The State of the World

Mark Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column in the latest NR Digital (subscription required) laments the post-post-9/11 world where the US fist has dissolved into five fingers. Another change has occured, he says. American foreign policy is adapting to a world in which optimistic interventionism has been falsified. He thinks this change is a reversion, a retrogression to the stability politics of old, where the US is unwilling to expend a massive amount of blood and treasure to benefit others immediately and itself only tentatively and in the long run. I do not think it is that simple.

Much of our essential influence derives from a simple fact: our da'sein, our being there. We affect the world merely by existing, or, more specifically, by existing in the fullness of our nature when other, alternative natures could hypothetically exist in our place--with our power. All theories of the world, whether those of our enemies or those of our allies, must at least account for America's existence in fact and interact in a thrown world of high American potential.

In the fitness landscape of society, we are the local peak . As such we exercise a terrible causal gravity on the surrounding population. Simply by being who and what we are, in contradistinction to who and what we aren't, we affect the world: we inform its apparency, and we weight the statistical variables of its possibility space.

In that sense, who and what we are can be determinative in a way that what we do cannot. The latter is a mere derivative of the former, and as such cannot be definitional. What we do is integrated, not integral: it informs, but it can never encompass.

This is why 9/11 was such an epochal event. Carried out under a false assumption of what America is, it surely succeeded in modifying it. Two distant governments have fallen since then, and we are seriously debating a third. Al'Qaeda is reduced to sending taped messages instead of hijacked airliners. The world is on edge, awareness and vigilance are heightened, and events that once would have been obscure are now globally consequential.

Small events loom large precisely because large events are no longer necessary to trigger American reaction. When America debates military action over weapons programs, and not weapons used, there can be little doubt that a shift has occurred in the world. (Think: is there any question about what would happen if America were struck again?)

We may no longer be in a post-9/11 world, but we aren't in a pre-9/11 world either. Our posture and our potential have changed--are changing still. We are less complacent, and we are dramatically self-aware. No longer simply concerned with self-sustenance, our attention and efforts have shifted to the management of our ecosystem. Our survival techniques have graduated to the next level--no longer at war with nature, we now seek to cultivate it.

Strong at home, respected abroad--as a subject--is a harbinger of what's to come, not just for America, but for the entire world. Who and what we are is not just our concern anymore; it is now everybody's.

Failed states cannot destroy us. The are not an existential problem: they are an administrative problem. The only existential threat left is mass defection caused by poorly conceived American overreaction to events.

Our challenge is to be responsive and effective without being precipitous. Therefore, pace Mark Steyn, we should put aside the fist, and use our five fingers. Until we can't.

As the father says in the movie Contact, small moves are what's needed now.

Not that it matters...

But CNN, the aspiring news channel, has committed yet another journalistic transgression against truth and fairness in reporting. Today's big news item, played several times, was the spat between Rumsfeld and the ex-CIA/current-dissident McGovern during Rumsfeld's speech in Atlanta. CNN put together a short video segment on it, headlined "CNN Fact-check" (which you can watch if you follow the link), to help the viewer understand who was telling the truth.

One of McGovern's charges was that Rumsfeld, before the war, proclaimed that the connections between Saddam and Al'Qaeda were "bulletproof," And this began CNN's fact-checking. It starts with video and a voice-over, which notes that the New York Times in 2002 quoted Rumsfeld as using the word 'bulletproof,' and that a few days later Rumsfeld reiterated it. That is premise one: Rumsfeld really said it. The video segment then moves forward to provide the viewer with premise two, showing a question and answer session in 2004 in which a woman asks Rumsfeld why he said "evidence of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 was 'bulletproof.'" On the video, one sees Rumsfeld move quickly forward to say, "I never said that." The message (the conclusion) is clear: Rumsfeld said the evidence was "bulletproof," and two years later Rumsfeld refused to own up to his own words. CNN's report does not delve any further into the issue, and the viewer is left with the impression that McGovern was right: Rumsfeld is a dissembler and/or a liar.

But is this true? Well, actually, no, it isn't. As is often the case, the devil is in the details. This is what the New York Times actually reported on October 25, 2002 (which CNN couldn't be bothered to expound upon):

Mr. Rumsfeld said today that information he cited last month on Iraq's links to Al Qaeda was "bulletproof" because it was compiled and vetted by the C.I.A.

"When I said something was bulletproof, I was referring to the five or six sentences that I had read here off of a piece of paper which I'd received from the agency," he said.

Mr. Rumsfeld had cited information indicating that contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq stretched back a decade and had increased since 1998, that Qaeda members had been in Baghdad, and that Al Qaeda had sought help in acquiring weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.

The video clip CNN dug up showed a woman accusing Rumsfeld of saying "evidence of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 was 'bulletproof,'" which, of course, Rumsfeld was right in denying. He never said evidence of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 was bulletproof. Never. Not once. He said evidence of contacts between Saddam and Al'Qaeda was bulletproof -- and it is. We have loads of documentation on these contacts and connections (for instance, here, here, here, and here). Rumsfeld was right then, and he is right now.

The opponents of the Administration have long sought to conflate the two issues; for instance, the Press recast the 9/11 Commission's findings of "no proof of operational coordination" into no link whatsoever. That is a false meme, because the Commission did find quite a few contacts and connections between Saddam's Iraq and Al'Qaeda. This is not an arguable point; this is simply what they found.

Yet here, once again, CNN does the bait and switch, "proving" that Rumsfeld said bulletproof (without elaborating the circumstance), then showing a clip of him denying it. But what CNN doesn't tell you is that Rumsfeld was not denying the word, but the context -- and here, context is everything.

Rumsfeld says one type of evidence is bulletproof (connections and contacts), and gets accused of saying it about another (involvement in 9/11). He correctly denies the latter, and he has never backed away from the former. So what's the controversy?

It is not Rumsfeld's fault that this nuance is lost on his critics. CNN is either too dumb, or too dishonest, to report it.