Opinion: Pedantry minute: I know why they hated us last summer, and all the summers before that

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Determined to lose no chance to infiltrate the mighty lot of Paramount Pictures, I caught a screening the other day of the Michael Winterbottom joint A Mighty Heart, with Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl and a guy named Dan Futterman playing murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (with juicy supporting roles for Irfan Khan and Will Patton). This is not a review, but for the record: The movie was much better than I had expected, with the caveat that I was expecting it to be terrible. The computer and cellphone procedural stuff was mercifully free of OVERRIDE-SECURITY-SYSTEM-type flapdoodle; the post-Sodergodardantino jump-cut/time-shift hokum was unobtrusive though regrettably not absent; and the depiction of police torture (a practical example of the mostly theoretical ticking-time-bomb dilemma, by the way) was bracingly ambiguous.

This is one of those movies where they regularly flash timestamps and datelines up on the screen, so my blazing glimpse of the obvious came in the constant reminders that the events depicted occured in January and February of 2002, barely a year into the Bush Administration, and more than a year before the invasion of Iraq supposedly created a zillion jihadists. I’m not defending the invasion of Iraq, which I knew was a bad idea even back when it was just a government-mandated inevitability. But something bears repeating: Big bad President Bush didn’t create the jihad. Long before he grew into his historic role, cunning people were willing and able to kidnap and behead a cautious, well connected reporter and broil 3,000 Americans (and others) to death, all for the crime of being Americans. (Someday Allah will explain to me the irony that these same people are so ignorant of their enemies’ culture it’s possible they didn’t even know Daniel Pearl was Jewish before they grabbed him.)

The anti-dhimmitude zealots, who always seem to think I’m against them, deserve credit for remembering this truth. (Why haven’t these guys discovered Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, with its description of Sunnis as people who have ‘carried on, through all ages, an hereditary war with all mankind, though they neither covet nor envy their possessions?’) One of the by-products of super-euphemized diplomatic speech (using words like engage, disarm or intervene to mean inflict violence upon, for example) is that people start to treat the metaphors and euphemisms literally. It’s easy enough to believe the invasion of Iraq has given new life to the international jihad, but listen to enough OBL stemwinders about Andalusia and you start to realize the stuff we think will infuriate Islamists is often different from what actually infuriates them. (As for the hypothetical fence-sitter, who was just about to become a notary public when the invasion of Iraq drove him into the arms of al Qaeda, well, there may be many of those people, but just how many is something former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would have called an ‘unknown unknown.’) At some level, violence and suppression are tools that need to be used against violent fanatics, and the question is how well you use those tools. That Bush so far seems to have failed at this test (or has he?) doesn’t mean the test has gone away.