Posted on 01/20/2005 9:44:21 AM PST by quidnunc
The distinction between "red" and "blue" America came to mind again this past week, albeit from an unexpected direction and with unusually disturbing connotations.
While reading Joshua Muravchik’s article, "Why the Democrats Keep Losing," in Commentary magazine, I came across a remarkable discussion of Osama bin Laden’s pre-election videotape.
Perhaps because we have grown bored with his tendency to periodically reappear and spew the usual fundamentalist slop, bin Laden’s video didn’t receive a great deal of media attention at the time and wasn’t thought to have made much of a difference in the election outcome.
The key part of the tape was acknowledged to have been his statement that "any state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own," interpreted by the media to mean an assertion of al-Qa’ida’s essentially defensive motives — that bin Laden was justifying his behavior as only a belated reaction to the sins America allegedly has committed against Islam.
Lost in the excitement of election-day postmortems, though, has been a new translation issued by the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute, briefly discussed by Muravchik. In that corrected translation, the word "state" in bin Laden’s comment, originally interpreted to refer to a "country," in this case the United States, was revised to mean a state in the sense of Arkansas, California or Oregon.
In other words, what the leader of al-Qa’ida was doing was attempting to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush by warning prospective red states and offering immunity to prospective blue states. Those (hopefully few) that went for Bush were being declared fair game for future terrorist attacks and those (hopefully many) that went for John Kerry would be safe.
That bin Laden would have issued such a threat tells us several things, the first of which is that the terrorist view of America is more subtle and nuanced (to borrow a Kerryism) than commonly believed. Although Islamists may see America as the Great Satan in their struggle to purify Islam, they perceive some Americans as more threatening to their designs than others.
That perception suggests, in turn, several other things, including that Bush has inflicted far more damage upon terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, than his detractors are willing to acknowledge, and that the claim of Bush critics that his bellicosity has only "played into the hands of the terrorists" is not shared by the world’s most prominent practitioner of terrorism.
Going further, the properly translated contents of bin Laden’s gambit clearly implies a desire for a Democratic victory at odds with the Democratic nominee’s repeated assertion throughout the campaign that he would have more effectively pursued bin Laden and his ilk.
All of which returns us to what should have been the two most relevant questions in any assessment of who was the better candidate for combating our most serious problem: Who did the terrorists want to win and who did our soldiers fighting those terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Iraq prefer as their commander-in-chief in that fight?
That the answer to the first question was undoubtedly Kerry and the answer to the second undoubtedly Bush tells us so much more about their respective qualifications on the terrorism front than did the presidential debates or any of their campaign literature.
Then again, maybe bin Laden’s preelection appeal stemmed from a genuine desire for peace on the part of a misunderstood defender of Islam in the face of American depredations and we would now be coexisting harmoniously with the forces of international terror if only we had had the wisdom to elevate Kerry instead of Bush to the presidency.
But that bin Laden could entertain hopes that Americans could be influenced by his appeals to fear and offers of what could be considered a separate peace also alerts us to the likelihood that we have a great deal more to do to convince terrorist chieftains that we aren’t weak, squishy and lacking in national spine.
In a depressingly related sense, the likelihood that bin Laden prayed in his cave for a Kerry victory and intervened in our electoral process on his behalf at the 11th hour tells us that American conservatives aren’t the only ones who think liberals are weak, squishy and lacking in spine in the face of our enemies.
Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
yeee-ahhhh... we figured this out the day the rant was released... what took the author this long?
Osama bin Laden was one of the many "world leaders" who endorsed the Traitor, John Kerry.
***snip***
In other words, what the leader of al-Qa’ida was doing was attempting to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush by warning prospective red states and offering immunity to prospective blue states. Those (hopefully few) that went for Bush were being declared fair game for future terrorist attacks and those (hopefully many) that went for John Kerry would be safe.
Then why is it that the new "undocumented immigrants" with sinister plans supposedly wanted to be dropped off in New York and headed to Massachusetts?
He's from Arkansas??
by way of Seattle?
Though Prof. Gitz presently teaches at a college in Arkansas, he is originally from Freeport, IL.
its deeper than just campaigning....Let me ask you guys this.... Where do you see training bases for al qaeda or insurgant groups inside the US? what states? and then ask yourself what is the ideology politically in those states? You will see they are in heavily liberal areas where they know they can go about business easier. Liberal left wing ideology is an achilles heel to the US security and they know it. THAT is why they campaign against Bush.
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