Matt Yglesius says what I have been thinking for a long time. The reason why the right is inept at fighting the war on terror is because they simply have no interest in accurately surmising the driving force behind our enemies. Instead, the right just wants to paint the bad guys with broad brushes, and ignore the nuances of their motivations.
But I’ll let Matt explain:
FACTUAL CLARITY. Marshall Wittmann Christopher Hitchens‘ insights into the mind of Al-Qaeda:
We know very well what the "grievances" of the jihadists are. The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor’s liberation from Indonesian rule. All of these have been proclaimed as a license to kill infidels or apostates, or anyone who just gets in the way.
Grasping this, says the Moose, will give us the "moral clarity" we need, a phrase I thought nobody used unironically anymore. The question raised by the Hitchens thesis, as is usually raised by like nostrums, is "is any of this true?" Is there any reason to think this is accurate? What’s Hitchens’ source for this? Certainly in the weeks after September 11 when all political and social commentators were called upon to say things about terrorism, Al-Qaeda, and America whether or not they knew anything about it, this is what most people came up with. Since that time, some of us have started to wonder about the accuracy of all this and tried to learn the truth. University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, for example, has studied a database of suicide bombings around the world over 20 years and concluded that the actual terrorist rank-and-file—as opposed to crackpot ideologists—is overwhelmingly motivated by foreign occupation of what they see as their homeland rather than the sort of grandiose dystopian visions Hitchens cites.
This is important stuff. Moral clarity, after all, is pretty easy to come by. Murdering people in the London Underground: bad. Kidnapping diplomats in Iraq: bad. Beheading people: bad. It’s all very bad and we’re all very morally clear about it. Factual clarity—actually understanding what’s going on and why—is pretty hard. But by the same token, it’s much more important. The habit of just making things up and repeating clichés has become pretty entrenched in this country and it hasn’t served us very well. Faced with bad people who want to do bad things, you need to actually understand who they are, what they’re doing, and what could stop them, not just rail away in ignorance. [emphasis Ken’s]
Sun Tsu understood the importance of getting into your opponents’ head if you wish to prevail in war. The current administration supporters apparently do not, because facts impede the propaganda. Or maybe the enemy is just smarter than them.