Its takes someone that is psychologically exhausted to make
a Freudian slip; it takes a former psychiatrist who is intellectually bankrupt
to write a column that is a Freudian slip in its entirety. This is what Charles
Krauthammer is demonstrating in his column: “The Jihadi Logic,” also subtitled:
“Lure the U.S. into the
fight that Obama will quit, as in Iraq ,
Libya , and (soon) Afghanistan .”
It was published on September 18, 2014, in National Review Online.
In trying to psychoanalyze what the Islamic State was
thinking when it beheaded two Americans on video and propagated the spectacles
to the world, he came up with two possible explanations which he then calls
theories. One is that the terrorists are motivated by depravity, the display of
which they did not realize will “bring down upon them the furies of the U.S.
Air Force.” The other explanation or “theory” is that the terrorists meant to
“provoke America
into entering the Mesopotamian war.”
Even though he began by making it sound as if he were saying
either one or the other of the theories was valid, he goes on to talk about
them as if both were valid simultaneously. He begins this process by asking the
question “Why?” That is, why did the terrorists wish to provoke America into a
war? And he answers: “Because they are sure we will lose.” He explains: “They
count on Barack Obama's quitting the Iraq/Syria campaign.” What this means is
that the author accepts the second theory.
But now Krauthammer does something which says he accepts the
first theory as well. He does that by explaining: “As for the short run, the
Islamic State knows it will be pounded from the air.” He goes on to say it
deems this to be a price worth paying because the public executions translate into
renown and recruiting. And this means that the current members of the
organization are depraved as are those they seek to recruit. Framing the
situation on the ground this way, makes it possible for the two theories to be
in force simultaneously. But they open the door for a massive Freudian slip to
develop.
Krauthammer gets on this road by lamenting: “The
[terrorists] are convinced that, as war drags on, we lose heart and go home.”
Further down, he elaborates: “And this goes beyond Obama. They see a pattern: America
experiences shock and outrage and demands action. Then tires and seeks leaders
who will order the retreat. In Obama, they found such leader.” This is a big
admission from someone accustomed to blaming Obama for all that went wrong,
attributing his weakness to a misunderstanding of the American value system.
This being a first admission, the author piles more such
admissions to the point where he dismantles the entire value system which he
and his neocon comrades have fashioned, and have presented as America's
authentic system. He begins with the following: “Understanding this requires
adjusting our thinking.” This causes the reader to wonder: What thinking? What
kind of adjustment? And Krauthammer responds in the most cavalier fashion you
can imagine with the moral equivalent of this fictitious allegory: The guy says
he was mad at me because I used to rape his 6 children. Well, I stopped raping
3 of his children and he is still mad at me.
Look how Krauthammer does that: “A common mantra is that
American cruelty – Abu Ghraib, Guatanamo, 'torture,' the Iraq War itself – is
the great jihadist recruiting tool. But leaving Iraq , closing Abu Ghraib, and
prohibiting 'enhanced interrogation' has had zero effect on recruiting. In
fact, jihadi cadres have swelled during Obama's presidency … Turns out the
Islamic State's best recruiting tool is indeed savagery – its own. The
beheadings are not just a magnet for psychopaths. They are demonstrations of
its determination and of American helplessness. In UBL's famous formulation,
who is the 'strong horse' now?”
“Strong horse,” he says? And what about the furies of the
U.S. Air Force? The relentless video display of American “smart bombs” blasting
Muslim properties and killing everyone inside – is this not a way to say, you
kill one of ours and we kill hundreds of yours? Does this not translate in the
mind of the terrorists over there that the terrorists over here can bring to
bear on their citizens a hundred thousand horsepower in a warplane for every
one horsepower they can to bring to bear on an American citizen?
And so the big question to ask is this: Does the relentless
showing of Muslim positions being blown up from the air along with every soul
that is in them, help America
recruit American psychopaths? Many of the TV intros show a display of American
mass murder a thousand times a day for what reason? To say the same thing a
thousand times a day? Or is it to indoctrinate young audience with the neocon
principle that the blood of Arabs and Muslims will quench their thirst for
violence if they volunteer to serve.
But how did this proud and relentless display of American
mass murder begin in America ?
Well, the Israelis started the trend by showing what the weapons that America gave
them could do. The trend was then imported into America , and the more neocons got
themselves into high positions in the American media, the more they popularized
the gruesome display.
To us here, such display now looks no worse than seeing how
nice it is to drink a cool beer on a hot summer. To them over there, it looks
like it would to us as if we had to watch their television, and seeing a head
being shopped off a thousand times a day. Their terrorists are still civilized
enough not to do that, however. Why should we let the Jewish terrorists over
here dictate to us what we should do and what we should watch?