in both countries can not even reveal what might be motivating those who wish to indiscriminately kill their fellow citizens and residents. In the most remarkable information ju-jitsu, the cause of terror in the West becomes the West's Islamophobia and mistreatment of Muslims. Melanie Philips documents how the sages of Londonistan continue to appease the monsters within their midst:
In a recent speech to a Muslim audience, the then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw blamed the tension between the Islamic world and the west on Europe's hostility to Muslim immigration and to religion in general.
Both Britain and the United States are turning a blind eye to the fact that the source of Islamic terror is radical Islam. Students training to be imams at a college with strong Iranian links are being taught to despise non-Muslims as "filth." Meanwhile, radical Muslim chaplains promote an extremist agenda in U.S. prisons.
Meanwhile, rather than see each other as allies in a War that threatens to destroy our civilization (and I might remind those who hate the present administration that another 9/11 is almost certain to cause a significant diminution of all of our civil liberties), we have Kevin Drum, in a review of Peter Beinart's book, The Good Fight, which called for liberals to join in a bipartisan fight against Islamic fascism, state that he would remain silent out of concern that any support he offered would help George Bush. As Marc Schulman points out:
This is a frank admission that for Drum and those for whom he speaks, Bush is the greater enemy and Ahmadinejad and the mullahs the lesser. I wonder what—if any— circumstances would persuade antiwar liberals to shelve their antipathy and give voice to their ideals. Would another massive terrorist attack on U.S. soil do the trick? I doubt it: they would more likely place the blame for it on Bush's shoulders. It would be retribution for Iraq.
It's time for the the increasingly vocal chorus of antiwar liberals to tell the rest of us what it would take to bring their ideals out of hibernation. Or have they been asleep for so long that they are now just a distant memory?
I could go on but the problem is insidious and two fold. On the one hand, we see how our own media organs are used by the enemies of our culture to attack the foundations of our own civilization, with the willing aid and assistance of far too many of our countrymen and women. The result is to make the fight nearly impossible to conduct. Here is Neo-neocons construction of the current Rules of Engagement:
(1) Wars cannot last more than a few weeks.
(2) In the "hot" stage of the war, no civilians can die.
(3) In the aftermath of a war, no civilians can die.
(4) All military investigations of possible war crimes and atrocities must be treated by the press as though they are already coverups. The accused are guilty until proven innocent. And, of course, since the military always lies and covers up, the accused can never really be proven innocent by a military court.
What would these rules do? They would set up war as an impossible to execute but morally black and white situation in which we keep our hands impeccably clean.
On the other hand, the effort to counter the distortions and overt lies of the opposition is exhausting and time consuming. The Second Draft is an organization that was founded in order to redress one particularly egregious example of media distortion and dissembling, a lie which fueled the Second Intifada and brought ongoing international condemnation onto Israel. The Palestinians staged the drama, were assisted by the French "news" reporters who propagated the lie, and despite tremendous work and effort, the lie will never go away.
Each lie and distortion takes on a life of its own: There were no WMD! Well, maybe there weren't and maybe there were and still are; how many people know about the documents being translated revealing the extent of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs? As Helen Szamuely points out, The jury is still out about WMD, but you wouldn't know that from our politicians and media.
Worse, our media's omissions and distortions color the entire spectrum, so that a leak can be plugged at one place, and after barely a moment, another springs out someplace else. How often do we hear of how terrible the economy is? Michael Barone highlights the discrepancies we are dealing with:
Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.
And while we dither and exhaust ourselves with petty arguments and name calling, our enemies hone their weapons and spread their hateful ideology on the backs of our own media. Their holy hatred knows no limits and no doubts; Kyle Smith reviewed THE CULT OF THE SUICIDE BOMBER on Friday:
One of the families Baer interviews remains so proud of their bomber son that they continue to show film of his demise at an annual celebration, a sort of anti-birthday party. That the bomber failed to take any lives other than his own doesn't matter to them. That's because, as last summer's London bombings made clear, the campaign has become literally senseless, a joyride for maniacs.
"For them," says Baer, who believes the cult will grow still more powerful, "death is the only aim."
The Islamic fascists mean for us to surrender or die; they say it often enough. They remain only constrained by their limited capabilities. Their war is facilitated by the fractures within the West.
Fighting on so many fronts is exhausting and an important part of Conservative Fatigue Syndrome.
The New York Sun points out that it is our existence that fuels the Islamists' rage, not our policies. Opposing the war in Iraq has conspicuously not protected Canada.
What the Islamic extremists oppose in Canada is neither its support for Israel nor its behavior in Iraq but the mere fact that it is not a country governed by Islamic law. An Associated Press dispatch on the bomb plot noted that Canada, with the America, Britain, Spain, and Australia, was listed by Osama Bin Laden as a "Christian" nation that should be a target for terrorism. Nothing short of dropping Christianity and converting to Islam will satisfy the Islamist terrorists.
What follows is this truth: the options this leaves Canada and other free nations are, in other words, either defeating their enemy or surrendering to it. Concessions short of surrender won't satisfy the enemy, as the example of Canada demonstrates. Nor will a crackdown on immigration entirely solve the security problem for the West - it appears that many of those arrested over the weekend were Canadian-born.
More details will emerge as the case against these plotters progresses. The accused are entitled to a presumption of innocence. But this war has been going on for long enough now - dating back not only to September 11, 2001, but to the attacks on the USS Cole in 2000, the Dhahran Barracks in 1996, the World Trade Center in 1993, the United States Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983, the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979. And, some would argue, to the original Muslim invasion of Europe and the Christian Crusades that followed. Not all Muslims are enemies of Christendom any more than all Christians are enemies of Islam. But one can begin to discern patterns. Those who falsely see the source of Muslim rage solely in American policy can now consider the case of Canada.
The probability that this war will take decades and be fought on many fronts, some yet to be visible, while being impeded at every step of the way by forces within our own culture as well as the unchallenged propaganda of our enemies, is daunting and exhausting.
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