We have a real strategic opportunity here. Rudy Giuliani has put all his eggs in the 9/11 basket, and, though he has no f'ing clue what he is talking about, he keeps saying you can't be President if you don't "understand" the terrorist threat, suggesting that his "experience" as mayor of NYC on September 11, 2001 makes him uniquely qualified to become president. Leaving aside for the moment that this is akin to saying "I got my ass kicked last week so I have the experience necessary to teach Karate classes" -- he showed a huge achilles heel last night when said he'd never heard anything as "absurd" as the claim that al Qaeda seeks to kill Americans because of our foreign policy toward Muslim nations and the middle east in particular.
We all know that's wrong, but we've never had a great vessel to attack it. The notion that al Qaeda hates us because of our freedom is a frame at the heart of the GWOT/Security State frame, leaning toward the notion that anything which pisses off al Qaeda os further proof of how awesome we are. Further, just as John Edwards (and Jim Webb, and others) have said that the phrase GWOT unites Arabs and Muslims against us, the notion that jihadists hate our freedom makes it seem as if anything we do will engender hatred from Muslims, and so we can never stop fighting them until they establish a global Caliphate, or we kill every last one of them.
Conveniently enough, Osama bin Laden himself wrote his reasons for jihad against the United States in a 1998 fatwah (excerpted in the extended entry), and he cites three principle reasons, all of which are due to our foreign policy regarding Muslim states (and Israel). If we can successfully inform the public debate on this issue, we can severely discredit Rudy Giuliani; we can make a fundamental change in the discourse; we can encourage other presidential candidates to follow in Edwards's footsteps by refusing pervasive GWOT frames; and we can probably even help non-Hillary Democratic candidates in the process. Follow below for the facts.
From Osama bin Laden's fatwah calling for jihad against the United States:
For seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, pludering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
...
First, The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still the are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... the Americans are once again trying to repreat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.Third, if the Americans' ... aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.
I'm still waiting for a transcript, but Congressman Ron Paul basically paraphrased the above for the reasons as to why al Qaeda attacked us. Giuliani responded:
That's really an extraordinary statement-- that's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11th, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.
One reason this is so noteworthy is because every conservative and Fox News commentator is falling all over themselves to praise Giuliani's smackdown of the congressman -- they're just begging to be called out. They literally could not be more wrong about the issue they claim is the Most Important Issue Ever. We need to hammer them on it while they're still yammering on about how "from the heart" Giuliani's indignance was.
Not only can we use this issue against Giuliani in the primary, but against the entire Republican field, and against Hillary Clinton in our own primary, who (like Giuliani) asserts that her "experience" (having a New York office) makes her uniquely qualified to deal with terrorism. It's going to be an uphill battle, but it's a good fight -- the facts are so incredibly clear, and the indignant outrage among Republicans and conservative media types is so incredibly wrong, that I have to believe we can win it if the Democratic elites with megaphones have the courage to stick it out.
Update: Here's the video.
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