The White House always has a fallback plan: when all else fails, scare the bejezus out of as many people as possible.
[Yesterday] on Fox News, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow defended the President’s Initial Benchmark Assessment Report, which argues that the administration is making “progress” in Iraq.
Snow attacked proposals to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, claiming:
“To walk out of Iraq right now would plant a seed that ultimately would lead to destabilization there, hundreds of thousands of deaths, loss of our influence in the region, would create instability throughout the Middle East throughout East Asia, throughout Europe. And sooner or later it would come to our shores, to a shopping mall near you.”
OK, so this is the kind of shameless, pathetic fear-mongering we’ve come to expect of those who’ve run out of substantive arguments (maybe this is part of Snow’s “surge of facts“?). It’s also an off-shoot of the thoroughly discredited “follow us home” argument, which the White House repeats nonsensically.
But I have a different question: is Snow suggesting there’s something unsafe about going to shopping malls? Does he have a “gut feeling” about terrorists striking at a mall?
If the economy takes a downturn because people start to fear shopping malls, can we blame Snow?
On a more substantive note, Igor Volsky and Ryan Powers note that Snow’s doomsday scenario (sans the mall attacks) is already happening in Iraq.
* Since Bush announced his surge in January, violence has skyrocketed. Close to 600 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since January. Military assessments suggest that “the U.S. military’s plan to secure Baghdad against a rising insurgency is falling far short of its goal.” A recent bombing killed over 150 in Baghdad, “one of the deadliest single bombings, if not the deadliest, since the 2003 invasion.”
* The war in Iraq has already destabilized the Middle East and exported terrorism throughout the world. “The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of people killed in those attacks, increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks.”
* The U.S. has already “lost influence” in the region. In a poll of 18 countries, the percentage of those “saying that the United States is having a mainly positive influence in the world” dropped 11 points from two years ago, down to just 29 percent. Just 17 percent believe the United States is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.
True, but other than this, Snow’s argument was perfectly sound and persuasive.