Rumsfeld Telling It Like It Is

Last Monday, Rumsfeld in a speech at the Army War College berated the U.S. (note, not necessarily the Administration) for doing a very poor job in countering the ideology of "terrorism". "If I were grading I would say we probably deserve a 'D' or a 'D-plus' as a country as to how well we're doing in the battle of ideas that's taking place in the world today." For Rumsfeld, this ineffectiveness is of profound importance because "the enemy we face (Islamic extremism) may be the most brutal in our history."

Rumsfeld could well take the cake among the Bushies for being able to combine false candor with wildly inaccurate hypothesizing -- and the speech perfectly captures both qualities. On first glance, Rumsfeld seems to be doing some serious soul-searching, but in classic Administration fashion he ends by simply displacing the blame. The failure to spread national ideals is as much the fault of all Americans as it is of the government. We as citizens just don't get how perilous the times are. And to the extent that the government is to blame, it's for not finding the right communications strategy.

Even more bizarrely, immediately after calling Al Qaeda more brutal/dangerous than the Nazis, Stalin, Imperial Japan -- hey even than the British Empire (didn't we fight two wars of national survival against those guys?), Rumsfeld places the following rather incidental caveat. "They currently lack only the means . . . to kill, murder millions of innocent people." In other words, we're now officially in an alternative universe where brutality is measured not by past behavior (or even remotely plausible future actions), but by mere aspiration.

Ultimately, such speeches expose the dirty secret of the war on terror. It's not just that the Administration actually has no ideas to export -- a point we've made repeatedly. No PR strategy can be effective if you've got nothing to sell. It's that if the country, let alone the "free world", were truly imperiled by Islamic extremism, the Bush rhetoric of freedom -- no matter how hollow -- would strike a much deeper cord. The public would actually care that government investigators were able to smuggle in enough radioactive material to build two dirty bombs. Instead these facts are relegated to the back pages, because of Rumsfeld's incidental caveat -- the other guys don't have the means.

Precisely because there is no emergency, the government finds itself confronted by the emptiness of its own democracy talk. It has to worry about PR strategies and struggle over why the American public isn't fulfilling its end of the bargain. The simple reason, of course, is that Al Qaeda does not embody a real political enemy -- capable of threatening in any sustained way the institutions of American political and economic life. If it did, all these problems of communication and idea-building would disappear. But instead, the Administration is left constantly invoking the logic of war on the terror, without an enemy to justify it.