Bush and bin Laden
I've always thought it was fairly obvious that one of the intentions of Osama bin Laden's October 2004 message was to assist the Bush re-election campaign and it's interesting to learn that the US Intelligence Community shared that assessment. On its own, that's neither here nor there, but again I think it's fairly clear what's going on there. Bin Laden represents an incredibly extreme agenda -- far out there even by the standards of Islamist extremism. His interests are best served by trying to provoke as high a degree of global polarization as possible since it's the only way to push non-trivial numbers of people into his camp.
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I thought the ironic shame of the '04 election was that John Kerry got the nomination on the basis that he'd know to turn his swift boat straight into enemy fire at just the right moment, and that just the right moment was the Friday before the election Osama message. But Kerry didn't turn his boat into the fire.
He gave a sorta halfhearted attempt early Friday afternoon when he tried to turn the Osama message onto Bush, but then the Bush campaign returned fire and Kerry backed off.
If he'd turned the volume up to 11 on righteous indignation that Osama was still at large issuing messages three years after 9/11, he'd have taken home enough late deciders to win the election.
Kerry always promised that he was going to get to Bush's right on the GWoT - as opposed to Iraq - like Kennedy had done to Nixon. The Osama message was his grand opening, and he didn't have the strategic courage to take it.
June 29, 2006 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
I remember reading a post-mortem interview with him where he pretty much admitted the same. Maybe not precisely on the Osama tape (even tho I seem to recall a mention of that,) but I am sure I read he felt where he lost crucial votes was national security on terrorism specifically, and that his main mistakes were very late in the game, that it was his presentation near the end that did him in. There was nothing iffy about the way he presented it, he basically said he knew exactly what he did wrong, from studying the numbers post-mortem. I remember it because he basically dissed the whole culture wars/gay marriage/Ohio issue as irrelevant, and that whole thing was still hot in the blogosphere, and he was contradicting all of that, that if he had handled the national security challenge late in the game correctly, that that wouldn't have mattered.
June 30, 2006 12:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
What's really interesting is that the exit poll shows exactly the opposite. People who called the tape "very important" voted for Kerry. The three lower levels (somewhat, not too, not at all) voted for Bush. Now, none of the percentages were overwhelming, but I still think it's interesting.
But I think it's interesting because it shows the limits of exit polling to grasp motivations. People will give you answers that represent their conscious thought process, but never their unconscious thought process. As in the Fight Club example of inserting single-frame pornographic images, things like this can have an effect, although people may not acknowledge such. Moreover, the question is terrible. "How important is the tape?" matters much less than "What does this tape mean?"
June 30, 2006 5:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
"But I think it's interesting because it shows the limits of exit polling to grasp motivations." Or it could be that our knee-jerk reaction to blame Kerry's weakness is acceptance of GOP spin. I'm increasingly buying those exit polls, especially after the increasingly persuasive analyses of Ohio. I've also cited before the irony of Josh's post right after the Swifting, citing Kerry's response as an example of how we should deal with Rove tactics, whereas his lack of response has become canonical.
How do you keep hitting back, so that you stick to a theme rather than let even the need to hit back distract you from your themes, which is another reason they smear? I don't have a firm answer, but as long as we can be sure that the question is on the table for Democratic strategists phrased that aggressively, I'll be happier.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
June 30, 2006 7:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's bigger than Bush. There is a hugely conspicuous similarity between the divisive rhetoric of conservatives and the hyperbole of Osama bin Ladin in particular and the Arab-Muslim establishment in general. The theme of attacking mainstream sources of information as adversarially biased is central to the strategy of fear and division, whether for the sake of conservative dominance of our national discourse or for regional Islamic triumphalism/Arab supremacy. As our own conservatives have the "liberal media" to shake its constituency loose from inconvenient facts and reasoning, so too does the largely state-run Arab establishment media have the "Zionist media" to maintain its collective populations' sense of existential threat from the national expression of 5 and a half million Jews on 20,000 sq kms of Mediterranean coast.
June 30, 2006 9:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
The man is a wishy-washy dolt and people (four million + if memory serves) trusted him less than they trusted Bush.
The trick is to be right (correct)and win votes.
June 30, 2006 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you wanna say that the tape helped Bush, that's a reasonable idea, but if you want to say that it was Osama's intention to do so, that seems more difficult to guess. Isn't the tape also kind of a taunt--pointing out that for all Bush's bluster, Osama's still alive? Whether it played out that way or not is questionable, and therefore its possible that Osama intended it to go either way.
Perhaps he didn't care who was president, but if Kerry won, he would claim that his influence had caused that outcome. With Osama, the message isn't to the American street, it's the the Arab street.
June 30, 2006 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
"I remember reading a post-mortem interview with him where he pretty much admitted the same."
Without a citation, I'm also working off a foggy memory of what Kerry said in that interview, but my recollection is that he attributed his defeat to the Osama Friday message, not his own reaction to that message.
But, as I said, I'm not certain without the actual interview in front of me.
June 30, 2006 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
"What's really interesting is that the exit poll shows exactly the opposite. People who called the tape "very important" voted for Kerry."
Sure. It's why it was in Kerry's interest to turn the tape into a political football over the final weekend, while it was in Bush's interest to prevent Kerry from doing so.
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"But I think it's interesting because it shows the limits of exit polling to grasp motivations."
This is also true.
Interpreting all political polling is more art than science.
The tape helped Bush because it focussed the election back onto questions of 9/11 for late deciders, and away from Iraq.
The tape helped Bush because it quoted liberally from Michael Moore and framed Kerry on the same side as Osama.
The tape also presented an opening for Kerry to re-frame the argument as to why the killer of 9/11 was still playing propaganda games three years later, but Kerry didn't forcefully take the opening.
Much as you suggest, the exit poll question is sorta useless, because what it's measuring is whether or not the respondent agreed with the argument Kerry feebly attempted early on Friday that the tape's very existence was an indictment of Bush. It wasn't measuring the degree to which the tape refocussed the underlying question of the election to security from terrorism.
June 30, 2006 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with that, from all I have read on him. My own guess would be that he meant what he said, he was basically threatening the American public, that they as a democracy about to vote better think about doing something to address his concerns and those of all his supposed folllowers. As always, he wanted to get more followers by grabbing a chance to look powerful. Since Kerry never said he was about to capitulate to Osama's many and sundry demands over the years, I suspect he was dreaming of simply having a de-stabilizing effect, and didn't prefer either presidential candidate, was thinking more like "American people, revolt, throw off your chains, demand your leaders do the right thing & stop interfering with the progress towards restoration of the caliphate, or else."
Anyone know what Peter Bergen concluded on the issue? I can't think of the right kind of keywords to search for that.
June 30, 2006 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Except of course that 100-200 nuclear weapons does indeed establish an "existential threat" to the Arab world, not to mention the US's nuclear arsenal at the service of the Zionist camp, as the so-called "Iran crisis" proves.
July 1, 2006 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd say it's the other way around - Bush NEEDS bin Laden alive and out there in order to terrify the US public into following his agenda.
While it is true that Bush does the same for bin Laden, bin Laden can't do anything about Bush, whereas Bush has the ability to take out bin Laden - he just doesn't.
Standing offer, folks...
July 1, 2006 4:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Review of "The Osama Bin Laden I Know" by Peter Bergen in the Nation can be found on Bergen's website.
Fascinating.
July 1, 2006 7:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since the Arab world is also the location of much of the world's oil supplies the possibility that thge US would start firing nukes into thew region is pretty low.
July 2, 2006 7:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, but the probability of the US or Israel firing nukes into cities - not oil fields - is a lot higher.
July 3, 2006 2:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Um, destroy the cities and you destroy the infrastructure that supports the oil fields, even if, by using airbrusts, you avoid massive radioactive fallout poisoning the oil fields.
It's possible the Israelis would do it if they felt their survival was a stake, but I can't se the US risking economic ruin in such a fashion. The US government (especially under its current despot) is all about money and will take no action that threatens the profits of the oligarchs to whom its has auctioned itself.
July 3, 2006 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink