My enemy, my ally

My previous post got me thinking about Israel's recent bloody misstep. As Ed Stein noted, it was obviously a setup, and Israel walked right into it. But was it just incompetence, or were there Israelis who wanted exactly what their enemies wanted from that situation? Were they allies in that?

I'm not very familiar with Israeli politics, so let me give you an example of what I mean that's closer to home. For almost a decade, America has been battling Islamic terrorists. Terrorism is a tool of the weak. If al-Qaeda could face America openly, it would. Since they're far too weak for that, they use terrorism, instead, hoping to provoke an excessive reaction (just like the organizers of that fleet hoped).

The attacks on September 11, 2001 were designed with that in mind. Nineteen religious fanatics shocked the nation and certainly got the response they'd hoped for. In fact, al-Qaeda was probably overjoyed with how it worked out. This was a criminal act by a handful of religious nuts, and we could have kept it that way. We've faced terrorism before, and we've rightly treated it as a crime. And after 9/11, we had the whole world behind us. We could have kept that support and enlisted the rest of the world in a massive criminal probe to bring the guilty to justice.

That would have been the smart thing to do, and no doubt it would have been disappointing to our enemies. Luckily for al-Qaeda, though, they had allies here. Oh, those Americans were still their enemies, but they were allies in wanting the same thing at the time. We ended up doing exactly what al-Qaeda wanted, and that was only partly due to incompetence and human nature. Mostly, it was because all too many Americans wanted what the terrorists wanted.

Some of those people were in the media. Al-Qaeda wanted to shock America and needed us to focus obsessively on the attacks, and the media were their allies in this. Yes, that's their job, but they still had a financial interest, as well as individual personal interests, in making the most of this tragedy. 9/11 was a gift to the national media. I don't want to blame them for that, but merely to point out that their interest was aligned with al-Qaeda's. To that extent, they were allies.

More importantly, the Bush administration was allied with al-Qaeda in wanting the same wild over-reaction. George W. Bush had been elected as a "compassionate conservative" less than a year before, and he really wasn't taken very seriously. In fact, he was rather a joke, widely considered an amiable idiot - a nice guy, but not too bright. It's hard to believe now, but Dick Cheney was expected to be the steady hand in the White House.

With few exceptions (most notably the despised "moderate," Colin Powell), the administration was full of chickenhawks - right-wingers who loved war, but not for themselves. Bush, whose whole family had strongly supported the Vietnam War, used their connections to avoid fighting in the war himself. But by making this attack a "war," rather than the criminal act that it really was, he got to prance around in a flight suit and play commander-in-chief. For a chickenhawk, what could be better?

(As an aside, I had never heard the term "commander-in-chief" used so much as during the Bush administration. Previous presidents, starting with George Washington himself, had emphasized the civilian nature of their position. We had never before been led by caudillos, and, in fact, our Constitution specifically set civilian rule above the military. Our president was never the commander-in-chief of civilians. But Bush's supporters acted like being president was just a minor sideline for the commander-in-chief. And Bush got to play soldier with no danger to himself.)

Right-wing ideologues in the Bush administration and Congress saw 9/11 as a great opportunity. By making this a "war," they could do anything they wanted. The Democrats, eager to prove their patriotism, just rolled over and played dead. Well, according to Fox "News," it was treason to criticize a president in wartime. (Funny how that's changed now, isn't it?) The point is that Republican politicians from the president on down had reason to ally with al-Qaeda on this. GOP politicians wanted an over-reaction to the attack, which is exactly what al-Qaeda wanted.

There were other al-Qaeda allies on the right, too. Al-Qaeda wanted to present America's response as a war on Islam, and they found eager allies in the Christian right who've been battling America's separation of church and state for two hundred years. Both sides wanted the same message to be spread, that America was a "Christian nation" fighting against the Muslim people. Although they hated each other, they were allies in this.

Likewise, many right-wingers just wanted an enemy. Those people had been devastated when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, because they'd lost their great enemy. These are people who really need an enemy, for some reason, and they leaped to embrace the "war on terror" with great relief. They, too, were allies with al-Qaeda in the matter of over-reacting to 9/11.

The point is that we did exactly what al-Qaeda wanted us to do - wildly over-reacting to their terrorist attack - because there were powerful segments of the American population, including the White House and the majority party in Congress, with interests aligned with al-Qaeda in that particular respect. They were, in effect, allies.

Al-Qaeda's opponents in this were those of us who see America as a secular nation of diverse beliefs, those of us who wanted to hunt down the criminals who attacked us, in cooperation with the rest of the world, those of us who wanted to deny the terrorists the hysterical reaction they'd hoped to provoke. Sadly, we had no power at all in the days, months, and even years after 9/11.

Are there people in Israel who wanted that bloody incident just as much as the organizers of the fleet did? Perhaps they dread any movement toward a peaceful solution in the Middle East? Perhaps they're always looking to drive a wedge between Israel and America? Perhaps they just hate so fiercely that any excuse for bloodshed is welcomed? I don't know much about Israeli politics, but it really wouldn't surprise me. Of course, incompetence is always a plausible excuse, too.