Glenn Greenwald is defending Bill Clinton in Salon today, against the charge that he “cut-and-run” from Somalia.
Can I just say, “cut-and-run” isn’t even a meaningful word or phrase. It’s pure nonsense, as it’s used. We could try to make sense of it by adding some more words — like “cut losses and run away” — but that might even seem like a reasonable proposal if expressed as such.
Sure, run away sounds bad, that’s the part that makes it sound cowardly. Cutting losses sounds pretty good, though. Anyone who invests in the stock market and has any sense at all knows to sell their non-performing assets — which is to say if you buy something and it looks like it’s not going to give you a better result in the future than it has in the past, and it’s been all bad so far, you unload it and invest somewhere else.
That’s what Iraq looks like, and that is what Somalia looked like. But Glenn wants to defend Clinton because, he’s right, the charge isn’t as true as it should be. Which is to say, the right wing is lying about Clinton’s record, but the record itself is not thereby transformed into a good one.
And Glenn digs in a little deeper and smacks Reagan for withdrawing from Beirut. When that was undoubtedly the right thing to do there. It’s a powerful argument because the Republicans today are arguing against the policy that their pre-Bush hero followed, calling them on the disjunction between their current beliefs and those prior.
The Republicans can show you that point of disjunction, though. It was September 11, 2001. That’s the critical event which was used to transform their ideology from one of “isolationism” to one of “engagement.” But by these terms a false sense is also left. The idea that somehow engagement must be military in nature. That we must invade the world in order to befriend it.
This is a manipulated, mass-psychology event. This is a coordinated media mind-control program. By use of language that deceives, they create patterns of deception, which embed in our consciousness and make us unable to think clearly. So we need to get past that and stop letting our words think for us. You need to experience and understand things and that is the way to learn, and then we can communicate with one another and share those experiences to help one another understand.
So how the propaganda works with “cut and run” is they combined a positive “cut losses” with a negative “run away” and joined them together as if they were a unit. This shuts down thinking because the two meanings contradict one another in their implications.
Let’s cut losses, for sure. We don’t have more men and women to spare, for God’s sake. Losses — human lives lost, misery and hatred and despair for millions of people — that haven’t made us safer. Losses that have made us more likely to be attacked, not less. That’s not just my opinion, that is what the United States intelligence services have reported.
And stop saying “cut-and-run.”
Update: Glenn has more on his blog.
