What’s Wrong With That Statement?

I just got a mass e-mail from the American Conservative Union that says:

Dear Friend of ACU:

QUESTION: Who made the following statement?

“(The U.S.) military and the insurgents (in Iraq) are fighting for the same thing, the hearts and minds of the people.”

A) Terrorist Leader Abu Musab Al-zarqawi
B) Osama Bin-Laden
C) Saddam Hussein
D) Ted Kennedy

The correct answer is D.

I’ll be frank. Ted Kennedy he has simply gone too far.

Ted Kennedy should be held to account for his words and actions.

Use the hyperlink below to send your personalized Blast Fax message to Senator Ted Kennedy, Vice-President Dick Cheney and the remaining five Members of the Senate Leadership, all six Members of the Senate Ethics Committee and the remaining twenty-three Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Tell them that Senator Kennedy has given aid and comfort to the terrorists and that he is unfit to sit on the Armed Services Committee.

http://www.grasstopsusa.com/acukennedy.html

The trouble is that whatever bad things Kennedy might have said — and I’m sure he’s said plenty — this isn’t one. First, some context from Kennedy’s remarks (made Friday, February 4):

Too many Iraqi people do not believe that America intends no long-term military presence in their country. Our reluctance to make that clear has fueled suspicions among Iraqis that our motives are not pure, that we want their oil, and that we will never leave. As long as our presence seems ongoing, America’s commitment to their democracy sounds unconvincing.

Other indications of anti-American sentiment are clear. CDs with photographs of the insurgents are spread across the country. Songs glorify combatants. Poems written decades ago during the British occupation after World War I are popular again.

We have the finest military in the world. But we can’t defeat the insurgents militarily if we don’t effectively address the political context in which the insurgency flourishes. Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing — the hearts and minds of the people — and it is a battle we are not winning.

The goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it and not to micromanage it.

Kennedy is complaining that the Iraqi insurgents (a fairly neutral term, not as harsh as I might like, but nothing I can complain about) are trying to get the Iraqi population to sympathize with them and to hate us. That seems quite right. Of course, the Iraqi insurgents are also trying to influence the Iraqi people by terror, not just sweet reason; but they surely are trying to win people over as well as frightening them.

Kennedy is also claiming that we aren’t winning the public relations battle in Iraq. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, but it seems to me like a plausible position. The election suggests that the Iraqi insurgents haven’t won over or intimidated all Iraqis. But my sense is that we aren’t vastly loved there, either, and that in some areas a considerable chunk of the public (enough to cause serious problems for us and for the new Iraqi government) is indeed on the insurgents’ side.

Now Kennedy may well have been wrong in some of the other things he said in that speech. He surely has been wrong in lots of other things. Fault him for that. But this statement is hard to see as “go[ing] too far” (unless one reads it as a claim of moral equivalence between us and the insurgents, which neither the context nor the text supports).

Even if you think Kennedy deserves whatever criticism he gets, the viewpoint expressed in that particular phrase is a plausible and quite possibly correct viewpoint. The viewpoint shouldn’t be denounced simply because we might not like the person who conveys it.