January 17, 2013
'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America
Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:
Zero Dark Thirty is like a gorgeously-rendered monument to the fatal political miscalculation we made during the Bush years. It's a cliché but it's true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we're the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere.
The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn't deserve to be mass-murdered. To use another cliché, we needed to win hearts and minds. We had to make lunatics like bin Laden pariahs among their own people, which in turn would make genuine terrorists easier to catch with the aid of genuinely sympathetic local populations.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:14 PM | Permalink
Comments
Not one of Taibbi's better efforts.
"It's a cliché but it's true: Bin Laden wanted us to make this mistake. He wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability to reveal a brutal, repressive hypocrite underneath. He wanted us to stop pretending that we're the country that handcuffs you and reads you your rights instead of extralegally drone-bombing you from the stratosphere, or putting one in your brain in an Egyptian basement somewhere."
This is basically drivel isn't it? It seems like the left's mirror version of Bush's "they hate us for our freedoms." We actually have a pretty decent idea what bin Laden and al Qaeda were after, so why this mustache twirling stuff?
Posted by: prasad | Jan 17, 2013 2:48:01 PM
Prasad:
On this one secondary point, Taibbi may be guilty of rhetorical excess and the always risky matter of speculating on the true motives, the psychology of an enemy, especially of someone who was a recluse, effectively, and whom we know only from the policy statements and the presumably fairly well-crafted persona he presented in his caveside communiqués (and whatever US government contacts who knew him back in the 80s, when he was one of a number of anti-Soviet mujahideen being armed and encouraged by the US, might have gleaned about him.)
But that doesn't negate his larger points about the American government's bungling, whether from incompetence or indifference, or, more likely, a combination of the two, of the "war for hearts and minds" that was crucial (and is now pretty much lost) to any real success in fighting terrorists. It's also a safe bet that bin Laden wanted to provoke *some* sort of a massive response which would backfire on the West and turn the whole of the Islamo-sphere to his side; whether it's exactly how Taibbi speculates is not crucial.
What's interesting here is how you chose to focus on this point rather than the larger one. To echo one of Taibbi's phrases, a comment on an article is the result of an editorial decision: what to focus on, what to disregard. WIthout falling too far into the same trap of amateur psychoanalyzing that Taibbi may have in discussing bin Laden, I yet think it's fair to speculate at least a little on why you chose the focus you did:
Your focus on this point alone as if it were sufficient grounds to dismiss the whole of the arguments presented in the article suggests that you came to it with some prior degree of hostility - how much, I can't guess - to his overall thesis and ones like it which you've encountered before, and thus you seized on the first flaw you could find, as a convenient proxy battle to win (before walking away with a snort of derision ["drivel"], so to speak), in lieu of engaging the larger text.
Posted by: Kai Matthews | Jan 18, 2013 5:38:50 AM
"What's interesting here is how you chose to focus on this point rather than the larger one."
1) I focused on this point because it's a bad argument from a template that's frequently used. The issue in question is quite fungible - it can be homeland security, or civil liberties, or torture as here, or drones, or whatever. It converts every statement of the form "the US got X wrong" into one of the form "bin Laden wanted the US to get X wrong in this way, and organized 9/11 for that reason." It's a very silly way of thinking and arguing, and that on the foreign policy issue the US takes most seriously. I think Americans in the media made halfway decent arguments about terrorism for about ten lucid days following 9/11. Noise and nonsense took over quite rapidly thereafter.
2) The bit I quoted is actually pretty important to Taibbi's rhetoric against Zero Dark Thirty. Without it, you'd have only "Kathryn Bigelow seems to think waterboarding captives to get intelligence on bin Laden is worth it." But lots of people think this, and you actually need to argue against them. The bin Laden trick gives Taibbi the cheap (in both senses) resource that this movie is bin Laden's "victory" over America. That's the title of his article btw, and unlikely to be peripheral to his argument. If your problem is that I read an article doing the torture theme and didn't express unstinting admiration of it and its author, maybe this will help: boo torture.
Taibbi in general produces rhetoric that pleases in direct proportion to whether you agree with what he says. I largely agree with his take on wall Street, so I enjoyed the famous Vampire Squid article. Since we clearly differ in our assessments of this article, it'smgood Bayesianism to assume that if we sat down and discussed torture, the artistic responsibility of filmmakers, and US foreign policy, we'd uncover at least some deep differences. That said, I find your last paragraph strange. I didn't see myself as "dismissing the whole of the arguments" and I can't imagine anyone else saw it as that either. I don't know how I'd go about defending myself against claims of this sort based on a simple quote-and-criticize comment, so I won't bother. I will say only that when I actually fisk an article I am anything but terse, something anyone who's read my comments here on various issues can testify to.
Anyway, I don't see why you get to define what's a "secondary" point, or which arguments are "proxies." Let's say my battles aren't yours and leave it at that.
Posted by: prasad | Jan 18, 2013 8:33:38 AM
"The only way we were ever going to win the War on Terror was to win a long, slow, political battle, in which we proved bin Laden wrong, where we allowed people in the Middle East to assess us as a nation and decide we didn't deserve to be mass-murdered."
I think it’s a mistake to ‘allow’ people in the Middle East (societies like Saudi Society, which seems to have little clue, and less care, about what tolerance - however imperfect - means) to 'assess' which other peoples 'deserve to be mass-murdered.'
I’m putting it mildly.
Posted by: Vivek T | Jan 18, 2013 2:44:09 PM
Prasad and Vivek, as it happens I agree with you, but if I didn't, I would HATE to argue the other point of view. I think you'd win.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 18, 2013 3:33:11 PM
Prasad, you're an intellectual lightweight. Your ideas are so remedial they are not even worth arguing about. Taibbi's take on the movie is dead right.
Posted by: Josef Stern | Jan 18, 2013 6:43:50 PM
Josef, Matt Taibbi is serving up boilerplate here -- he can and usually does do much better. As for Prasad, he is almost always the smartest person in the room. As an exercise in being an intellectual heavier weight, yourself, you might try to refute his arguments. Not liking them, and dismissing them, is not the same as defeating them.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 18, 2013 11:36:33 PM
What were the arguments exactly? I don't see any critical engagement, just a bunch of statements along the lines "this is drivel", "this is nonsense", "this is silly", "not a great effort".
"I didn't see myself as "dismissing the whole of the arguments" and I can't imagine anyone else saw it as that either."
Actually from your comments that's exactly what I saw. I'm with Kai Matthews on this one.
Posted by: big joe | Jan 19, 2013 12:07:50 PM
Thanks Elatia. You're too generous but very kind. Joe - my argument is roughly the first point in response to Kai. This is a mindless argument (if you X the terrorists/bin Laden/Saddam have won, together with the added wrinkle that they wanted or hoped to win in this exact manner) that's trotted out every time the US does something unfortunate. I don't think much is needed to rebut the case that bin Laden wanted what Taibbi says he did, but okay. Here's a typical listing of what bin Laden was after:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks
A generic story about 9/11 involves foreign policy stuff like Iraq sanctions and all things Israel. There's infidels in holy land and such like. You can psychoanalyze bin Laden and his cohorts, taking the Bernard Lewis line, or emphasize the Sayyid Qutb thing, or do the seventy two virgins and sexual repression angle (including maybe the wrinkle that most of the hijackers had lived in the west). They clearly wanted to increase the scope of conflict with the US, and exploit and stoke simmering resentment. And the act itself, with its very striking visuals and symbolically resonant targets, was presumably intended to provide a good gathering point for people watching.
If you have some support for Taibbi's notion that bin Laden "wanted America to respond to him by throwing off our carefully-crafted blanket of global respectability" I'd like to see it. It's not even a great description of bin Laden's possible hope of inciting mass revolt, which is the closest you can get from this Bond-supervillain stuff to reality. I think maybe Taibbi watched The Dark Knight once too often - his bin Laden is very similar to Heath Ledger's Joker, istm. And Kai knows - really should know - better. If you know enough about bin Laden to say he was a religious nut radicalized as one of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, you don't need to give him chess grandmaster type goals like "if I blow up the twin towers the US will discard its cloak of goodness and reveal its true nature to Muslims throughout the Middle East."
And discard what cloak exactly? Taibbi wants to imply the US had meaningful credibility *in the middle east* before 9/11, before Bush came along and bungled it all up. I can see how someone who's utterly clueless about the US role/perception in the region would like to think that, but the US has in fact had approximately zip credibility there for a very bloody long time, and for very many reasons. Maybe *Americans* have cherished illusions about the US being too noble a nation to do certain things, but bin Laden's audience didn't really. Waterboarding doesn't even make the top-20 list of most hated things the US has done there, not when there's such rich pickings. Abu Ghraib, maybe.
Posted by: prasad | Jan 19, 2013 1:37:53 PM
Prasad and others, I recall in the days after 9/11 there were videos of Egyptians dancing in the streets, openly delighted at what had befallen the US, and willing to talk about it with relish. I had NO idea they hated us like that, so that any misfortune that afflicted us badly enough was cause for celebration. There was also the tribe in Kenya who wanted to give us their cattle, so heartfelt was there sorrow, so great their empathy.
Would they give us their cattle now? Or has our stock fallen, with them, in almost 12 years? There were highly negative views about the US before 9/11 and the Iraq War, as you say -- Matt Taibbi should try to understand them, as other Americans struggle to do.
I believe also that getting inside the head of OBL to assert what he was really thinking, and what his deepest desires were, is pretty fishy. It should be the turf of astrologers, not journalists, because the former do fantasy in a better, freer way.
Additionally, Matt Taibbi has a very big name now, so big that a certain type of reader -- many of them -- will believe what they read "in Matt Taibbi." Is there a journalist who would take a cue from such a felicitous sitch to be really, really careful?
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Jan 19, 2013 2:40:59 PM
Post a comment