I'm so tired of hearing about September 11 in connection with the war in Iraq. I'm tired of the references to 9/11 in Bush's speeches, and I'm equally as tired of every lefty blogger pointing out all those references to 9/11 in Bush's speeches. Yes, folks, Bush invokes 9/11---a lot. Yes, it is indeed a matter of sophistry, rhetoric, and evasion of cogent argumentation. But, No, he has not come out and directly linked Saddam and AQ. There was, of course, some genuine legerdemain: making a statement about AQ or bin Laden, and then saying in the next sentence that Saddam has supported (Palestinian) terrorists. But the speechwriters knew what they were doing, and the record pretty much supports that.
But the current invocations of 9/11 are the foreign policy equivalent of Santorum-ian statements about the damage to individuals that can be done by a corrupted liberal culture. Santorum's point is that individuals are hurt when they must live surrounded by debauched concupiscence. The idea is that the rights of liberal citizens to act as they please must be constrained by the rights that illiberal citizens have not to be confronted with liberal nonsense. So when Santorum points to gay sex and tries to argue that allowing that sort of nonsense will open us up to man-on-dog sex, he need not be relying on the claim that gay sex is as bad as man-on-dog sex. He need only be invoking a common characteristic of both, namely that the existence of both in our society infringes upon a certain moral space that he believes decent, god-fearing citizens are entitled to.
Bush's use of 9/11 these days is similar: he need not be saying that Saddam was as big a threat as bin Laden was before 9/11. He is saying that our 9/11-inspired appreciation of how vulnerable the US is should convince us that we could not simply abide the threat--whatever its actual nature--that was posed by Saddam's Iraq. Since we did not know what sort of threat there in fact was, we were justified in invading Iraq because we were justified in being more careful than we were before 9/11.
My point is this. While Bush and Santorum fully appreciate the rhetorical points they score when they mention grave threats (man-on-dog sex, 9/11) in the same breath as less grave threats (gay sex, Saddam), the best way to combat their arguments (if genuine arguments they be) is not to point out that they make such comparisons, but it is rather to meet their comparisons head on. Point out that gay sex occurs between consenting, loving, peaceful adults who use the act as a form of expression of their love, or even simply that it occurs between consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes. Point out that while bin Laden was a threat, Saddam was not; or--if you're currently more concerned for the lives of real Iraqis and American soldiers--point out that we are not doing any good in Iraq, and that we're creating and perpetuating more terror than we're combating or stamping out. Those are the only effective ways to demonstrate the inaptness of the analogies and connections. Insisting on the existence of more sinister rhetorical motives is either (a) politically inexpedient or useless, or else (b) a misrepresentation of what Bush (and Santorum and the rest of them) are really doing with their words.
Posted by Paul at June 29, 2005 02:02 PMi used to agree with you before 9/11 when we all learned what a horrible threat saddam hussein was because we looked at the calendar and realized it was 9/11.
Posted by: upyernoz at June 29, 2005 03:04 PM