©2006 UrbisMedia
In a recent Dragon City Journal Special it was remarked that one of the high priests of Conservatism, William F’Buckley, [1] appears to have jumped ship from George Bush’s Iraq War and failed dreams of democracy. F’Buckley titled his piece in National Review “It didn’t Work.” As though he were writing about a collapsed soufflé he dismisses the war that has already cost thousands of lives in what he might say in his haughty, sibilant tones, by counseling that the Bush administration must come to “. . . the acknowledgment of defeat.” So much for the brotherhood of Yalies.
One has to wonder what took F’Buckley so long to admit it himself. He is pompous, fey, and overblown—one thinks he is left over from some 18 th Century French salon, waving his signature No. 2 pencil about like a baton to accentuate his sententious phrases from his well-licked lips—but he is not stupid. But then that might be that particular Republican political affectation: don’t admit you had it wrong until you have conceived a way of blaming it on somebody else. You know, “it was bad intelligence.” In light bulb terms he’s a 100 Watt, to Bush’s 20 Watts, so he’s even less forgivable than the president.
What’s pealing away here is what could be called the Margin of Stupidity. Bush’s political standing has always been dependent upon this margin. It is a thin one indeed; his “plurality” in his first election was not among the people but among Supreme Court Justices, and was scarcely greater in his second election on which he ran as a “war president.” In short Bush relied on just enough stupidity in the electorate to put and keep him in office. [2] Then came 9-11; it was tailor-made for his dimness and arrogance.
But maybe Al Qaeda was counting on the Margin of Stupidity as well.
It’s not too difficult to conjure the scenario of the other side. The “election” of George Bush in 2000 might well have been seen by Al Qaeda as a gift from Allah—a semi-literate, swaggering fool who just happened to be the son of the president that violated sacred Muslim lands with his military bases and is the pal of the scorned royal families of the sandy states. It was probably not too much of a “what if” for bin Laden and his gang to figure there was a good chance that a successful terrorist attack on a high profile target on mainland America would provoke a reaction, if not exactly like the preemptive war on Iraq, then something close to it. Indeed, the fervent desire of the neo-cons to invade Iraq was not a closely-guarded secret, it had been around for ten years. Moreover, there are similarities between bin Laden and Bush that might give them insights into their respective behavior. Both come from wealthy families, both are religious fundamentalists, both see this as a jihad/holy war. But there are differences, too; bin Laden has at least put himself in some danger as a mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war; Bush has done some driving under the influence of alcohol.
Keeping with the scenario, Al Qaeda must have worried that America would wise up (or find a way to keep Bush from stealing elections) and their unwitting puppet would not be re-elected. They needed things to fall apart; that was their plan. And here’s where the F’Buckley’s just sat back and counted their tax cuts—they should have known that it is far easier to create chaos than democracies in conditions like those in the Middle East. They should have known that the numbers and the passions and historical antipathies virtually assured the kinds of outcomes that now appear imminent. Indeed, given the capability to throw the Islamic world into a frenzy with a few Danish cartoons, it seems more likely. They probably did know.
The ensuing mess may be everything that Al Qaeda wished for—a great conflagration that would drive the infidel from their lands after a century of foreign hegemony, and the establishment of theocratic states that run on sharia and oil. It would take a fool like Bush to be pulled into the scenario and then manipulated to where he would provide the elements to spin things out of control. It was a calculated risk that might go in several bad directions, but the likelihood that Bush would not be able to “stay the course” was a good one. Bush would have to keep fanning the flames of terrorist threat, so it would be efficacious—to keep himoverconfident and in office— not to mount another attack on his mainland. The more he was around to utter words like “crusade,” the more he would inflame hatred for his country, the more the conflict would become—which it is in so many respects—a war between the fundamental and extreme wings of two global religions. Too late would Bush understand (or be told by F’Buckley) that Saddam, for all his despicable attributes, was the secular lid that kept Sunni nitro and Shiite glycerin from combining in the Middle East.
And now is is easy to see who is in charge in Iraq, and it isn’t America. America is stuck, unable to advance or retreat, hunkered down in its barely secure “Green Zone,” and venturing out in convoys of armored vehicles as ready targets for “insurgents” whose origins the administration is unable to define. In spite of some small and ineffective campaigns, America’s inadequate forces are on the defensive. Bush and Rumsfeld have had to design their war as they went along, and it gets more defensive with each iteration. A combination guerilla cum civil war was predicted by those who know the region, but Bush thought the biggest bully in the bar would prevail, even if his brain was drunk on power. Now they have the proverbial “tiger by the tail” afraid to let go and retreat lest, in both appearance and reality, they are driven from the region with the insurgents sniping at their heels and claiming victory.
If such a scenario is valid Al Qaeda may still not get what it wants, the region might not spin out of control and the cleansing conflagration obtain their ends. But there are so many detonators. Even Bush’s vaunted democracy might have backfired—Hamas in Palestine, Iran’s reactor, things going “fundamental” in Egypt, Sharon in a coma, Iraq’s democracy all but a joke, Afghanistan’s democracy applying only to Kabul, Lebanon de-stabilized—almost anything might send it all out of control, with America smack in the middle. And America is likely to be given the biggest blame and will have been weakened economically and spent spiritually by its accession to torture, spying non itself, deceived by the lies, by actions bordering non treason, corrupted, and unable, thank you at last Mr. F’Buckley, to admit the defeat of a wrongheaded policy.
And if Al Qaeda has indeed been the puppet master in playing The Margin of Stupidity, it might just be wondering what profit there might be in another devastating attack on America. They could be thinking that it should be too difficult to sniggle a few “martyrs” into that Dubai port facilities operation and, . . . well, they already know their enemy better than William F’Buckley.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.1.2006)
[1] For those who don’t remember Lily Thomlin’s send up of Buckley her pone switchboard operator, Ernestine, used to scramble William F. Buckley into William F’Buckley. I can’t seem to remember him any other way.
[2] With the assistance of some stupid Democratic campaigns, particularly Al Gore’s candidacy . Gore managed to blow a significant advantage by ignoring Bill Clinton, taking as his running mate a man who sounds like he is having a perpetual difficult bowel movement, and having his wife, Tipper, attack Hollywood and the entertainment industry.