McCain camp rattled after WaPo and AP write that Al Qaeda is pro-McCain

Spencer Ackerman:

I just got off a conference call the McCain campaign held to deny that al-Qaeda, contrary to reports in the AP and the Washington Post, is rooting for their man.

To describe the call as panicked would be an understatement. ...

What was absent from the call, oddly enough, was any discussion about why al-Qaeda might want McCain to win. And there the case is simple enough. al-Qaeda prefers an indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq and a bellicose U.S. all across the Muslim world in order to radicalize Muslims to its terrorist cause and drain the U.S. of its financial wealth -- what Osama bin Laden calls his "bleed to bankruptcy" strategy. Hence the reason why, as the CIA eventually concluded, bin Laden tried to help George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 by releasing a late-October tape. McCain pledges basic continuity with Bush on the Iraq war. As Scheunemann put it, "John McCain will spend what it takes to win."

Yet the idea of al-Qaeda preferring a U.S. strategy that strengthens it confounded the McCain camp. "It is ridiculous to believe that in its heart of hearts, al-Qaeda wants John McCain to be the president," Woolsey said. "It's ludicrous."

You know, the funny thing is, I think that Woolsey really doesn't believe it's true (despite the opinion of the CIA, which he used to head). Not only are they absurdly wrong about mid-East policy -- they don't even know it.

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Biden Goes Epic: A Level 25 Gaffe

Apparently conservatives are unhappy, because news of Palin's $250K shopping spree has displaced coverage of Biden's "gaffe" (he recently suggested that early on, Obama's administration would have to confront "an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy"). Ross Douthat, in his typically moderate tone, suggests:

Biden's bizarrely honest remarks are an almost too-perfect exemplar of the Kinsleyan definition of a "gaffe" as an accidental statement of the truth - and in a different, closer election, one untouched by a global economic crisis (and, yes, the ongoing Sarah Palin story), they might have been the game-changing flub that conservatives keep looking for. (At the very least, I think they summon up a much more compelling argument against the Democratic ticket than Obama's comments to Joe the Plumber.)

The problem with what Biden said, and with Douthat's take, is that it's not "an accidental statement of the truth" -- it's an accidental statement of G.O.P. delusion. Conservatives (especially neocons) have long argued that we need tough-talking hawks in the White House because it will cow the Muslims -- even Thomas Friedman advanced this argument in his infamous "suck on this" rant.

In reality, it's pretty clear that Muslim extremists see Republicans as more likely to play along with their attacks by over-reacting and overreaching. As Yglesias reminds us, not only was this Bin Laden's aim with the 9/11 attacks, there was pretty much a consensus that he mailed that tape to Al-Jazeera on the eve of the 2004 elections because he wanted to swing the elections toward Bush, who kept playing along. Hence, what makes Douthat's argument so "compelling" is the same thing that helped Bush in 2004 -- a mass national delusion rooted in our basic ignorance about what serves our objectives in the Middle East (and Al Qaeda's clear understanding of what our ignorance leads us to do).

The key point: these terrorists see conservatives and the G.O.P. as their defacto American allies. What does this mean? It means terrorists believe they get more out of attacking someone erratic and bellicose like Bush/McCain, rather than a more moderate Democrat. And this risk/payoff analysis, in turn, suggests Al Qaeda is more likely to attack a president McCain, whose response it can count on, than Obama.

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Jouez-l'encore, Hirohito

Those who still derive amusement from examples of history repeating itself will be delighted by a story published today in Le Monde under the heading "Opération kamikaze à Casablanca et nouvelles arrestations." You do not even have to read the story. The headline alone, with its combination of French, Japanese, and classic Hollywood elements, evokes a certain sentimentality, proving that history is rather like a food processor: surely, its mechanical action is repetitive, but you can never predict what unassimilated lumps its churnings will toss up as the multitudinous ingredients are puréed.

Isn't it fascinating that "suicide bomber" is rendered here in French with "kamikaze"? Of course, the English expression is as new as the French adoption from Japanese. Suicide, already a disturbing act against oneself, is combined with an external, devastating attack on others. This surrendering to the negativity of self-destruction by means of a positive assault on the environment that produced it might be considered postmodern. "I recognize my subject position abstractly, but I reject it, and further, I seek to destroy the enforcers of subject positions themselves." There were martyrs in the past who sacrificed themselves for a higher cause, but weren't they somehow different? The word "martyr" literally means witness, and it was the positive fact of the victim's individual, witnessing identity that lent significance, gravitas even, to his or her death, the positive result of which is the martyr's inscription into history. Perhaps we can respect this. A suicide bombing, however, seems an extreme self-abnegation. The perpetrators, in their willingness to be erased from history, commit not only physical violence against us, but even more inexcusably, they offend our reverence for the priority of the individual. It is, after all, on behalf of individual rights and freedoms that the West always claims to fight. From this perspective, anyone who makes such a pointless sacrifice, who becomes the anonymous instrument of others, must perforce be evil.

But this is where French wisdom shows itself. The word "kamikaze", meaning "divine wind", actually preserves the dignity of the erstwhile "bomber". Many of our ideas about the limits of human malice derive from World War II, and the kamikaze, the insane agent of a relentless and unfathomable Asian enemy, is one of the most profound. The niggling cultural differences that seem an almost aesthetic concern today remain at the heart of human fear. If we certainly recognize in one another a common humanity, what do we make of fellow humans who do things we would never consider, who go farther than we would? Is our fear for our own destruction at the hands of such enemies or for the more terrifying possibility that "we" are not so unlike "them"? The original divine wind was the one that sent the Monguls packing after repeated attempts to invade Japan. This grace, almost exclusive to Japan in the era of the Khans, may explain the feeling that famously developed among Japanese that they are an exceptional people, unconquered and (as a result) unmixed. This divine election also meant they felt destined to lead the other nations of Asia (they were already trying to conquer Korea in the 16th century). But a nationalistic superiority complex is not just a peculiarity of imperial island nations. Our own adventures in the Middle East, if they really are predicated on a democracy-building program, reflect an American superiority complex just as devastating as Japan's. The idea of a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere is surely no more farcical than a Coalition of the Willing. And however cruel was Japan's imperial embrace in practice, you can hardly fault their motives: against an overbearing and exploitative West, Japan intended to rise up and loose the shackles Europe had placed on the nations of Asia. When you actually believe your way of life is the best one there is, how can you morally prevent others from enjoying it? Why wouldn't you force them to conform to it, for their own good? And thus you had the incongruous image of Javanese women practicing karate at dawn. And, ultimately, fighter pilots who were willing to die, not just on behalf of an emperor they never met, but however tenuously, for the greater good of humanity.

Except we won that one. And so today the greater good of humanity seems to mean the greater good of the United States and its allies. We were an isolationist nation before World War II. Did we achieve victory then only to adopt the aspirations of our enemies? We are again confronted by an enemy who exposes to us our own dark side. They consider themselves the favored of God, their very bodies the instrument of a divine wind. That wind is not the product of an esoteric evil but the necessity of a conviction that would spread its benevolence to all of humanity. What divine wind is at our backs, driving us? If there isn't one, by what right do we storm across the world and what claim can we possibly have on its sympathy? By relegating suicide bombers, the kamikaze of today, to the amorphous realm of evil, we fail to understand that their mission is quite similar to our own. The difference lies in the means to carry it out. The French surely have little nostalgia for their own colonial adventures, though we have it on their behalf for all those Casablancas that somebody else controlled, where somebody else did the dirty work, while we pretended to be everybody's heroes. In the future, we may have a nostalgia of a different sort: for a time when we could more easily draw moral boundaries, when we at least had the luxury of knowing where our enemy lived before he moved closer to home.

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