How the Terrorists Can Win

Peter Lee

May 20, 2004

It’s official. If Bush wins the election, the terrorists have won.

White House officials say they've got a "working premise" about terrorism and the presidential election: It's going to happen. "We assume," says a top administration official, "an attack will happen leading up to the election." …most Bushies think the nation would rally around the president. "I can tell you one thing," adds the official sternly, "we won't be like Spain," which tossed its government days after the Madrid train bombings.

Remember the line after 9/11 that the terrorists wanted us to modify our behavior. And if we did, the terrorists have won?

This seductive trope was used to justify everything from therapeutic shopping to our implacable indifference to the aspirations of Muslims in the Middle East to a simple-minded policy of unilateral defiance that culminated in the Iraq disaster.

Now that Bush is tanking in the polls, the hyenas of Abu Ghraib are nipping at his heels, and an unlikely cross-party gag reflex of liberals and conservatives is preparing to eject him from office, a terrorist outrage within the United States would not be an unwelcome sullying of Bush’s ostentatiously burnished credentials as America’s Protector in Chief.

Instead, it might provide an indispensable distraction, a clarion call for the people to rally around their president, and a signal for the obedient organ grinders of the right wing media to serenade the American public with that old tune “a vote against Bush means that the terrorists have won.”

Just the opposite is true.

If we are stampeded into electing a failed president — who is otherwise headed for deserved national repudiation — because of a terrorist attack, then the terrorists have modified our behavior.

And they’ve won!

And not just on the moral level. It’s a win for terrorist strategy.

Bush in office — still practicing his failed, alienating policies against the Muslim world — is the terrorists’ best friend.

If our country persists with a regime of brutal incompetence in defiance of logic, self-interest, international opinion, and common decency, it is another victory for terrorists who delight in seeing the United States alone, despised, impotent, and self-destructive.

The fact that America was unable to repudiate Bush would send a signal to the world that nothing — including America’s brutal, unilateral aggression, coercion, and deceit — has changed, and America is still at war with the world.

We need to show the world that we’ve turned the corner.

We also need to extract our armed forces from the Iraq quagmire as quickly as possible so America has the resources and credibility to protect its interests and security in places it really matters.

And we need a government that can lead this nation and the world instead of trying to stampede it with a never-ending cacaphony of fear and threats.

George Bush can’t do that.

He’s got to go.

No terrorist is going to make me change my vote.

No to Terror…and to Bush.

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