America’s Obsession with Linking Insurgency and Terrorism to Al Qaeda

30 December 2013

This essay is intended for people with appreciation for the often obvious ways in which our maps of reality differ — sometimes self-destructively — from it

The on-going political argument about who did what to whom in Benghazi (Libya), when American ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others were killed (in September 2012) is a good example.

One side leans toward holding the Obama Administration blameless and the other toward pillorying it for a combination of political cowardice, national security ineptitude, and outright dishonesty.

Virtually none of the debate is intended to correct the United States’ now characteristic missteps abroad. Instead, the jabbering is merely an initial salvo in the 2016 presidential election. This is theater over substance. With the unintended effect of keeping us just as stupid as we always seem to be about what is really going on abroad.

In truth, we seem to be incapable of seeing reality for what it is, apparently due to our need to make it so simple that even nitwits can mistakenly understand it.

The problem with this head in the sand approach is that:

(a) our unwillingness to learn what is Real and what is not gets lots of people killed for no good reason

and

(b) it allows behind-the-scene profiteering plutocrats to reap enormous monetary benefit from the Stupidity Carnage Sweepstakes — at everyone else’s expense.

First — the premise

Reality is almost always more subtly complex than we think it is. Which means that walking around smashing things with a sledge hammer is unlikely to cure the problems that we think we see.

Black and white thinking is a one-way ticket to eventual extinction. If we pretend that the rocky, white water river that will drown us is not there — what happens when the tiger’s rush, or illness’s fever, pushes us into it?

Second — an illustration of how we ignore the complexity conundrum

Take the renewed, politicized furor surrounding journalist David Kirkpatrick’s attempt to uncover what really happened at Benghazi on 11 September 2012:

David D. Kirkpatrick, A Deadly Mix in Benghazi, New York Times (28 December 2013)

His tentative (preponderance of evidence) conclusions are that:

(i) a mix of outrage over an insulting American-authored defamation of the Prophet Mohammed (Innocence of Muslims) aroused some of the local population into an angry mood

and

(ii) local Benghazi-based terrorists, who were not affiliated with Al Qaeda, took advantage of the uproar to assault the American consulate and kill the Ambassador and his protectors.

Naturally such a challenge to America’s favorite and inflated Al-Qaeda bugaboo (bugbear) could not go unchallenged

America’s “conservatives” immediately struck back against the “liberal” newspaper. And against its inferred attempt to let President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton off the hook — for having (allegedly) pretended that the assault had been a result of the insulting video and also might not have been Al Qaeda-sponsored:

Rep. Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said on Fox News Sunday that Times reporter David Kirkpatrick’s story, a months-long investigation that relied on interviews with witnesses on the ground at the time of the attack, was inaccurate.

Also on Meet the Press, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa supported Rogers’ argument and insisted that government officials lied about what happened . . . .

“Kirkpatrick doesn’t have the classified information that Mike Rogers and others have, and neither do I,” Issa said.

Issa became a leading voice in conservative rallying cries on the issue and used his role as the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to repeatedly investigate the assault. In his interview with NBC Sunday, Issa maintained his critical posture against the administration and defended his past assertions that al Qaeda played a role in the attacks.

“There was a group that was involved that claims an affiliation with al Qaeda.”

California Democrat Adam Schiff, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee with Rogers, agreed with his colleague on Fox News. “The intelligence indicates that al Qaeda was involved,” he said.

Notice where this argument immediately went — to black and white, rather than into the probably complicated and/or unknown

The Benghazi argument appears to revolve around, “Al Qaeda did it” versus “Al Qaeda didn’t.” This, despite the fact that terrorists/insurgents, of one kind or another and not necessarily formally associated with each other, killed our people for reasons that probably can never be fully recovered.

The better question is:

(a) What psychological dynamic and anti-American implementation(s) went into the attack

and

(b) how might we prevent or protect against another such?

Formulated this way, we would have to deal with what is Real rather than with our illusory maps.

The argument for open-mindedness — spelled out with two hypothetical examples

The human mind likes to make stories up — meaning that we like to create accounts that make sense and which push the unknown and (cognitively offensive) randomness out of sight.

This tendency often deceives as to what is really going on, especially when we invent one Bogey Person to blame, when there are actually many — all perhaps operating with different motivations and capacities.

Here is an example of what I mean:

Let’s pretend that numerous and heavily armed “Bad Guys” from abroad have invaded our neighborhood(s), and some of us want to kick them out — despite our comparative military inferiority.

Do you think that we will object to offers of assistance from neighbors (near or far), just because there are political, social and religious disagreements that usually separate us?

And in regard to how to interpret connections between our armed resistance clans:

Assume that my resistance squad has a member named Mike, a teenager. He has a best friend, John, who now belongs to a separate resistance organization 20 miles away.

John’s elderly grandmother sends Mike $50 for his birthday, via a non-insurgent friend of hers, who is not associated with either of our bands. The birthday present comes to Mike only because non-political Grandma wants to please John by being kind to his best friend.

Does Grandma’s gift to John constitute an organizational connection between our separate resistance groups?

The NSA would probably say so, and President Obama would assuredly drone kill her and keep her death secret.

So, in the Benghazi example of analytical stupidity — is “Al Qaeda did it?” the most relevant question?

Probably not.

But the issue gets framed this way because we Americans love to point fingers at one person, one organization, one evil, or one side. Subtlety escapes us. Which means that Reality does, too.

Our ham-handed foreign and military policies, and their often inane justifications, are the result.

Bogey Man versus multiple bogey men and women

In regard to the Benghazi debate, our seemingly single-track focus on Al-Qaeda as America’s predominant adversary, causes us to be unreflective as to why — wherever we go in the Islamic world — so many apparently new “enemies” pop up.

Were we to recognize that many of our current and potential adversaries:

(a) object to our imperialistic cultural, economic, and militaristic tendencies

and

(b) are not associated with Al-Qaeda —

we might have to accept that we are doing something that profoundly irritates a substantial portion of the world’s population.

Thus, we go from single Bogey Man to multiple bogey men and women.

With the “multiplicity” insight, our perspective on Reality would have to change. Presumably to one that allows us a better chance of coping effectively with it.

When you look at who benefits from our shared stupidity — you understand why things work out as badly as they do for most of us

Publicly announced political reasoning usually serves as camouflage for monetary and power interests that are acting sub rosa (secretly).

In regard to Benghazi, neither political side really cares much what went wrong. Both are more concerned with retaining or gaining power and, therefore, holding onto or acquiring the monetary and prestige perks that go with it.

Note

My take on Benghazi is that what happened is probably closer to David Kirkpatrick’s findings, complicated by a certain amount of ineptness from the Obama Administration, than it is to Representatives Rogers, Schiff and Issa’s single color representation.

Those of us, not bound by “either-or” ideology, often recognize Truth by its messy smell.

Behind these political guys are the interests actually pulling the power strings

In the case of fomenting war, the Military Industrial Complex gains every time. It just needs to think of reasons that the public will temporarily buy into, so as to get a conflict started or extended.

In illustration of this, consider President Obama’s mostly uncriticized willingness to renege on his promise to get American troops out of Afghanistan in 2014:

Secretary of State John Kerry announced on Wednesday that the United States and Afghanistan had finalized the wording of a bilateral security agreement that would allow for a lasting American troop presence through 2024 and set the stage for billions of dollars of international assistance to keep flowing to the government in Kabul.

The proposed agreement justifies itself with the argument that Afghanistan will fall apart, if we leave as scheduled. Which, according to American warmongers, means that terrorists will again sprout there, apparently in excess of every other darn place the United States sees and drones them.

Overlooked is the question:

Why should Americans care about a region that:

(a) is not (and never has been) a vital U.S. interest,

(b) is not even a nation in the historically accepted sense of such,

and

(c) has definitively (and understandably) proven that it is unlikely to respond constructively to an outsider’s way of doing things?

The moral? — Politicians and special interests use the American public’s penchant for black or white thinking to justify policies that enrich the untouchable elite — at the price of ordinary citizens’ blood and wallet contents

Persuading ourselves of the truth of these manipulative tactics seems to be an impossible task. It is so much easier to coast on the crest of our usually irrelevant ideological sillinesses or to sleep in Complacence’s Cocoon.

When the political and economic elite privately look down their noses at the “great unwashed”, they are looking at us. Many of them pleasurably marveling at how easily people can be tricked into voting and acting against their own interests.

America’s adversaries are not all Al-Qaeda. Some of them, we voted into office. Our single biggest national adversary is our tendency to think and act like simple-minded dopes. The trait weakens us. Eventually, we will perish as a nation because of it.

PeteFree.com

America’s Obsession with Linking Insurgency and Terrorism to Al Qaeda