At the insistence of Congressional Republicans, last week the Director of National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte, began the Web release of tens of thousands of Iraqi documents captured by American troops.
Upon their release, these documents were transformed by Republican spin masters into fresh, taken out-of-context quote lines; quote lines that are intended to stir the American public's inaccurate belief in a substantive pre-Iraq war connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
This is only the latest episode in the right-wing misinformation campaign against the truth about Iraq and American foreign policy, but I think it gives us a chance to ask fresh and difficult questions about how Americans were so severely misled by the Bush Administration to war; and, it gives us the chance to examine what this past manipulation means for the way Americans see the world today and how we may see the world tomorrow.
On 9/11, we Americans were justifiably scared; scared for our loved ones; scared about not knowing who our attackers were and why they attacked with such murderous effect.
In particular, my generation, the 9/11 Generation, who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall but did not experience why it was built, for the first time learned what it is to truly fear a foreign threat. Naturally, we and all Americans craved a way of understanding this new unknown.
In times like these, citizens look to their leaders for direction. We looked to President Bush. And so the President was tasked with deciding how America would approach Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism.
At first, Bush chose to refer to our attackers as outlaws. But for those whispering in his ear (among whom the vast majority were children of the Cold War and Reagan era neoconservatism) "bringing the 9/11 murderers to justice" didn't quite do it. Well before 9/11, the President and his brain trust wanted more. They wanted an amorphous, all encompassing "War on Terror" made in the image of the Cold War approach to national security in which they had been educated. And so it came.
But what exactly is the paradigm of the "War on Terror?" Who are we fighting? What is victory? That a coherent understanding of this paradigm is elusive is its greatest strength in the minds of neoconservatives and it is entirely intentional. The "War on Terror" casts a too-wide net that allows utterly unrelated world events and groups to be thrown under the same heading.
Indeed, one of its key aspects is to invite and maintain a public haziness about who really threatens America. This public haziness engenders public control - an uninformed, fearful public is weak and easily manipulated.
Evidence of public obedience to the reality the Bush Administration seeks to create via the "War on Terror" is no more apparent than in a March 14, 2003 report issued by the Christian Science Monitor. The report found that in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. Fast forward two and a half years and on March 14, 2003, Knight Ridder found that 44 percent of Americans reported either most or some of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.
Public opinion does not shift so dramatically with a magical whip of a wand. The American people's uncertainty about the Muslim world helps explain the public belief in a substantive Qaeda-Iraq connection; but it in no way sufficiently accounts for the phenomenon. At the end of the day, public uncertainty was molded by a political leadership hell bent on recreating the international landscape in its own image. This center stage role played by the White House in this manipulation is well-documented and requires no further comment. But the manipulative power of the "War on Terror" paradigm did not evaporate when the truth about the reasons for the Iraq war were finally given public attention.
It lives today as we Americans engage in a struggle with our own ideals that is an internal threat as much as it is an external one. This struggle stems from our lack of understanding of the intricacies of the Muslim world and it has produced two influential conditions within the American mind that are having profound effects on the Bush Administration's freedom to continue conducting a cowboy foreign policy.
The first factor is, intended or not, the American dehumanization of Muslims around the world as simply "other." Evidence of this dehumanization is found not only in Bush Administration's practice of extraordinary rendition and the horrors of Abu Gharib and Camp Nama, it is found in our public indifference to this moral evil of torture. With the exception of human rights, religious, and progressive activists, most Americans don't seem too concerned with all this torture business.
A September/October 2005 Pew Research poll found that 46 percent of Americans believe torturing terror suspects is sometimes (31 percent) or often (15 percent) justified; 17 percent think torture is rarely justified and only 32 percent are opposed its use. If anything, the data show that Americans offer tacit support for torture.
Yes, this is only one indicator of how we unintentionally dehumanize "the enemy," but the important takeaway is that this dehumanization - the idea that the Bush Administration's odious policies are simply not the concern of Americans so long that they do not directly affect Americans - is the very condition that allows the President far too much freedom to continue enacting his ill-conceived "War on Terror."
As for the second state of the American mind that indirectly supports the President's policies, it is the perpetuation of our irrational public fear. The world view created by "War on Terror" is seeping deeper and deeper into the fabric of our country. And though we would like to think otherwise, even progressives are not immune to its siren calls. The most recent example of this fear was the public outcry, among Republicans and Democrats alike, over the planned sale of British owned port company, P&O, to Dubai Ports World, a port company owned by the emirate of Dubai.
I will not retrace ground already covered about the merits of the deal. I will say that when liberal Democrats and House Republicans take the same stance on an issue, you know something is not right in the air. So why were both parties able to cry (contrary to fact) that the White House was "selling our port security to Arabs?"
Because there exists a requisite condition within the American mind that makes possible such nativist grandstanding; that condition is our broad brush fear of "them," the Muslims. Yes, President Bush reaped what he sowed in this case - the public fear he orchestrated sank the deal. But as Buffalo Springfield told us, "nobody's right when everybody's wrong."
The ironic truth is that ultimately, if and when Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism are defeated, they will be defeated not primarily by American might, but by the stewardship of progressive Muslim leaders and the collective will of their people.
We can choose not to recognize this essential truth. We can choose not to embrace far from perfect Muslim moderates. But in doing so, we choose the "Long War" President Bush and his Cold War romanticists so badly want to bring.
While any meaningful public check on the presidency of George W. Bush is unlikely (the second term president need not answer to anyone any longer), as we look to the future, we Americans need to check ourselves about how we choose to see the world around us.
We need to bother one another to learn that the Muslim world is not a country; that not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Arab; that Islam is broken down into different sects; that while Islamic extremists are a real threat, they do not represent the vast majority of peace loving Muslims; that if America and our Allies change the direction of our policy, the pools of support within the Muslim world provided for the extremists can dry up. This list of essential public inquiry goes on and it is the elixir of public reason and the enemy of public dogma.
Sure, President Bush and his policies are loathed around the world. But the American people are loved. Our international friends can and do make this important distinction. But if we Americans don't start making some distinctions of our own, I can tell you that pretty soon everyone else is going to stop making theirs.