The sins of Richard Nixon and Osama bin Laden are in different moral universes. But the two men do share the dubious distinction of being caught red-handed on tape, with no real room for argument except among the brainwashed. And both cases suggest that smoking guns can have unintended consequences, especially when they raise expectations down the road. For the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign in the war against terror, it could be all downhill from here.
In the short run, at least, the airing of the tape is clearly good for the good guys. For all of the exertions of Tony Blair and American authorities, evidence of bin Laden’s prior knowledge of September 11 had been circumstantial until the tape. The very fact that so many Arabs believe the video was doctored suggests they know that the sick merriment of bin Laden and his toadies helps the American cause. (My favorite absurdity is that it’s actually spliced video from the wedding of bin Laden’s son.) If nothing else, the leader has been demystified, stripped of some of his romantic revolutionary allure, his Che street cred.
But soon enough, the problem will be less bin Laden than bin Laden wanna-bes, spread across 60 countries. The chances of any of them being caught on a smoking-gun tape are now small, though you can never underestimate a villain’s egotistical desire to dance in the end zone. At least for a while, they’ll be camera-shy; videotaping of anything but carefully planned propaganda efforts will be about as welcome in Al Qaeda hideouts as the Star of David. When we swoop down to arrest or assassinate suspected terrorists, much of the Arab world (if not the international community at large) may say: “How do you know they’re terrorists? Where’s the incriminating video?”
In other words, today’s smoking gun could blow a hole in tomorrow’s quest for justice. After that Nixon tape, Charles Peters of The Washington Monthly predicted that it would be much harder to make charges of malfeasance against future presidents stick. He was right. The bar was raised. Despite plenty of evidence suggesting that higher-ups in the Reagan administration lied about the Iran-contra affair, investigators lacked a smoking gun. They couldn’t find it again during a probe of the 1996 Clinton campaign’s funding (though they did find a smoking blue dress). Each time the standard of proof is raised, it makes it harder to win the next round in the court of public opinion.
When proof is lacking, the U.S. government must rely on trust, a far inferior coin. Beyond the bin Laden case, that’s the administration’s position today. Trust us to tell you the news from the battlefield, even as correspondents are kept far away from the action. Trust us not to abuse civil liberties. So far, the authorities have generally not betrayed that trust, so reporters have been generally friendly. That could change. If the government gets caught baldly lying or withholding critical information, all the news-management techniques in the world won’t help protect it.
In the Arab world, that trust is already nonexistent, and even slam-dunk evidence like the bin Laden tape cannot create it. But we could do a much better job of getting our position across. For instance, to respond to Hani Subai, the “expert” who labeled the tape a fake on Al Jazeera TV, the United States last week offered up Christopher Ross, the former ambassador to Syria who has become our designated spokesman in the Arab world. Ross’s Arabic is excellent, but he’s not a Muslim, which immediately gives him less credibility in the Arab media. Apparently, the State Department has no Arab-American voices it trusts to carry the official U.S. message. But an answer may be in the offing. Support is growing in Congress to underwrite a new TV network in the Middle East that promotes moderate Islamic views without in-your-face American propaganda.
In the meantime U.S. officials worked hard to distribute copies of the tape to embassies around the world, but many of our Middle Eastern “allies” weren’t making it any easier to get the truth out. Even as the Arab governments issued statements critical of bin Laden, Arab state-run media (the only kind) buried the story of the tape or ignored it altogether. Naturally these governments paid no price in their relations with the United States.
After bin Laden is eliminated, the United States has to start pressuring these countries to take the anti-American and anti-Semitic trash talk out of their textbooks and cease funding hate-filled religious schools (the Saudis underwrite such madrasas all over the world). That’s problematic; we’re asking them to be simultaneously more and less democratic. But despite the more than $2 billion the United States annually gives to Egypt in aid and the oil we buy from Saudi Arabia, we sometimes act as if we have no leverage. And we sometimes forget that they are playing a dangerous double game–communicating one thing to us and another, more sinister message to their own potential terrorists. You don’t need a smoking gun to know which way the bullet’s moving.
