John Tierney shows signs of sanity

This is getting scary....John Tierney seems to be developing some grey matter at last:

Once again he has beaten America at an American game: public relations. He may be sitting powerlessly in a cave, but his image is as scary as ever. He doesn’t even have to cut a new video. He released an old one last week, the equivalent of a fading musician putting out a greatest-hits album, only this one’s getting played every hour.

Last night, President Bush paid him homage by quoting his warning that America will face “defeat and disgrace forever” it if loses in Iraq. Bush himself called the war on terror a “struggle for civilization,” and said it was essential to ”maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations.”

It was just the kind of apocalyptic language favored by bin Laden, except that, for all his delusions, he might realize that American civilization is not really in jeopardy. Americans can try to copy him, but they don’t understand his rhetorical technique.

They continually misinterpret his equine theory of international relations: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” This is supposedly a reason America was attacked on Sept. 11 — it was perceived as weak for failing to respond to Al Qaeda’s earlier attacks — and why it can’t leave Iraq.

If we falter in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney explained to Tim Russert on Sunday, the war on terror will falter because people will say: “My gosh, the United States hasn’t got the stomach for the fight. Bin Laden’s right, Al Qaeda’s right, the United States has lost its will and will not complete the mission.”

But bin Laden knows something else the Bush administration hasn’t figured out: You don’t actually have to be the strong horse. You just have to look stronger. You can be weak, you can be pummeled in a fight, but as long as your opponent looks more scared than you, you can save face by simply declaring victory.

[snip]

Al Qaeda wasn’t a serious military threat to America, but it could play one on television. As Al Qaeda’s losses mounted and America recovered from the attack, bin Laden and his cohorts didn’t let the facts get in the way of their campaign to promote fear (and themselves). They hid in caves and proclaimed themselves champions.

America, meanwhile, accentuated the negative. Instead of declaring victory against terrorists after routing the Taliban and sending bin Laden into hiding, it invaded Iraq, reinvigorating Al Qaeda with a new tool for recruiting. Instead of putting the terrorist risk in perspective, Bush (with the full cooperation of Democrats and the press) set an impossible standard for making America safe.

“We’re on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront,” Bush said last week, “and we’ll accept nothing less than complete victory.”

When you define victory that way, when you treat one attack from a disorganized band of fanatics as a menace to civilization, you’ve doomed yourself to defeat and caused more damage than they could. You can’t completely stop terrorism, but you can scare people into giving up liberties, wasting huge sums of money and sacrificing more lives than would be lost in a terrorist attack.

When TIERNEY is starting to talk like this, Bush may have no choice but to bring in Bin Laden if he wants to save what little credibility he has left.