Our Enemies and the Election
05.10.2008 - 12:31 AMAre we due for an “October surprise?” Ever since October 1972, when Henry Kissinger, then Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, announced that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam, an October surprise – or the impending possibility of one – has been a perennial feature of American political life. Will a dramatic foreign-policy development tip the electoral balance this year?
Several factors have converged to make this more probable than in any recent election. I explore what they are in today’s Wall Street Journal.
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May 10th, 2008 at 11:45 AM
A very interesting piece, as always. If I were to predict an October Surprise for this election year, it would be Iran temporarily making nice, long enough to undermine the suspicion and warnings of the American right. All Iran would have to do is signify a willingness to negotiate on a more cooperative basis, begin to negotiate a timeline for fresh IAEA inspections, keep everything juggling on the table in Vienna, and wait to see how the election comes out. No actual concessions would ever be required. Russia quietly urging Iran to do this, and publicly endorsing Iran’s actions as a great blow for peace, would be perfectly in character. Moreover, although Ahmadinejad is a public as well as a private loon, the ruling council of clerics takes a longer view, and would see the benefit of allaying American concerns long enough to possibly get an inexperienced dupe elected to the Oval Office.
Iran’s uninterrupted record of gaming the multilateral negotiation process would weigh only with those who already believe Iran is undeterrable. And even if Obama didn’t want to point to negotiations that developed on Bush’s watch as a positive thing, the simulated willingness of Iran to “talk” could persuade some substantial number of war-weary American voters that there’s a Third Way happening that is more in Obama’s style than McCain’s.
I think the wahhabi terrorists, on the other hand, are smart enough to know that blowing things up, before election day in America, is much more likely to give McCain a landslide than stir up votes for Obama. Basically, anything that makes the world look more dangerous will almost certainly bring victory for McCain. For Obama to win, the “security Democrats” need to feel that threats are receding, and American can focus on butter rather than guns.
Given the IC’s and Homeland Security’s track record of averting terrorist plots over the past six years, which has been pretty good, I actually think it’s more likely that such plots between now and November will be interdicted, than that the IC will emit accurate, predictive interpretations of anything Iran or Russia does. This doesn’t mean no one in the IC will understand what’s going on. It does means that the IC leadership has demonstrated a pattern of seeing only what it wants to.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:06 PM
I think that Mr. Schoenfeld needs to learn how to reason from evidence and :
(1) Does the fact that a ranking official in Hamas, an adviser to Putin, Hugo Chavez, and North Korea’s state owned newspaper express either pro-Obama or anti-McCain sentiments really portend a “dramatic foreign policy development” that might tip the Presedential election? Only if they are in a position to act on these sentiments and are likely to if they have such a disposition. And where is the evidence of this?
(2) The article assets that Obama has “pledged to pull out of Ira
May 11th, 2008 at 12:48 PM
I think that Mr. Schoenfeld needs to learn how to reason from evidence and do a better job of evidencing his claims. Opinion pieces like this provide ample support for Richard Posner’s claim that much public intellectual opinion is based on sloppy thinking and is nothing more than disguised political advocacy.
(1) Does the fact that a ranking official in Hamas, an adviser to Putin, Hugo Chavez, and North Korea’s state owned newspaper express either pro-Obama or anti-McCain sentiments really portend a “dramatic foreign policy development” that might tip the election for President? Only if they are in a position to act on these sentiments effectively and are likely to make such a decision after considering its benefits and costs. And where is the evidence of this? And, of course, it all depends on how much more probable this might be? If the probability shift is a very small one, then the opinion piece is much ado about very little, and perhaps, some “might” (to use a favorite Schoenfeldian hedge) say it is nothing more than an exercise in fear mongering.
(2) The article assets that Obama has “pledged to pull out of Iraq no matter what the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell him, or what is happening on the ground.” In fact, isn’t Obama publicly on record as saying that he reserves the right as Command in Chief to reassess the situation. You may not believe that he will reassess the situation, but this not an unambiguous pledge to withdraw.
(3) And where is the support that Obama has pledged to talk with Hamas or other world dictators “no matter what they say or do.” When it comes to Hamas hasn’t Obama said that he will not talk to them. In fact, didn’t Obama recently say, ““We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction,” Obama said. “We should only sit down with Hamas if they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.” And does the fact that Obama says that he will talk to the dictators necessarily imply that they he would continue to talk to them under any circumstances? It’s hard for me to believe that there is significant textual support for this claim in any of Obama’s published remarks.
(4) Is there any proof other than timing that Osama Bin Laden’s television appearance a weekend before the presidential election “may have been a naked attempt to influence the outcome” or that this was the intent of the massive terror attack in Madrid? Or that the single largest terrorist attack in the war was related to General Petraeus’s upcoming congressional testimony. If your hypothesis is that terrorists are more likely to act on the eve of national elections, then do all the acts of terror that did not occur before national elections count as evidence against the hypothesis? And what makes you think Al Quaida does not realize that a terrorist attack pre-election could hurt rather than help Obama? That you assert that “operatives making plans while dwelling in caves in Waziristan MAY NOT have a particularly nuanced understanding of the ebb and flow of American public opinion” does not mean that they do not. And your assertion concerning Bin Laden’s 2004 television appearance would seem to cut in the opposite direction.
Gabe. You’re a smart guy, used to play a mean game of chess. You can do better. The article reminds me of the quality of discourse students used to engage in at Sarah Lawrence, not something that you should be proud of.
May 11th, 2008 at 2:05 PM
Ed Burke - with respect, you have a weak gambit here. What you have identified in Gabe’s piece is not flawed logic, but premises you disagree with.
Gabe doesn’t need my help in his defense here, but I do want to observe the following:
1. That a conclusion is not inevitable does not mean it is illogical. We need not inevitably conclude that the Islamist attack on the Madrid train station was intended to influence Spanish voters, but that doesn’t make it ILLOGICAL to reach that conclusion.
2. Premises one disagrees with underlie many things a majority of the public has adopted as settled conclusions. Opinion writers know that there remain people who disagree with the premises. That doesn’t make it either logic-chopping or rhetorical unprofessionalism for opinion writers to refer to the majority-favored conclusion — such as “Islamists attacked the Madrid train station to influence Spanish voters” — without making the whole argument anew every time.
3. Accusing the opposing side in an argument of illogic is often a means of trying to establish the high ground for one’s own premises, without providing empirical evidence or a more compelling process of deduction.
May 11th, 2008 at 2:43 PM
I’m not trying to establish any high ground. I don’t have any ax to grind here. If you have a premise, then you should be able to evidence it. The weaker your evidence, the less probative value it has and weaker your premise. This is just common sense stuff. In fact, what we are dealing here is circumstantial evidence, which can often be used to support any number of competing premises. The circumstantial evidence that Gabe is relying (which simply consists of temporal proximity) is quite weak, and inferring intention from such evidence is often a dicey proposition. I don’t think that I ever characterized Gabe’s reasoning as illogical (which in my view is quite a low bar). Circumstantial evidence will permit any number of logical inferences, which is not say that a logical inference is necessarily a strong inference. This an opinion piece built upon a number of weak inferences.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:33 PM
Um , from out here in the country that #4 is looking a little bit silly, Ed.
** Is there any proof, other than that Osama’s TV message came out days before the election, that he was trying to influence it? **
What kind of proof is called for here? It’s obvious. Is there any proof Dan Rather was trying to influence the election with his fake NatGuard docs story? Is there any proof the media was trying to influence the election with the scary story about Al Qaqaa and the hundreds of tons of high explosives lost by the army? A fake story, btw, that DISAPPEARED the day after the election. Never heard another word about it. Is there any proof the media was trying to influence the 2000 election with the Bush drunk driving story the day before the voting? Or that the Swifties were trying to influence the election with their book about the candidate titled “UNFIT FOR DUTY”? Is there any proof the CIA was trying to influence the election when it allowed Scheuer to publish that stupid book of his and go on a tour with it, right before the election?
** does a terrorist attack that isn’t near an election refute the theory?**
No, it just shows there are other reasons for the timing of an attack besides an American election. It says NOTHING about whether the attacks that WERE close to elections were or weren’t timed for that reason, and sensible people recognize they were.
And as to your question about whether it hurts al Qaeda to kill people right before an election, the answer is yes IF THEY ARE AMERICANS. But Al Qaeda has never launched a massive attack on Americans, civilians or military, right before an American election. they killed a couple hundred Spaniards, sure enough, but not us. that might have made the Spanish a bit worried about the choice they made that month, but for them it was too late– and that TOO shows that Al Qaeda was thinking about elections– they held their fire at the Spanish until Spain’s voting was THROUGH.
This proves they are thinking carefully about this stuff, and American election outcomes are certainly a high priority for them.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:57 PM
Put away the crystal ball. Our enemies may be rational and try to defeat the Presidential candidate they oppose most, or they may be irrational and lash out at us irrespective of its effect on our election. Enemies with messianic pretensions could believe that their triumph is so much in the bag that nothing as small as our election results would matter.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:34 PM
argh.
I should never post when I’m doing other stuff. I misremembered the Spanish situation– the bombings DID come three days before the elections.
But that sort of proves the other part of my post, because not only was the attack timed to influence elections, but one could say it DID.
And that makes this VERY interesting. Al Qaeda knows not to bomb Americans right before an election… but they still bombed the Spanish, and they proved themselves right in their judgment when the Spanish elected a leftist anti-war government after that bombing.
They had witnessed what happened right after 9/11, America coming together, the bombs going off in the mountains of Afghanistan, and they learned the best way to influence American elections was NOT to kill Americans.
No such respect for the righteous reactions of the Spanish. Al Qaeda took that nation for cowards who would flinch backward when symbolically attacked, and they were right.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:06 AM
We’ll see how attuned Tehran is to the American political scene if, as appears increasingly likely, they loose Hezbollah and Hamas in a two-front war against Israel this summer. If the war comes off, then we’ll know that once again they are misreading the American mood, b/c any such action will only highlight the weakness of Obama’s diplomacy-only school of foreign policy and showcase the need for a more serious guy like McCain.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:09 AM
Meantime, we have an admisnstration in Washington that ought to be dealing with these issues. Apart from the “peace process” effort to get Israel to give away the store, what are they doing to thwart Hamas and Hezbollah? And don’t forget Fatah, who are terrorists, too.