The Mind of a Neocon

The Pentagon was forced to release a series of documents that helped the NY Times uncover the story of the military analysts/media propaganda efforts, and people are finding all sorts of interesting tidbits inside.

One such tidbit was a transcript of a meeting then-Sec. Rumself had with some of these analysts, shortly after the 2006 elections and the announcement of his impending resignation. They discussed the state of Iraq, among other topics. In one part, when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong lamented the lack of "sympathetic ears" for their vision for the war on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld responded-

"This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats."

Yessir, it's a goddamn shame that terrorism isn't the all-powerful, daily threat that it's made out to be, and a shame that terrorists haven't killed as many people as we'd have liked in recent years, because it's really hard to get people behind our policies without the proper levels of fear. A real tragedy that the President's vision has been 'victimized' by the lack of carnage on American soil.

It should be noted that this type of mentality is sadly quite prominent in the far-right GOP base. Part of what this election is about (to me, anyway) is sweeping these people out of positions of power in our political structure. And then we may have to deal with the horror of a sanity-based approach to the terrorism issue.

[PS- Media Matters has a great report on the media and the analyst story.]