Pro-War Propaganda Vol. I: Back Talk

As I said in my first entry, I have a history of stirring up trouble on pro-war blogs. Probably my most bold and protracted campaign was at Back Talk. Back Talk is a gathering point for pro-war "intellectuals" to get their talking points from. It is fairly well-read and is held in very high regard within the pro-war community, so it was a natural target for me and over the course of several months I went on a rampage there, tearing through as many of engram's posts and readers as time permitted. Here are some examples from the beginning:

Barack Obama Explains his Opposition to the Troop Surge

Muqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire

There are many other examples from the following months, through until May, in fact, with similar results: the blog's proprietor, engram, a "liberal by some measures" who supposedly became curious after 9/11 (read: threw his lot in with Bush and his neocon cabal) posting nonsense disguised as fact, me knocking his argument down and then dealing with a few members of his cult-like fan club. My real goal was to engage engram in a debate directly, but what I found is that he didn't want a debate. In fact, he'd go out of his way to avoid responding to me altogether, even if it meant responding to other commenters and pretending that I hadn't shattered his original article to pieces. Finally, I got an admission of what I had known all along:

"No, I'm not going to argue with you. I often do have discussions with people who think like you do, and I've learned that it is just impossible to make any progress with them. I know that you think that I'm the one who is impervious to evidence, so we are at an impasse. Arguing is not going to get us anywhere."

What's amusing about this is that the "professor" debates other readers - just not the ones that he thinks might actually make him look bad. A good example of that is here, where engram skewed evidence to support his agenda (which includes pretending that America's economy is doing just swell). An anonymous reader challenged him, and engram tried (and failed) to back himself up. Apparently having learned his lesson, he simply stopping trying to answer serious challenges even when pressed:

Engram, I hope you will engage the point I made in the last thread. It was, I believe, a valid criticism of your argument. If your belief in being open to evidence and discourse is more than a pose, I expect you will respond.

Note also in that same discussion engram's demand that I limit the size of my comments after I discredited his entire article. Not too long after, one of my comments actually did get too far under his skin and he deleted it. So, I stopped. Of course, since I have my own blog now, I'm free to discredit engram and others who spout his rhetoric without having to worry about someone else deleting my comments.

Back Talk annoys me because engram is not just a typical war propagandist: he is a propagandist with an uncanny ability to make himself appear like an intellectual. For this reason, he needs to be seen for what he really is. If just one person reads what I post here and manages to see through his facade, then it will add to the satisfaction of discrediting him in the first place.

So as not to draw this post out too far, I'll start with a rather simple deconstruction of one of engram's most recent entries: a typical whinefest about liberal defeatism with a chorus of pro-war cheerleading. From the beginning of his article:

It seems to me that one issue that separates the left from the right on this issue is that, if you are on the right, you see nothing good -- nothing at all -- in America suffering a military defeat (either in Iraq or in Vietnam). If you are on the left, although you might patriotically prefer an American victory, you might also be able to see at least some good in our powerful military being defeated.

This is classic engram propaganda: draw a false dichotomy between the left and right and paint the left as less patriotic by default. By making a base like this that's supposed to sound reasonable, he builds himself a platform from which to push on his readers the idea he really wants to convey: that liberals are defeatists.

Furthermore, engram routinely tries to lure his readers in by building the foundation for his arguments with utter fallacy, such as this:

The conditions that caused Harry Reid and the editors of the New York Times to declare that this war is lost have been reversed. I wonder if they are starting to think that this war is won? I am.

Of course he limits his qualification to what Harry Reid and the Times were upset about: which is that violence was sky-high in 2006. He doesn't want to talk about the things that Middle Eastern experts, intelligence experts or political scientists were upset about, which is that political conditions, such as the refusal of Iraqi Sunni and Shia to even sit in the same Parliament together, the lack of support for the central government among Iraqis and favor of the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr as well Iran's massive influence are the reason that the war is lost and has been for some time now.

Nor is Engram particularly interested in reality regarding al-Qaeda, as this blatant lie demonstrates:

Al Qaeda has not been operating in Afghanistan for many years. They've been in Iraq instead.

As I have tirelessly pointed out on my blog, Osama bin Laden long ago diverted his suicide bombers away from Afghanistan to fight the Americans in Iraq (note the year of publication).

This assertion is so utterly incompatible with the facts that even by engram standards it is shocking. Here is the reality of the situation:

AFGHANISTAN: NEW APPROACHES NEEDED TO DEFEAT INSURGENCY - EXPERTS

Hoffman began by observing that "the lawless border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has, I think, become really America’s most acute foreign-policy challenge, even more so than Iraq." He noted that, "every single major Al-Qaeda plot or attack since 2004 has emanated from precisely that area," referring to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

There is plenty appearing regularly in the news regarding concern over al-Qaeda's role in Afghanistan, which is largely administered from the safe haven it established in 2001 after the botched invasion of Afghanistan. So the idea that al-Qaeda has been exclusively in Iraq (where the vast majority of its organization is/was comprised of native Iraqis) and not present in Afghanistan is simply nonsense. The reality is that the major elements of al-Qaeda have actually managed to operate relatively unscathed in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area, and that the Iraq-centric policy of the Bush administration has failed to diminish their capabilities. Just last week the Department of Defense contracted a study highlighting all of this:

A terrorism study prepared for the Defense Department has some bad news for the Bush administration—and presents a sizable challenge for whoever is next in the Oval Office.

The current strategy for defeating al Qaeda has not been successful in diminishing the group's capabilities and is unlikely to do better without a shift in emphasis, the Rand Corp. study concludes.

The article goes on to explain why this is the case, which I won't discuss right now, but the point is that people need not dig very far to see that what engram is trying to push on his readers is simply bullshit of the lowest order. It is my hope that more people take it upon themselves to make sure that uninitiated readers aren't fooled by it.

This is merely the first in what I intend to make a series of articles debunking the lies and rhetoric of those who support the failed policies of neoconservatives and their ilk. Engram is merely a drop in the bucket but he is a good starting point nonetheless.