One of the more common phrases you'll hear these days from the right is that criticism of the president or of our conduct of the war "emboldens our enemies." This strikes me as terrible logic and very simplistic thinking.
First off, do our enemies really need emboldening? What was it that Cindy Sheehan said that led to 9/11? What war were liberals protesting prior to the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole? What were people like me saying about the president when they bombed our embassies in Africa? What complaints about denials of civil rights were we making when the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993?
In reality, these people need no emboldening. They already want to kill us and it is ridiculous to think that it is the words of people like me that are inspiring them to do what they do. I mean, I'm sure they all watch Fox News to discover the latest outrage in the War on Christmas and other liberal offenses. Actually, no, wait, they don't do that. They watch al-Jazeera, which, last time I checked spent more of its time focusing on the actions and choices of the conservatives who are actually in power than the rantings of people who are essentially powerless in the U.S.
What is it that really emboldens these people? Israel. It's very existence. Our support for the Israelis, even on those occasions when they are wrong. Our presence in the holy land. Our support for the House of Saud. Our support for Saddam back in the day -- giving him intelligence to kill other Arabs and the precursors to chemical and/or biological weapons -- then our later flip-flopping and condemning the very monster we created. Our invasion of Iraq. I could go on, but there is no need, this is enough to embolden thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of terrorists.
The root of this comes out of the conservative "thinking" about the Vietnam War. Many of them are under this fantasy that we lost the Vietnam War because of media coverage and because protests emboldened the enemy. Forget the fact that one doesn't need to be emboldened to defend one's own country and that many of the enemy had little or no access to what was going on in America. The clear reason we lost in Vietnam is simple -- you cannot win a war of occupation. There is no standard by which you can say "we won" that has any real-world impact. Beyond that, our leadership did such a poor job of running the war that we couldn't have won even if winning such a war was possible. Read any history book about the war or ask any veteran who served any significant time in the field during the height of the war.
I made the mistake the other day of watching Fox for a few minutes and saw a goofy story about how Stephen Spielberg and George Clooney were bad guys because they made films that portrayed terrorists as human beings. This is all part of the same phenomenon -- conservatives look at the world as simplistically as a young child does. Everything is either black or white, good or evil, with us or against us. To them, the motivation for a terrorist is simple -- they are evil. To them, a film that doesn't portray terrorists as simply evil beings who are out to get us because they hate our freedoms is not only factually incorrect -- it, too, is evil.
The real world, though, doesn't work that way. The real world is made up of shades of gray. People in the real world are almost always somewhere in between good and evil. And there are many, many people in the world who are neither with us nor against us in the war on terror. Take Canada for instance. Or Europe. Or the rest of the world. This is why conservative solutions don't work for so many problems -- they are too simplistic and fail to address reality. Clooney actually said it best -- if you want to solve the terrorist problem, you have to understand their motivations. You have to understand that they are human beings with human motivations. Yes, they are also the bad guys, but we don't live inside a comic book, it just isn't that simple. Complex problems require complex solutions. And things, such as movies that portray things as they are not as we wish they were or criticisms of failing policies, that point out the truth are part of the solution, not the problem.
A last part of this is the conservatives who claim that we are also emboldening our enemies by making a wrong choice in the "national security" vs. "civil liberties" debate. As any sane person knows, this is a false choice. You can have both. And as some old famous dead guy once said, those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither. It is simple. America is the greatest country in world history because of our freedoms and liberties, not in spite of them. If we give those up in the name of "national security," then the terrorists actually do win.
Besides, it's somewhat misleading to say that terrorism is really a "national" security issue anyway. Yes, it is something that the national government should be responsible for, but are we really worried about terrorist attacks anywhere but on the coasts? Are we expected an al-Qaeda attack in Iowa? Or South Dakota? Or Nebraska? Or New Orleans? No, we expect it to take place in prominent locations of symbolic value in major metropolitan areas. If the terrorists just wanted to kill large numbers of Americans, they could've easily gotten away with an attack on a big mall or football game or parade or something like that. But those types of attacks don't hold the symbolic value that makes them high profile enough for a terrorist attack.
And in what way does any of this crap the administration is doing actually do anything to protect our security. In what way does spying on PETA or Grannies Against the War help our national security. And I'm not even asking for someone to reveal classified information about how this has helped us, I'm just asking for even a logical argument about how such a thing could possibly help us. Others have asked this same question and none have received an answer because such things cannot possibly make us more secure. There is also no way that illegal wiretaps help our security any more than identical wiretaps that were obtained legally would. Something that does hurt our security, though, and emboldens our enemies is when our own leaders reveal their willingness to break their own laws for personal and/or political gain. That reaffirms our enemies' belief that Americans are corrupt and immoral -- making them hate us more and reinforcing their belief that they are doing God's work in attacking us. One last thing that emboldens our enemies is incompetence. When they see that a major city like New Orleans is completely unprepared for a major disaster and that the federal government's response is wholly inadequate, they know that their next attack will be met with the same kind of response. What could embolden them more?