Spin and the war on terror

FIVE YEARS AGO, President Bush stood on the pile of rubble that had been the World Trade Center and announced, “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Remember that? Well, the people who knocked down those buildings just won.

Last week, in a news story that was buried by all the major newspapers, Pakistan signed an agreement to “allow militants to operate freely in one of Pakistan’s most restive border areas in return for a pledge to halt attacks and infiltration into Afghanistan.” Which is to say, Pakistan surrendered. The border areas of Pakistan are where thousands of Al Qaeda militants and (almost certainly) Osama bin Laden himself reside. On Thursday, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a not very reassuring statement that he’d go after the insurgents’ command structure.

It’s worth briefly refreshing our memories as to why Bin Laden and his closest friends are hiding out in Pakistan. In 2002, we had them surrounded near Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but Gen. Tommy Franks, the former head of U.S. Central Command, persuaded our commander-in-chief to rely on poorly equipped, ill-trained Afghan mercenaries of dubious loyalty, rather than U.S. soldiers, to finish the job. (Apparently the operating theory was, if you can’t trust mercenaries, who can you trust?) Shockingly, as Peter Bergen reported in 2004 in the Atlantic Monthly, Bin Laden paid off the mercenaries, who let him escape to Pakistan. And now the Pakistanis, who were at least nominally trying to hunt him down, have thrown in the towel.

In related news, the Bush administration has decided to stake the 2006 elections on Bush’s record of fighting terrorism. It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. He let our worst enemies escape; he is on the verge of creating a terrorist haven in Iraq where none existed before; and this is the issue he picks to highlight. Why not run on his record of evacuating New Orleans? Maybe Bill Clinton can run on his record of chastity!

Of course, Bush doesn’t really want to be judged on his record of fighting terrorism as much as his image. Republicans want you to think about him on that rubble pile and of his vow to bring Bin Laden to justice “dead or alive,” rather than whether Bin Laden actually has been brought to justice.

Bush’s defenders insist that his paramount contribution to the war against Islamic radicalism is “moral clarity.” Moral clarity means keeping in mind that even if we’re not perfect, we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. The president’s defenders are correct that having moral clarity is a necessary condition for fighting evil. What they fail to realize is that it’s not a sufficient condition.

There are millions of teenage boys who have moral clarity but who are nonetheless unqualified to lead the free world against jihadists. If your leader has moral clarity but lacks the other relevant intellectual qualities, you end up with a president whose foreign policy doctrine is expressed in statements such as: “I intend to kick [Saddam Hussein’s] sorry ... ass all over the Mideast.” (This Bush quote comes from Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s new book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.”)

It’s precisely because the image of Bush as brave leader in the war on terror is so lacking in substance that his admirers have been forced to manufacture it assiduously.

In 2003, Showtime aired a movie called “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,” written by a conservative Bush admirer and featuring an implausibly heroic Bush ordering around Dick Cheney and daring the terrorists to come get him. (In fact, the president was ushered around Air Force bases on 9/11 to protect him from further attack.)

Tonight and Monday night, ABC-TV is airing a similarly propagandistic drama called “The Path to 9/11,” written, apparently, by a friend of Rush Limbaugh and gleefully circulated among right-wing bloggers. The thrust of the show is that any failures against Al Qaeda are primarily the fault of the Clinton administration -- which, of course, is in keeping with the conservative mythology that the U.S. was soft on terrorism until we got a clear-eyed commander-in-chief in Bush.

ABC is portraying the movie as based on the report of the 9/11 commission, but two former counter-terrorism officials who served under Clinton and Bush, one 9/11 commission member and many others have called some of the key scenes fake. ABC says it’s not a documentary but a “dramatization.”

It’s fitting that the most powerful propaganda reflecting Bush’s view of his own indispensability are, literally, works of fiction.