Somebody's got to do it, but the Bush administration is derelict in this duty
The idea is not mine, I have to credit Maj. David High, USMCR, a close friend and an occasional writer here. The media are acting a the Red Cell for the public in thinking about enemy threats of the First Terrorist War. I asked David to write this up but he keeps getting deployed overseas. At the moment he is doing Marine stuff in Germany (of all places).
"Red Cell" was the term given, first, to SEAL Teams who were trained and tasked to simulate the enemy during security exercises, especially to test the security of critical compounds such as submarine bases or nuclear power plants. The term morphed in military usage to refer to plans officers tasked to assess how real-world enemies, real or potential, could exploit our own weaknesses, especially military threats. Naturally, this task required the Red Cell staffs to use a great deal of imagination, to get inside the enemy's head as best as possible.
Now, military staffs have been doing that for thousands of years. I am sure that the Pharaoh's armies tried to do the same thing. But the recipients of their assessments, from the Pharaoh until today's Red Cells, have always been military commanders.
David pointed out in a long conversation last fall that America's general public has not been informed by Red Cell-type analysis until quite recently. The media, mostly the entertainment media, have become the public's Red Cell.
Two examples that David mentioned: Fox network's "24" and CBS's close relative, "The Unit." I have never seen an episode of The Unit but pretty devotedly watch 24, despite its numerous technical errors. Some things on "24" are laughable, for example, Sunday night's use of a search warrant by the FBI to seize personnel records of an Islamic-American organization. The FBI doesn't serve a warrant and stand idly by while an IT guy copies the warranted files onto a CD. They just rip out the computers and servers and take them to the FBI crime lab. I can overlook such breaches because the basic premise is so terribly, frighteningly credible: an Islamist terror group brings the war directly to the interior of this country, first with conventional explosives used in suicide and other bombings, and then with at least one WMD.
It is a severe but justified indictment that no one else is preparing the American people for such a potentiality or even admitting that such destruction is what our enemies intend. By "no one else" I mean the Bush administration, whose leader seems content simply to recite platitudes such as, "The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is ... the decisive ideological struggle of our time." Yeah, that's a real rally to arms, isn't it?
The Bush administration, from the president on down, is unwilling to inform us of the horrifically lethal intentions of al Qaeda and its ideological allies. Apparently, the administration thinks that "nine-eleven" can be recited like a mantra and all Americans will fill in the gaps. This is perhaps one of the most serious errors the president has made so far. I wrote in August 2005 that Bush is failing to keep the public in the loop.Military theorist Marshal de Saxe observed in 1730, "The courage of the soldiers must be reborn daily. There is nothing that is so variable." In the same way, a wartime president in a democracy must always remind the people why they fight and expend their blood and treasure. The will and determination of the people to persevere is highly variable.
Right now, "24" is filling that gap. Victor Davis Hanson gets it, too:
Killer teams that poison the water supply of Los Angeles or blow themselves up in the Mall of America, defy an easy response. Do we hit the Saudis whose charities funded them? The Syrians who gave them the weapons? The Iranians who trained them? Or the Pakistanis who offered them space? All such governments would immediately "deplore" such attacks, offer their condolences, and claim they had no influence over their cheering crowds...
The goals of the Radical Islamic forces arrayed against us are the same as their factotums, the Palestinians, have for Israel. In the jihad against Israel we can see what the Islamic forces have in mind for us: the complete destruction of our systems, the occupation of our land, the usurpation of our government, and the death or conversion of all our citizens. These are the goals of Radical Islam as understood by their fundamentalists and as tolerated by the vast majority of believers. ... Whether the goals of Radical Islam can be achieved is a matter for history to determine. It is the belief that they can be achieved that brings the First Terrorist War upon us.
No way, you say? here is what al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith said in 2002:
"We have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans'] chemical and biological weapons." "America knows only the language of force. ... America is kept at bay by blood alone…"
Last November The SF Examiner wondered whether Americans are sleepwalking into a gathering storm, much as the British did in the 1930s. If so, a lot of the blame rests squarely in the Oval Office, whose occupant is permitting it happen. Yet the stakes could not be graver. I wrote last November why I was a single-issue voter, kicking off with David High's observation, "If we don't get the war right, the Medicare prescription plan won't matter, Social Security won't matter, nothing else will matter." The threat is real, people, so watch "24" to see what our enemies want to do. It and like media will tell you; the administration won't.
Great stuff.
To back this up, One need only look at what is taking place inside the "moderate mosques" in Londonistan to get an idea of just how negligent our government has been at explaining the current threat
Islam in its current form, is the enemy. The "moderates" tend not to exist, and I for one am tired of listening to our leaders refer to the "religion of peace" when it is anything but.
Like many such hazards, kid-gloving and white washing the danger now is only going to lead to far harsher reprisals later. Thats my main beef against the chicken littles arguing Bush has turned America into a gulag- the fundamental unseriousness that even mainstream outfits like the NYT reveal when the publish secret (and legal) programs is going to rebound hard on all of us in all likelihood.
Who is going to listen to the NYT under our next president if a WMD hits a major population center and President X starts really infringing... to the loud approval of the vast majority of American people? Its too easy to forget- nobody really thought much of locking up Japanese Americans in prison camps in WW2 at the time, and that was a relatively minor strike on a distant naval base on what wasnt even a State at the time. If the DC mall goes up in a 10 kiloton flash of light can anyone imagine the consequences for Muslim Americans? The point is, we should be vigilant now to avoid being truly cruel later.
Excellent, thought-provoking piece. I excerpted and linked.
YES! I knew Mr. Sensing got it! All we can do is keep pounding on the doors of the MSM, the gov't, our neighbors and anyone else who will listen. BUT, I am afraid that it will take that bright flash above the Mall of America or the Mall in DC or ... or ... before the American people wake to the dangers. And then, we have not done our best work with this generation, they may be too soft to get 'er done. I am too old. I would volunteer to help but as so many professional soldiers would point out, us old farts are too slow and would just get in the way. We can do our part by banging on the tambourine at home I suppose.
While Its without argument that Bush had been deficient in explaining much of this, some of the blame has to be laid at the feet of the disloyal opposition and the MSM, for when the Bush team does infrequently try to explain the stakes of the game and what could happen here, which is one of the reasons for fighting there, the screed is raised, Governing by Fear, trying to frighten voters etc - repeated ad nausem, So Bush and company should be better at it, but they messages they do put out should not be undercut immediately by democrats for mere political purposes.
Well, Kevin, sadly, even tragically: good point.
Echoing Kevin in #7, on Cnn's Reliable Sources Pam Hess reporter for UPI said, "But we're not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you're carrying Bush's water."
Now she was talking specifically about "the surge", but that attitude is reflected everywhere in the media. That doesn't excuse Bush for not really even trying, but he is fighting a pretty strong headwind.
The administration is in a lose-lose situation when it comes to how they approach this from the PR perspective. If, on 9/12, they had told the truth about Islam, they would have gotten no support internationally, and much less domestically. They are stuck with trying to operate within a system where half of the nation's political leadership hopes that the WHite House falls on its face (no matter what the consequences might be), and probably 80% of the world's political leadership feels the same way.
I recently read a novel by Nelson DeMille called "Wild Fire" http://www.nelsondemille.net/books/wild_fire.asp
which among other things alluded to a possible MAD scenario regarding a potential large scale WMD attack like on 24 in the US.
The premise was that in the age of terror where organizations are only loosely associated with nation-states, that we had put together a target list of islamic nations across the globe that would be instantly retaliated against with nuclear weapons in the event of a WMD attack on the US. The process of the retaliation was designed similarly to the Soviet MAD program in that in the event of a decapitating strike, the retaliation would occur automatically. Moreover, the leaders of each islamic nation had been warned of this policy and the automatic method in which it was to be carried out.
The author points out in the book's preface that he isn't sure that we have anything like this in effect, but that we ought to.
I agree. It would make for a tasty NY Times expose if leaked, I'm sure.
Froggy
Froggy,
That's a long list, that seems to include all predominately muslim nations.
Blame Bush, how childish,
The media stifles and throttles his words,
and distorts and spins the actual form of
the epic battle we are in. He has said many
substantial and important things that have
been twisted and ignored.
The key is Bush gets it. Blair gets it.
The Congress is flunking the test.
Our military gets it most of all, and they
re-enlist.
We have friends across the world, in the alleys
and back streets, in their own houses,
who support their own
countries in this war on terror at the risk of
their lives.
We must honor our friends and heros.
That is where victory starts.
Our weakness is our distraction, by the
political and media elites who have their
own strange agenda.
We are only now learning how strange and
suicidal that agenda is. But we are learning.
I have friends who risk their lives to deliver
a modest literacy program deep into the interior
of Afghanistan. Their lives are at risk every
day.
Dont whine. Dont blame Bush. What are you
doing. Today.