[Mb-civic] How Would Osama Vote? I assume for Bush

[Michael Butler]

How Would Osama Vote?
Stop assuming al-Qaeda wants Bush out of office. We don¹t know that -- and
it¹s probably wrong.

 By  Sam Rosenfeld
 Web Exclusive: 08.20.04

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 It¹s perilously close to conventional wisdom in the media that al-Qaeda
wants John Kerry to win the November election. In the next 10 weeks, get
ready for a concerted effort by the right to fix that notion in place.

 The meme originated, unsurprisingly, with the usual right-wing suspects.
Rush Limbaugh kicked things off right after the election-eve terrorist
bombings in Spain, asserting on March 15 that terrorists ³want Kerry, they
want the Democrats in power. They'd love that -- I mean, based simply on
what they're saying and how they're reacting to what happened in Spain.²

 In June, Dick Morris wrote a New York Post column with the
characteristically subtle headline ³Terrorists for Kerry.² Morris explained
to his readers that ³the real test of American resolve will not be our
willingness to stay in Iraq, but our desire to keep [George W.] Bush in
office Š . It is obvious that Osama [bin Laden] and his allies all want Bush
out. It might profit Bush's supporters (though not the president himself) to
point out this obvious fact to the American people.²

 Needless to say, Bush¹s supporters have been happy to heed the call (and
MediaMatters.org has carried out the thankless task of compiling all such
statements comprehensively).

 The idea got a lot of encouragement from government officials, both
anonymous and named. On April 18, CNN¹s Suzanne Malveaux paraphrased
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as saying that al-Qaeda ³may have
looked at the situation in Spain, where you simply had -- essentially had a
pro-American, pro-Iraq war leader ousted for someone who took the opposite
position." A month later, another CNN correspondent, Kelli Arena, made her
now-notorious remark about there being ³some speculation that al-Qaeda
believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the
White House.²

 Arena cited no source for that speculation, but by June she might have been
able to stake her claim on the authority of the president himself. Bush
explained to Tom Brokaw on June 6 how worrisome it was ³that the al-Qaeda
killed innocent people in Spain, and the al-Qaeda leadership think that they
affected the outcome of the election Š . It worries me that the al-Qaeda
leadership says, ŒWell, we may be able to affect the election of the United
States. We may be able to, you know, change the outcome of democracy by
killing.¹²

 Nobody in government rendered the claim more explicit (or ludicrous) than
an unnamed U.S. intelligence official quoted last week in a breathless
Washington Times piece. According to the official, terrorists had adopted
the mantra of pragmatic Democrats: "The view of al Qaeda is Œanybody but
Bush.¹²

 Meanwhile, Chris Matthews has brooked no comparisons among mainstream
pundits in his penchant for raising the ³bin Laden for Kerry² specter. On
July 8, he asked Senator John Breaux what would happen if it turned out that
al-Qaeda was ³trying to get people to vote Democrat for president to
basically make their case worldwide? Doesn't it put your party in a terrible
position of having al-Qaeda rooting for you?" He revived the same line of
questioning a month later on his show.

 Anyone out there think we¹ve heard the last of this? As the campaign gets
more heated, so will the inclination of the Bush team and its right-wing
media surrogates to amplify the fear of a terrorist attack and insinuate
that what the terrorists really want is to derail Bush¹s re-election. If
they don¹t want to get mau-maued any more than they already have, mainstream
journalists will want to keep a few things in mind.

 First off, attempts to draw conclusions about the upcoming election from
what happened in Madrid stem from two faulty assumptions about that attack.
The first is that al-Qaeda attacked Spain because of the country¹s
involvement in Iraq; according to Lawrence Wright¹s August 2 New Yorker
article ³The Terror Web,² terrorists may have been plotting a bombing in
Spain since late 2000. The second, more significant misassumption is that
Spanish voters threw out the Populist Party government of José María Aznar
because they were heeding the perceived message of the terrorists; in fact,
it appears as likely that the Aznar government¹s early attempts to pin blame
for the attacks on Basque terrorists eroded trust in the candidate enough to
move a few percentage points to the Socialists.

 More to the point, responsible journalists will want to remind themselves
that there is not a shred of credible evidence documenting al-Qaeda¹s
preferences in the election one way or the other. This shouldn¹t be a shock;
after all, the ideological differences between the two major American
parties probably aren¹t quite sufficient in scope to sway the hearts of
radical Islamic theocrats.

 But hey, forget ideology for a moment and think strategy. Let¹s speculate:
If you were bin Laden, and you had enjoyed a year and a half respite from
America¹s full, undivided attention, as special ops forces, intelligence
operatives, and spy satellites were diverted from the pursuit of al-Qaeda to
the invasion of Iraq, for which candidate might you feel the most gratitude?
If you were bin Laden, and had watched the United States turn its invasion
of Iraq into a cause célèbre for Islamic terrorists worldwide, which
candidate might you deem the most useful and effective as a recruiting tool
for your organization?

 None of this is rocket science. The question for the mainstream media in
the next few months is whether they can withstand the barrage of right-wing
insinuations, administration speculation, color-coded alerts, and curiously
timed press conferences designed to filter this single notion -- that
al-Qaeda wants our president to lose the election -- into the regular stream
of campaign coverage. It¹s a noxious claim, and the media shouldn¹t swallow
it.

 Sam Rosenfeld is a writer for the online edition of The American Prospect.

 Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc.  Preferred Citation: Sam
Rosenfeld, "How Would Osama Vote?",  The American Prospect Online, Aug 20,
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