The Myths of War
Miniter, Richard
BOOKS IN REVIEW ' ~ ARNES DOES UNDERSTAND BUSH and does a n e x D cellent job analyzing the private as well as pubi lie man. A fellow evangelical Christian, Barnes displays a keen...
...Having gained that status, the myths come full circle to influence policy decisions at the highest levels...
...As Miniter shows, at least half of what we "know" about this war is just fiat wrong...
...Is all the time and energy being spent on illegal Mexican immigration wasted...
...2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, you can't get past the facts that there are no contemporaneous news accounts to support the charge, that the terrorists see American influence as corrupt, and that congressional and media investigations have revealed no truth underlying the myth...
...He relates a story about Bush apologizing to his aides after blowing up at them over a malfunctioning Teleprompter, an act of contrition that Barnes credits to Bush's Christian faith...
...For fear of offending other Muslims, we and the Europeans haven't taken on the radicals' beliefs, to tell their followers that their ideas are as false as those of the Soviets were, as evil as those of the Nazis were, and as strategically doomed as those of the Boxers in early 20th-century China...
...Myth Number 3 says that Osama bin Laden is seriously ill, a victim of renal disease requiring frequent dialysis treatment...
...We must find and defeat them in an environment where information, perception, and how and what we communicate are every bit as critical as the application of traditional kinetic effects...
...In sayJed Babbin, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is author of Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery...
...We have gone so long without taking on this part of the battle, the myths and legends that have taken hold of the public's understanding of the enemy and the war are a barricade we first have to break down before we can even begin the ideological battle...
...Myth Number 11 is that there is no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...
...A fellow evangelical Christian, Barnes displays a keen understanding of the role of faith in Bush's life...
...But even if you disbelieve denials by bin Laden himself, and his No...
...This one in particular is enormously damaging to the American war effort because it "proves" the war in Iraq was unjustified, and feeds the "Bush lied us into war" mantra of the hard-core left...
...Before you read my pal Rich Miniter's new book, Disinformation, remind yourself of this line from Will Rogers...
...Disinformation--at 193 pages--is a good, fast read...
...Miniter shows that the "diversity of sources" supporting this story amounts to one reporter talking to another...
...At the conclusion of an interview for this book, the President mentioned to Barnes that he had read two recent biographies of George Washington...
...One of our most serious mistakes since 9/11 is in failing to take on the ideological battle against radical Islam at home or on the battlefield that is the world's media...
...Barnes agrees that it will take decades to pass a fair judgment on the Bush presidency, but he clearly believes that Bush is well on his way to succeeding in creating a Republican majority by redefining conservatism and in making democracy the wave of the future around the globe...
...The worst misconceptions are created from spin by U.S...
...To defeat this enemy, we have to defeat its ideology and demonstrate conclusively, even to the dimmest bulbs among them, that there will be no new Muslim caliphate...
...To reach that goal, we must attack and defeat his ideology and, as General Pace knows, this has to be done as much with words as with rifles...
...He shows why the President's claim that the world is more dangerous for Americans after 9/11 than before is, at best, an exaggeration...
...To the bin Ladens of the world, radical Islam must make the same claims because its religiously based ideology demands it...
...There's no such warning in the document...
...Finding this distributed, loosely networked enemy is the greatest challenge we face...
...He says, "...Canada has a political climate far different from Mexico, one that actually defends accused terrorists...
...But it is more than that...
...government officials (the 9/11 hijackers only used "box cutter" knives in their attacks), foreign disinformation spread by the foreign press (A1-Jazeera's frequent publication of false casualty reports), and leaks by congressional and other government sources seeking to discredit what the Bush administration is doing...
...It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me," he said about some unremembered pol, "it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so...
...Saying so may once have been an honest mistake, but a mistake it is...
...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW ing, "The war against terror is a new kind of war," we implicitly exclude the fact that it, like most of the existential conflicts before it, is an ideological war...
...Barnes also describes Bush as humble, readily giving credit to others...
...The book is filled with other interesting revelations...
...One reason we haven't is that the West is more than just confused about who our enemy is, how he works, and what he believes...
...Where radical Islam takes hold, their ideology says, nothing can reverse it...
...But it is false...
...Despite his obvious admiration for the Texan, however, Barnes admits that Bush can be "stubborn and standoffish...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW ' ~ ARNES DOES UNDERSTAND BUSH and does a n e x - D cellent job analyzing the private as well as pubi lie man...
...Kinetic effects"--bullets and bombs--produce dead terrorists as fast as they can be targeted...
...But fighting and killing an enemy that welcomes death (or at least convinces its minions to welcome it) is not enough to produce his defeat...
...Myths 12-15 dismiss the current wisdom that there was no connection between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda...
...It is an essential reference book that every radio talk show host, every writer, and every editorialist who deals with the war, and every member of Congress and the executive branch, should have at hand to deal with the issues that befog our debate...
...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 77...
...We learn, for example, that Bush regularly cuts evening functions at the White House short so he can be in bed by 9:30 P.M., that Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have occasionally prayed together, and that Bush in at least one instance privately dismissed French President Jacques Chirac as an "asshole...
...Miniter starts with an analysis of how the myths and legends are created by politically motivated leaks and news spin, enemy propaganda, and even honest mistakes...
...After the Bush tax cuts were enacted and the economy rebounded in his first term, for example, Bush told economic advisor Larry Lindsey that the American economy had experienced"the Lindsey recovery...
...On his first day as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace published his "16th Chairman's Guidance to the Joint Staff...
...Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror by Richard Miniter (REGNERY, 256 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by Jed Babbin Terrorist groups such as al Qaeda echo the old Brezhnev Doctrine, which held that Communism is inevitable and irreversible...
...The most shocking result of Miniter's research is that the threat of terrorist infiltration to America comes not from the all-tooopen border with Mexico, but from our northern neighbor...
...These falsities fuel media and political machines eager to distort the public's view of the war, and because they are repeated over and over the falsities become accepted as fact...
...Among them is one that is dangerous because it conceals the true nature of the war against terrorists and the nations that support them...
...Here are just a few examples: 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Myth Number i says that bin Laden was trained or funded by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that lasted nearly a decade...
...I'm the forty-third guy, he's the first," Bush observed, "and they're still analyzing the first...
...How many times have you heard a vacuumpacked talking head say that the famous presidential daily b r i e f i n g - t h e one from August 2001warned that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America with hijacked aircraft...
...Objectively so, as Miniter demonstrates with reference after reference to reports by people such as former UN WMD inspector Hans Blix, no flack for President Bush...
...Pace emphasized that Our enemies are violent extremists who would deny us, and all mankind, the freedom to choose our own destiny...
...In 17 pages of detailed references and analysis, Miniter describes Saddam's funding of bin Laden's network, assisting the movement of its leaders, and working with it in supplying weaponry, including WMD...
...The Myths of War T HE FIRST WAIl OF THE 21ST CENTURY has been going on long enough to have generated its own clichfis...
...Miniter destroys myths from all sources...
...Though some readers will differ with Barnes' analysis, few will find this book anything less than entertaining, lucid, and thoughtprovoking...
...Miniter takes on 22 of these myths and legends and, with dogged research and well-documented proofs, destroys them seriatim...
...Even in the case of the Taliban, they still do not admit more than a momentary setback...
...But it is, as Miniter shows, distracting us to a greater danger to the north...
Vol. 39 • February 2006 • No. 1
