Andrew Sullivan on the Republican Propaganda Machine

Andrew Sullivan once again hits the nail on the head.

I don't often do this, but I am reproducing his entire post below:

The Unseriousness of the "Pro-War" Right
13 Jun 2007 12:33 pm

Is this truly the consensus on the Bush-Cheney right? Money quote:

Most Americans will not see a connection between the ideology of the head-drillers and head-loppers we are fighting in Iraq and those who try to do even worse at Fort Dix and the Kennedy airport.

How to unpack this? First off, it is not clear that we are in fact fighting all the head-loppers and head-drillers in Iraq. Many of the head-drillers are allies of the government we are supporting. Both the head-loppers and head-drillers have been empowered, not stymied, by our clueless occupation - and they have multiplied in numbers. And there are plenty of extremely unpleasant characters among the Sunni tribes we are now supporting to defeat a different strand of head-loppers in Anbar. Then one has to ask: is Hanson actually saying that the Shiite death squads and Qaeda wannabes in the Caribbean are part of the same movement? In the past, successful wars were often conducted under the aegis of "divide and conquer." The Bush policy, guided by the genius of strategists like Hanson, seems to be "unite a splintering enemy and lose to them."

Then there's this rubbish: "Do even worse" than what's happening in Iraq at Fort Dix and JFK? Is Hanson serious? Or has defending the indefensible finally forced him off the deep end?

If the risible, unformed, half-baked plots to "storm" a military base (with a handful of religious nutcases) or dream about blowing up JFK (while having the capacity to do nothing of the kind) are "even worse" than the genocidal Shiite death squads and Sunni cells of Iraq, then we really are in a pickle. I can't belief VDH believes this, unless there is some massive amount of evidence about Fort Dix and JFK that he is privy to and the rest of us aren't. So what's the point here? To conflate both sides in the Iraq civil war as being indistinguishable from Caribbean losers and 9/11? To reduce every conflict in a welter of conflicting fundamentalist claims to a single meme, "Islamist terrorism" and to urge that it be "fought" with the same finesse that we have brought to Iraq? Or to scare us into not thinking at all? Hewitt sums up the moronic convergence here:

A great deal of Campaign 2008 will be fought over this ground, with the GOP's nominee arguing that Afghanistan and Iraq are connected to Iranian nukes, Gaza and Fort Dix and terrorism in London, Madrid, Beslan and across the globe, and Democrats arguing that the world's problems come from a 140,000 Americans waging a campaign against Islamists in Iraq.

Those are the choices? Is it not possible to make, you know, empirical distinctions between various threats? To see that Islamism does indeed fuel Sunni and Shia violence, but that these forces are also fundamentally at war with one another? To see a distinction between Ahmadinejad's Shiite apocalyptics and Bin Laden's Wahhabist caliphate - a distinction any halfway competent war strategy would exploit, not deny?

When you see how evidence-resistant a propagandist like Hewitt can be, you begin to realize how important it is to keep these people away from power. They are much less interested in defeating al Qaeda than they are in using al Qaeda to defeat Democrats. This is what Hewitt really cares about: the GOP. Look what damage his ilk have done to the West's security since 9/11 because of their pathological partisanship. Look at how their refusal or inability to see any nuance, complexity or variety in the many threats we face makes our defeat more likely. We just cannot afford to tolerate these Republican propagandists any longer. There is a war on. And they simply aren't serious about fighting it.

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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