NYC Letter: Strong Horse, Weak Horse, Pantomime Horse

Mr. bin Laden: (...Inaudible...) when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.

Transcribed from a videotape shot possibly in Qandahar, Afghanistan, mid-November 2001

Only yesterday Mr. bin Laden thought the world his oyster. After 8 years of the docile Clinton administration and the spectacular carnage of 09.11, he clearly believed that America was the weak horse of his above trope. But Mr. bin Laden, apparently basing world war on little more than Allah's supposed favor, was knocked back by a very strong horse indeed.

Now a pantomime horse is not a horse at all. It is a couple of men got up as a horse, one as the head and one as the haunch, for pranking and antic capers. It is also how the great and petty enemies of America think about America, the strong horse. Could Mr. bin Laden, the most romanced terrorist bien-pensant since Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre, have been mistaken about his horses?

Well, yes and no.

The Weak Horse
Terrorism, which Mr. bin Laden freely admits to, is the war of choice for the weak horse of Islamism, the only war it can wage. And although it enjoyed the initial advantages of depravity and lawlessness, it cannot be prosecuted on the scale necessary to attain its political objectives. For it to do so requires it to have a definite shape and size and location. In which case it is simply found and killed. This is what happened in Taliban Afghanistan, a conflict where even among the benighted mujahideen the outcome was not much in doubt though the Western press beshat itself with timorous tales of the invincible Islamist.

Terrorism is not a perduring political force. By its nature it cannot openly organize or cohere. Its ideology is limited but poorly communicated. Its ranks get a large part of their orientation from the reporting in the Western press. Islamic terrorism wastes its future by spending its youth. Those needed to carry and enlarge the fight to the next generation are recruited to death. Much is made of the embrace of death in Islamism, but the median age of martyrs is in the late teens and twenties, with the old boys in the back-room scurrying from stink-hole to stink-hole.

When the tabescent political force of terrorism gives out, the terrorist group goes from being a criminal political organization to being a wholly criminal enterprise. It retains the relics of its angry polemics, but it becomes a business with a business's simple purpose, to be a going concern. This is why political settlements cannot be parleyed, because such put the terrorist enterprise out of business. The PNA, IRA, and FARC are all cases in point.

The Strong Horse
Western democracies tend to tolerate terrorism and its sponsors because it shrinks from spending the political capital and treasure to shut down bad guys. And besides there's always America.

Much of the world looks to America to keep the world from slitting its own throat. America is the only nation whose stated intentions suffice to deter rogue states from major mischief. And if the world bloodies itself, America is expected to tidy things up and pay for the mend.

The Canadian and European socialist paradises come by way of decades of puny defense spending made possible by American security. And while the UN and Europe posture over the Third World, it is America ponying up USD$40 billion to curtail AIDS in Africa. It is America spending USD$400+ billion for the restoration of Iraqi freedoms while European leaders tongue-cluck about UN primacy but contribute nothing.

The Pantomime Horse
The press coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal is an example of America as the pantomime horse. Abu Ghraib abuses have been elevated to something both irremissible and emblematic of the Allied mission in Iraq. They are neither. They are the wanton acts of a few.

Officials of various stripes huff (Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war, it's an attitude that comes out of how we went there in the first place, it's an attitude that comes out of America's overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries all around the world.") and puff (Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management."), smugly pretend shock (Jack: "We thought that those days were over, and that international obligations were now recognised and applied by everyone."), or drift off into bizarre blather and apoplexy. Elsewhere op-ed commentary freely characterizes the abuses as "torture". French editorial license, which extends to the pornographic, invents abuses not reported. Reuters reports abused Iraqis in the thousands though there is nothing to support this fabulous calculation. (The Guardian in contrast writes: Since the scandal broke three weeks ago, dozens of former detainees have come forward to recount stories of humiliation, beatings, and ill-treatment by American troops, not just in Abu Ghraib, the prison west of Baghdad, but at the US's 14 other military detention facilities across the country." [Emphases added.]) Reckless claims only require a byline to be published. Hoaxes abound.

None of this is pretty. But then it isn't exactly this.

The press, clearly enjoying its reporting on Abu Ghraib, only manages a head shake for Nick Berg, hardly news at all. Just an American being beheaded by "one man's freedom fighter" as Reuters' Stephen Jukes would have it.

What all the hopped-up reports lack are any sense of proportionality. Abu Ghraib is a war prison, not a holiday camp, wherein war prisoners, not altar boys, are incarcerated, not fed feet-first into industrial plastic shredders. To say this is not to exculpate the abusers but to provide some context. Mark Steyn explains the absence of context:

The American people, no thanks to their media, still understand what's real and what's just cheesy Beltway dinner-theater. That's why the Abu Ghraib scandal is dead, even if the networks don't yet know it. ... If you want to see what the Islamists did to Nick Berg or Daniel Pearl or to those guys in Fallujah or even to the victims of Sept. 11, you'll have to ferret it out on the Internet. The media aren't interested in showing you images that might rouse the American people to righteous anger, only images that will shame and demoralize them.

So why does so much of the world delight in depicting America as a pantomime horse? To start with, because it can. Calumniate America and the worst you can expect are sympathy calls from the Senators from Massachussets. Also America is expected to play by exacting rules. Rules to which few in the international community can hold themselves, or would if they could. Lastly because America is big and benign and it's just good fun to take a poke at the big guy. Everyone feels a little bigger having taken his swipe. No fear of a serious smack-back. After all, it's America -- the funny pantomime horse, its head here and its bottom running off there -- not some nut-case nation like the DPRK that demands an exaggerated respect it does not rate -- or else.