Posted on 08/22/2006 7:18:24 AM PDT by ZGuy
I am not a pollster, but my sense is that there has been a shift in the popular mood in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel as a result of events this summer in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and London. I suspect that this is one of those eras where the political elites are out of touch with mass opinion. In this case, I think that the elites are mostly wrong, and I hope that they adjust.
"British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny -- refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.
The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic."
--The Daily Mail, August 20, 2006
Regarding the "mutiny" of the British airplane passengers, no doubt the elites are thinking, "Oh, what awful behavior on the part of passengers. They are ruining our effort to reassure Muslims that they face no discrimination."
Meanwhile, the people are thinking, "Look, the fact that you subject all passengers to the same humiliating searching and restrictions says that you have no idea who is dangerous and who is not. If you are that incompetent, then don't expect us to trust you when you tell us that a plane is safe."
The elites focused on hair gels and other liquids that were supposed tools of the plot. Everyone else noticed the ethnicity of the plotters. As James Joyner put it recently on TCS,
"Keeping passengers from taking nail clippers, toothpaste, and hair gel with them causes an inconvenience disproportionate to the infinitesimal gain in safety provided. Likewise, forcing people to arrive at the airport three hours early so they may stand in line to have their shoes checked for explosives is plainly silly.
It makes far more sense to harden targets and screen for likely terrorists than to treat all citizens as potential terrorists."
I suspect that the popular frustration is widespread. My guess is that popular sentiment is turning against elite opinions like these:
- The world's Muslims share our desire for peace and democracy.
- Equal-opportunity passenger screening at airports is a better policy than profiling.
- The United Nations is the world's conscience and policeman.
- The "international community" will deal with Iran's quest for nuclear weapons.
- It is possible for the United States to bring about a constructive transformation of Middle East politics, either through diplomatic or military initiatives.
There are other ways in which elites have lost credibility. President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert are both guilty of exaggerating the success of military operations.
Excess partisanship in a time of war is very frustrating to the public. How can it be that essentially all Republican officials agree with the Bush Administration policies and procedures for monitoring phone conversations and essentially all Democrats disagree? Would a Democratic President really be following policies that are very different?
Finally, anyone who believes that "French co-operation" is anything but an oxymoron is an incurably senseless elitist. French peacekeeping forces in Lebanon were decimated without firing a shot. (Actually, it's worse than that. To be decimated is to lose ten percent of one's soldiers. France's expected contribution of 2000 soldiers was reduced by ninety percent; in addition, the French proceeded to deny that the UN resolution means what it says when it calls for the disarming of uninformed militias.)
Elite Theory vs. Popular Reality
One illustration of how elite theory can conflict with popular perceptions is the cover story on the September issue of The Atlantic, by James Fallows. The thesis of the article, which was written before the Lebanon war and the failure of the plot to blow up British airliners, is that the war on terror is over, and that we won. Despite the occasional plot or successful attack, we should declare victory, tone down the war rhetoric, and go about dealing with the world's trouble spots using conventional diplomacy. In a follow-up, Fallows argues that the break-up of the plot to blow up airliners shows that "it was police work, surveillance, and patient cultivation of sources that broke the airline bombing ring -- not speeches about a state of war."
A populist definition of victory would mean that governments that fund terror groups or use them as instruments of their foreign policy are brought down. A populist definition of victory might mean that Muslim clerics who urge young men to join the jihad are given the opportunity to experience the ecstasy of martyrdom themselves.
Failing to accept James Fallows' nuanced analysis, most people will not want to declare victory until they can once again board a plane without taking their shoes off. In fact, one might argue that we can really declare victory only when you can board a plane that has several dark-skinned male passengers speaking Arabic and not think twice about it.
Mobilize Social Scientists?
It is not just journalists who play the elitist game. In the Armed Forces Journal, retired major general Robert H. Scales says that in order to win modern war we need to mobilize social scientists.
"The military of the future must be able to go to war with enough cultural knowledge to thrive in an alien environment. Empathy will become a weapon. Soldiers must gain the ability to move comfortably among alien cultures, to establish trust and cement relationships that can be exploited in battle...
We are in for decades of psycho-social warfare. We must begin now to harness the potential of the social sciences in a manner not dissimilar to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project. Perhaps we will need to assemble an A team and build social science institutions similar to Los Alamos or the Kennedy Space Center."
I can hear Donald Rumsfeld saying, "You go to war with the social scientists you have." I am reminded of a neighborhood football game when I was in fourth grade, where all the neighborhood brainy kids were on one team, and the other team had Gary Bemis, my next-door neighbor who was big and tough. After Gary scored touchdowns the first five or six times he carried the ball, the parents declared the game over. My guess is that social scientists fighting Islamofascists would be like the brainy kids trying to stop Gary Bemis.
The elitist view is that we need to be more sensitive to other cultures and we must deal delicately with civilians whose hearts and minds we need to win over. I think that popular opinion is swinging toward the opposite conclusion.
Populist Responses
My sense is that popular opinion is likely to gravitate toward one of two positions.
In 2008, I believe that either a Republican running on (1) as a platform or a Democrat running on (2) as a platform could win broad bipartisan support. However, my guess is that the Democrats are likely to come closer to representing (1) in 2008, and as of now my sense is that (1) is more popular than (2).
In my own thinking, I tend to vacillate between (1) and (2). The advantage of (2) is that it helps align our interests with the UK and Israel, which are not in a position to adopt (1). The UK, with its larger and more radical Muslim population, necessarily is affected by international Muslim belligerence. For Israel, staying out of the Middle East is not an option.
The main prediction from this essay is that we will see an outbreak of popular frustration in the next few years. I think that many people are tired of political spin machines, diplomatic "solutions," and fancy intellectual models of the world that fail in practice. They long for a leader who talks straight and who can make the plays work on the field the way they were designed to work on the chalkboard.
The failures of elitist thinking will create an adverse environment for haughty, cerebral politicians such as Tony Blair or Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, I expect more populist figures to emerge, which gives me considerable misgivings. I think that populist economics is mostly bad. If voters turn to populists on the issue of national security, my guess is that the economy will suffer for it.
But I think that the popular instinct is that the elites so far have not gotten it right on security and Islamic militancy. And in that regard, the popular instinct is right.
This guy has a point, but man, does he go on and on.
The one thing that surprises me is how this story has managed to evade the more American style race mongering, such as "I'm not gonna fly on this plane with a colored person aboard." I mean, some articles did try to spin it this way, but it didn't seem to fly to well with the focus groups.
Now, if the passengers had been Americans I wonder how this story would've been told.
But as this author correctly notes, the elites live in an alternate reality from most normal folks.
Actually, it was the effective hard work of NAto and Pakistani militaries puttting pressure on Waziristan that caused the bad guys to make a mistake and one of them get arreste on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and yield info about the airline bombing. As there are not even any roads in that territory, it is not an area that lends itself to police work.
As for the conclusion, hopefully most people realize that serious problems cannot be solved in tiny soundbites in a 24 hour news cycle.
without that, we'd be wondering what happened to those 9 planes that disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic.
We can't keep depending on luck.
The candidate for president next time, either party, who announces these common sense positions will win the White House by acclamation.
Want to bet none of them has the guts to stand up to the elites in the universities and media?
Whomever does it wins.
It is not relevant what Muslims want. Most Japanese, Germans, and Italians in WWII probably wanted peace and Democracy too. As long as people are cowed by despots, there will be no peace and democracy.
"Equal-opportunity passenger screening at airports is a better policy than profiling.
Profiling may or may not have stopped 9/11. However, we do know that all the suspects were young Islamic males. And we know that the passengers who fought them to the death on Flight 93 were NOT young Islamic males!
"The United Nations is the world's conscience and policeman."
The United Nations has the conscience of a pimp and the ethics of a wise guy. "Oil for food" and "brothels" are the goals of these vermin.
"The "international community" will deal with Iran's quest for nuclear weapons."
Germany, France, and Italy don't want to go to South Lebanon as it is. They sure as hell don't to go to war against Iran.
"It is possible for the United States to bring about a constructive transformation of Middle East politics, either through diplomatic or military initiatives."
Militarily - yes, diplomatically - NO!
Finally! Common Sense is starting to prevail!
bttt
1. The Middle East is a hopeless cauldron of hatred. We should focus on homeland security, stay out of the Middle East, and have as little interaction with the Muslim world as possible; or
2. A major war is inevitable, so that we need to get ready for it. Nothing else will stop Iranian aggression, and nothing else will stifle the funding, sponsoring, and glorification of terrorists.
No. 1, the "head in the sand" policy, was the policy during the Clinton years. Meanwhile, terrorists took over Afghanistan and established numerous training camps turning out tens of thousands of trained jihadis, Pakistan got the nuclear bomb, the Qadeer Khan nuclear proliferation ring got underway, Saddam had his WMD programs back in high gear, jihadi bombers killed hundreds of US employees in embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania (why do liberals only count the US citizens and not the US employees?), etc etc.
A similar "head in the sand" policy was followed during the Carter years with respect to international communism, with disastrous results.
Just because we don't want to interact with muslims doesn't mean muslims don't want to "interact" with us.
Throughout history most Western societies have stuck their heads in the sand and after this doesn't work they have to go with option number 2.
It is amazing how confidently some assert things which are wrong.
Uh huh.
The British say their inquiry began months ago — prompted by a tip from within the British Muslim community after the bloody July 7, 2005, terror bombings of the London transit system, The Washington Post reported.
There were signs preparations stepped up recently. One of the houses raided by British police this week had been bought last month by two men in an all-cash deal, in a neighborhood of $300,000 houses, neighbors reported.
Pakistani officials said British information led to the first arrests in Pakistan about a week ago, of two British nationals, including Rauf, called a "key person" by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry.
And your point is that the New York Times recently made sure we won't be able track the terrorist money trail in the United States, right?
I for one am greatly disappointed that we haven't stomped a mudhole in the chest of any terrorist organization or terrorist-supporting government lately. Afghanistan and Iraq showed us that our armed forces are perfectly capable of doing it, and if any group deserved such treatment, it was Hezbollah, which has the blood of some 300 Americans on its hands. Instead, we pressured Israel into accepting a cease-fire that nobody expects will last, because in the Middle East, cease-fire is another word for "reload!" Alas, the latest news from Lebanon, Iran, etc. tells me that nobody in a position of power in our government is serious about winning the War on Terror, including our president. Well, there are times when victory is a better goal than peace.
If, god forbid, another hit does happen we will hear from the democrat party hacks who will jump in front of the parade to look crocodile patriotic.
This will be a fool me twice moment. At that point, it becomes time to start disbaring the ACLU types and start telling these faux patriots that they are no longer welcome to be in office.
Nooooooo. My point was that it was a tip from a british muslim that broke the airline mass-murder plot. Not "effective hard work of NAto and Pakistani militaries puttting pressure on Waziristan that caused the bad guys to make a mistake".
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