Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

My response: Except for two issues, I agree with this statement. Hannity claims that Democratic members of Congress have violated the principle of good faith. I myself cannot presume to judge and condemn as evil the intentions of any individual member of Congress, Republican or Democratic. However, Hannity asserts that Democrats in Congress, while being fully aware of the truth regarding "Muslim" terrorism and other threats to our national security, are deliberately weaving lies into their arguments in front of the American people to gain personal aggrandizement and undermine the Bush administration. I agree that many Democratic senators and representatives are shrewd politicians who often say things that they do not mean in order to increase their poll ratings and win votes. But Hannity's specific charge is very serious. He claims that certain legislators are fabricating myths about our foreign policy to buttress their arguments for purely partisan reasons. Though the latter part of this allegation is often true, Democratic member of Congress have not fabricated myths about our foreign policy. They may not be sincere, but the statements they have been uttering about "Islamic" terrorism, the situation in Iraq, and the "War on Terrorism" have been more or less correct.

For example, concerning "Muslim" terrorism, Congressional Democrats say in stark contrast to the beliefs of Hannity and neoconservatives that the terrorists' ultimate goals are benign. What have the terrorists themselves said about the matter? Many say their intention is to "wipe Israel off the map" of the Middle East, which in the hyperbole of Arab rhetoric simply means to attain the right of return for the Palestinian people. (The state of Israel is built on the foundation of a Jewish majority, and it cannot maintain that majority without keeping the Palestinians displaced.) "Islamic" terrorists also state that since America has slaughtered their fellow Middle Easterners, destroyed their homes and cities, plundered their natural resources, and imposed on them its debased culture, they intend to drive us out of the Middle East. We indeed have given Israel the weapons that it has used to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians and raze thousands of their homes as well as to murder tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians and severely damage thousands of buildings in the Lebanese civil war. Our twelve-year economic embargo of Iraq starved 500,000 Iraqi children to death. We have plundered the region's oil by ensuring that the lion's share of profits is concentrated in the hands of Western petroleum executives and undemocratic regimes such as in Saudi Arabia. And finally, our big businesses have shoved abortion, pornography, satanic music, and bad movies into the Middle East against the will of the people. Thus despite Hannity's lack of willingness to admit it, the terrorists are being accurate.

But are the terrorists' goals benign? Neocons warn that "Muslim" terrorists harbor a vicious hatred of the United States and ultimately intend to annihilate our country. "They hate not our policies but our existence", declared President Bush after 9/11. However, there is no evidence to support this notion, which itself is a ruse concocted by rich Western entrepreneurs to justify the unlimited expansion of huge companies and indefinite warmongering. Since terrorists are not demonic freaks but real people with real grievances as explained in No. 8, it is reasonable to assume that resolution of those grievances will satisfy them. Indeed, recall that terrorism against Israel from Lebanon halted after Israel's full military evacuation of the country in 2000. Brute force certainly does not work, as shown in No. 14.

Regarding the Iraq war, Congressional Democrats have repeated that the Bush administration knowingly lied to the American people about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, that Hussein did not possess such weapons in 2003, and that he was never planning to attack the US with them. The latter two charges are all true, although the first is imprecise. Some members of the Bush administration (not the president himself) appear to have deliberately misinformed others within the administration as well as American citizens about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But by all accounts, as described in No. 10, Iraq had achieved complete WMD disarmament long prior to our invasion. And no convincing evidence ever surfaced that Hussein was planning to restart his nuclear weapons project, much less a direct strike on the United States.

Finally, concerning America's post-9/11 foreign policy, Congressional Democrats complain that it is doomed to failure. War, they say, cannot "defeat" terrorism because it is a criminal and political phenomenon, not a military strategy. In this they are also correct, and the continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bear them out more and more clearly as time goes on.
Republicans and neocons can claim to possess the important moral truths, but they do not have a monopoly on all real-world facts as they think.

Again, I cannot judge the precise sincerity of individual Congresspersons. But many of their statements regarding "Islamic" terrorism, the Iraq war, and American foreign policy are true.