The Battle of Ideas Was Lost at Abu Ghraib

This is the US losing the war of ideas.

Or maybe Nagasaki.

BBC: "Eight civilians, including three children, were reported to have died."

Donald Rumsfeld: “We are capturing and killing a lot of terrorists. But we also have to think about the number of new ones that are being created, it seems to me, and the memo I wrote raised that question — how might we do that? How do we win that battle of ideas?”

My Grandfather was UDT in WWII. He came back to Hawaii from island hopping and saw a bunch of Japanese playing volleyball with their guards. He got mad and asked one of the guards what the hell they were doing being nice to them. The guard answered that once the Japanese saw that we weren't the devils they’d been told, they told us everything we needed to know from them.

Ma Nishtana

GW Bush palling around

The first line of The Four Questions song from the Passover Seder asks "Ma Nishtana?" Or, "What has changed?" The term is often used sarcastically to refer to something that someone thinks is new, but is actually not.

So, I ask, in a more contemporary English translation, "This is different how?"

“There’s nothing in it about national security,” Walter Jones, a Republican congressman from North Carolina who has read the missing pages, contends. “It’s about the Bush Administration and its relationship with the Saudis.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told me that the document is “stunning in its clarity,” and that it offers direct evidence of complicity on the part of certain Saudi individuals and entities in Al Qaeda’s attack on America. 

That's Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, via Digby, on the Twenty-Eight Pages the Dubya administration removed from the 9-11 Report.

Here's Josh Roggin at the Daily Beast with the answer to the question of why on earth doesn't Dick Cheney talk about who's backing the bad guys de jour:

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

Ma Nishtana?

Meanwhile, occasionally, someone from the elite actually stands up and tells us what all this palling around with fascists has gotten us.

"I can only plead with you to examine the current political and cultural works of my country [the U.S.]. We are in the hands of a terrible counterrevolution and a great reaction, a second Civil War sponsored by the same people that lost the first Civil War," the director said.

"And it has created a good president who is a prisoner of the White House who can do little beyond the ceremonial," McTiernan continued. "It has made, despite of what you may see on screens, a prison country, and I've had the pleasure of seeing what most people in our class are never allowed to see. I've seen the engine of the beast, it has given us a country with more prisoners than North Korea per capita, more policemen per capita than Germany in 1938. They have suspended trial by jury in most of America."

Now there's a guy I hope keeps talking.

Civil Disobedience by the Manichaen Paranoiacs?

Ethical arguments are always moved along by action, often violent. In a comment to a Whiskey Fire post on the Tiller murder, I wondered about the one thing that's always bothered me about these terrorists... Why do the run? Why, if they believe the law is wrong, and that they are committing not just murder but an act of civil disobedience, do they run and try to hide?

If their cause is so righteous, why not just shoot, and then sit down and wait for the cops, while you explain to everyone around you, as your victim lies there bleeding to death, how righteous you are?

This is an extension of the Manichean Paranoia exhibited, nay apotheosized, by the Bushies, that says, essentially, I am good and therefore I can do bad without being bad. Seeing the world in black and white leads to some stark conclusions and, in some cases, extreme actions. But if you believe you are good, that you just have to do bad to protect that which is good, then why run?

UPDATED: Safe Havens in End-of-Your-Rope-istan

Expect to see a lot more of this (well armed people attacking and killing groups of people, like in Binghamton, NY yesterday). While we're trying to stop a safe haven for terrorists in AfPak, we're letting them re-develop in militia-stan, crazy-stan, and at-the-end-of-your-rope-istan (think Michigan).

We have increasing numbers of frustrated people. These are especially frustrating times. We have easy access to guns and ammo, rampant undiagnosed mental health problems, loss of access to health care and medication, rising unemployment, homelessness and Bushvilles, higher rates of poverty, violent gangs, mafias, narco-terrorists, layoffs of cops and public safety officials, rapidly declining tax revenues at the state and local level. Add desperation to the mix, and people will react in very angry and violent ways.

Odd that John Robb of Global Guerrillas gave testimony to the House Armed Services Committee (pdf) Thursday in which he said:

"With the failure or weakening of nation-states across the board and the lack of ideological alternatives, people will shift their primary loyalties to any group that can provide them security and the basics of survival. These groups will span the gamut of gangs, tribes, criminal syndicates, militias, religious sects, etc. Many, if not most of these groups, will maintain and expand the interests both vigorously and violently. The worst version of this trend line would be the expansion of the criminal insurgency in Mexico into the US (through expansion of the criminal ecosystem more than anything due to ethnic identity)."

While not exactly on point, the example in your backyard is more proof of societal collapse, and is to be expected in the pressure cooker of 21st century America: armed and more dangerous than ever.

UPDATE: Three police officers dead in Pittsburg, shooter feared Obama Gun ban.