Earlier this week, Rick "Shark and Shepherd" Esenberg says this:
Believe it or not, one of things that I try to do as a law professor is break down generalizations into their comprehensible parts.
So, naturally, he endorses Sarah Palin's conflation of al-Qaeda (the organization created in the 1990s and carried out the 9/11 attack) with al-Qaeda in Iraq (the AQ affiliate group that opened for business after the U.S. invaded Iraq):
Gov. Sarah Palin linked the war in Iraq with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling an Iraq-bound brigade of soldiers that included her son that they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."
Andrew Sullivan's comments on a Bill Kristol defense of Palin's comments are appropriate. Sullivan:
Really? The people who "planned" the 9/11 attack? They're in Pakistan, governor, where your beloved president allowed them refuge. The people who "carried out" the attacks of 9/11? Most of them are now dead, but the few remaining are in Pakistan, not Iraq.
...
No, but she is saying that the people who planned and carried out the attacks on 9/11 are in Iraq. They're not. No sane person believes they are. More to the point, Kristol knows that on 9/11 al Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist in any meaningful form. His president helped create them by invading so incompetently a security vacuum sucked them in. AQI is simply a franchise spawned by 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. To say that entity - created entirely after 9/11, was somehow responsible for 9/11 is piffle.
Aren't lawyers supposed to be concerned with these, whatchamacallthem, nuances and distinctions? By any serious reading, Palin's remarks were flat-out wrong. (Beyond the AQ-AQI conflation there's the whole point that we're fighting more than just AQI in Iraq. But why add complexity to the picture.)
Responding to critiques from Mike Plaisted and others who point out that AQ and AQI aren't the same thing, Esenberg makes this rather strained analogy:
To say that they had nothing to do with 9-11 is like saying that the particular Japanese soldiers that we attacked on, say, Okinawa had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.
Al Qaeda didn't have much presence in the Iraq before the war but they are there know and they're awfully nasty. Track Palin will be protecting innocents from them and, yes, they are part of the group that planned and carried out 9-11.
All comparisons are odious -- all the more so when you're trying to compare a loosely linked confederation of ideologically sympathetic cells with an imperial nation state. A better analogy might be with, say, those in China or elsewhere who collaborated with the Japanese in the Co-Prosperity Sphere. An enemy,to be sure, but not the same as the Imperial Army or Navy.
Just in: Given the Brawler is a fan of the fairness doctrine, he would be remiss if he didn't point out that Ese raises a legit criticism of an earlier post here.
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