"Journalistic hyperbole has no place here ..."

- Ted Rall, from Afghanistan

At a time when the country is overrun by jingoistic sentimentalism, voices of dissent that call into question the extent of the War On Terror and the character of the conflict are desperately needed. Ted Rall's opinions on those issues then, are that much more valuable because they are so rare. But they are also more burdened by the need to hew closely to the facts. Effective dissent requires accuracy, not intellectual dishonesty. Lies can't be skewered with more lies. But Rall has a way of ignoring the facts that don't fit his preconceived notions.

In short, Ted Rall is giving dissent a bad name.

Time after time in his syndicated strips and columns since Sept. 11, he has shown a tendency to distort or exaggerate in order to make a point. His book, To Afghanistan and Back, is a distillation of his shoddy and ideologically blind war reportage. The Wall Street Journal and the New Republic have called him anti-American, but that's not really accurate. Of course, he does see only the negative aspects of America, but that's because he tends to see only the negative aspects of everything. He's a cynic, but more to the point, he's a hack.

And that's a bad thing for a political cartoonist to be -- especially one whose work appears regularly on the websites for the Washington Post and the New York Times, where potentially millions of readers can encounter his work. Meaningful and incisive political cartoons and commentary, especially those that attack the common wisdom, must be, at their core, true to the facts. Rall's have been anything but. He regularly exaggerates, excludes relevant information from his "analyses," and just plain gets the facts wrong.

Rall views himself as a champion of the First Amendment and he casts any and all criticism of his work as an attempt by a jingoistic, reactionary, war-hungry populace to stifle dissent. He sees himself as someone who is willing to ask the hard questions when no one else dares. But his free-speech dance is a diversion. Sure, there have been people like Alan Keyes, who, in his March 12 MSNBC column questioned whether like Rall deserve First Amendment protection, but they are on the fringe. Of course, such a suggestion is insane, and no one takes Alan Keyes seriously; Rall is no more in danger of being stifled than is Keyes. In his attempt to make his critics look like Orwellian thought police, Rall can ignore his responsibilities as a popular political cartoonist and columnist. He steadfastly maintains (see "Ted Rall, Pariah," in TCJ #242) that it is his critics who have overreacted, and he refuses to apologize for whatever pain his cynicism has caused.

As is now well-known, Rall has achieved a certain infamy as a result of his strips "Terror Widows" and "New York City Fire Department 2011," and rightfully so. They are, without a doubt, in the Pantheon of Rall rants; brutal in their indiscriminate targeting of still-grieving family members and loved ones, and deceptive in their characterization of victims as victimizers. His decision to make light of Marianne Pearl's grief less than a week after the announcement of her husband's death ("Of course it's a bummer that they slashed my husband's throat ... but the worst was having to watch the Olympics alone!") was both brutal and hateful. His only defense was that he found Ms. Pearl's appearances on television, so soon after her husband's death, to be "pointless and tacky," as if Ted Rall were the arbiter of proper mourning behavior. And the notion, in his April Gear magazine strip, that New York's firefighters would take money and booty from cancer patients like modern-day pirates, is just jaw-droppingly offensive.

These strips tell us much about Rall's methods and tactics, but they don't give us the whole picture. Like those attempts a few years ago in these pages to understand Dave Sim's misogyny, we must look at both what Rall draws and what he writes in order to understand the full extent of his deception. His strips convey his beliefs in short, four-panel summations, but it is in his columns where he has space enough to spin the rhetorical rope with which he hangs himself.

The World According to Ted Rall

Perhaps the best way to begin a critique of Rall's work is to rewind the clock to that fateful fall day, and examine some of his strips and columns in chronological order. The cynicism began in earnest on Sept. 13 with a column titled "Tear it Down, and They Will Die: The Inevitable Takes the World Trade Center." In it, he entirely ignores the pain and suffering of a city and a nation, doesn't waste so much as a sentence on the people who died, and, after quoting from a long-ago lecture by an unnamed college instructor (Rall must have taken exceptionally accurate class notes to quote so extensively so many years later) gets right to placing the ultimate blame for the destruction of the Twin Towers on -- you guessed it -- us. It was our hubris that brought them down. Not theocratic Islamism. Not hateful, ignorant impotence. We should never have built them -- it was dumb of us, he insisted. And we paid the price for our pride. "If it hadn't been passenger jets commandeered by terrorists, it would have been something else," he wrote while a city still held hope that it's loved ones might yet come home.

Aside from the infuriatingly misplaced blame, it is here that Rall shows the first signs of his almost inhuman level of coarseness -- a willful disregard of the pain of others in an effort to prove that his take on the situation is more enlightened, informed and right than the rest of the world (in a Nov. 12 strip, he says, "Secretly, they [Americans] think the World Trade Center footage is cool"). He was just getting warmed up.

On Sept. 20, in a column that reads like an almost-paean to the bravery of "Nineteen Guys Who Shook The World," he discusses the ways in which "Osama and his jihad boys sized us up fairly well," and unmasked the American paper tiger. He then goes on to explain how the national economy has "plunged into recession and beyond," and how the attacks spelled the beginning of the end of the American empire ("with a bang and a whine"). Of course, the economy hasn't plunged beyond recession and America is still around -- his prognostication is as accurate as his geopolitical analysis. He also spends a good deal of time spinning conspiracy theories about what he viewed as the probability that United Flight 93, which crashed over Pennsylvania, had been shot down by fighter planes and subsequently covered up by the government. He bases this analysis on the fact that, nine days after the crash, the flight data recorder transcripts still hadn't been released and he reasons -- if we can call it that -- that the government must be keeping them secret as part of a cover-up. We see this unsubstantiated paranoia pop up again and again in future strips and columns.

In the ensuing months, his analysis of the war and its combatants has been thoroughly shot through with distortion, exaggeration and lies. He went in convinced that a bombing campaign in Afghanistan would accomplish nothing, and he has since clung to that assumption and rejected any and all evidence to the contrary. He believes American military power cannot be used toward humanitarian ends, period. And he goes to great lengths to maintain faith in that belief.

Oct. 2 marks the first chance he gets to address the war in Afghanistan. His column from that day, knee-slappingly titled "Give Thought a Chance," is an attempt to explain why any military action in Afghanistan would be both a waste of time and "an escalation of genocide by trade sanction." After all, as he points out, Britain and the Soviet Union both failed in their imperialist attempts to control the country. Also, a war in Afghanistan would be fruitless because, as he explains, we could kill terrorists till the cows come home, but those terrorists have "mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. They have friends." An obvious point, perhaps, but he views it as proof that any military action against the Taliban and al-Qaeda would be nothing more than whack-a-mole on a global scale. Remember, Rall is -- as he mentions often -- "a student of the region." (You know what else he mentions often? Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Since Sept. 11, Rall has name-dropped the author of "Taliban" and "Jihad" -- both directly and indirectly -- more than a dozen times. He gives more shout-outs to Rashid than God got at the last Source Awards.)

Rall argues that oil is the real purpose of the war in his strip from Oct. 4 and his column on Oct. 12, when he connects the dots between a newly revived pipeline plan by energy company Unocal, and the Bush administration's notoriously close ties with Big Oil. Therefore, "... this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen." To Rall, no other motivations are valid, no other reasons sufficient. He doesn't for a second entertain the notion that the closing of dozens of internationally renowned terror camps might actually prevent a future terrorist act or ten (he refers to a supposed multitude of terror camps spotting the entire Muslim world in an effort to pound home his whack-a-mole point). And he insists it couldn't possibly be motivated by a desire to get the man who funded, trained and inspired those "Nineteen Guys."

Late November marks the beginning of Rall's dispatches from Central Asia. In a display of misplaced journalistic trust not seen since ABC News sent Leo DeCaprio to interview President Bill Clinton, KFI Radio in Los Angeles and the Village Voice sent Rall into the shit to get the low-down. And Rall delivered. Thanks to his brave reportage from the region -- think Robert Fisk during his recent beat-down mixed with the insightful analysis of Geraldo -- we now know that people who don't know "jack" about this part of the world go to Pakistan to get into Afghanistan (he mentions this from his stopover in Tajikistan so we know who knows "jack"); that a "50ish lady from Seattle" all but offered him sex in a Dushanbe elevator; that war correspondents often employ gallows humor; that Afghan men and boys followed him in Taloqan as though he were Mick Jagger; that Northern Alliance fighters can be unruly and violent; that Americans are self-interested where Afghans help their countrymen whenever possible; that Afghanistan is culturally diverse -- "a truly blended nation" -- whereas "Americans live in strictly segregated, monochromatic cities and neighborhoods and can't even stand to hear each other's music"; that it's hard to get food in Afghanistan during the daytime in Ramadan; that neither the Northern Alliance or U.S. troops were responsible for the safety of the thousands of journalists roaming and reporting around Afghanistan; that Afghan fighters often look older than their age; that he was forced to sleep on "stinky" mats and often woke up with rashes; that ducks keep the gutter water in Taloqan clean; that the benzene lamps Afghans use for heat burned his sensitive eyes and throat; and that he got cold at night. Really cold. Taken together, Rall's reports don't deal with the war nearly as much as they do with the inconveniences suffered by travelers and Western reporters. Frommer's for the ideologically blind.

After getting his war on, Rall returns home to "monochromatic" New York, and once again, the paranoia sets in. "Students of wartime propaganda will naturally wonder if all or some of last week's Osama bin Laden video were faked," he writes on Dec. 11 in reference to the infamous "bin Laden tape" that most of sane world agreed was proof of his involvement. Rall then goes on to point out that, even in the unlikely event that the video is authentic, it doesn't prove a thing. "Advance knowledge does not automatically equal full responsibility," he says, so the tape proves nothing about bin Laden's culpability. It's an attempt to do nothing more than to shift the blame from bin Laden at all costs, so that Rall's framework -- that the U.S. is ultimately responsible for what happened on Sept. 11 -- can remain intact, without the inconvenience of focusing on tangential figures such as bin Laden.

A Dec. 10 strip, titled "Tools For Political Action: A Guide," lays out Rall's take on the effectiveness of four different forms of "dissent": a letter to the editor, an appeal to Congress, peaceful demonstration and mass murder. He declares three "Effectiveness: Zero" and one "Effectiveness: You decide." His point is that terrorist attacks are the only proven way bin Laden and the rest of the world's oppressed can get their "causes" to receive a hearing in the American media and government. Again, he posits the simplistic "blowback theory": that Sept. 11 was the result of the world's oppressed trying to give voice to their grievances. It apparently never occurred to Rall that bin Laden might have hijacked the Palestinian's cause in an attempt to curry favor in the Arab and Muslim world, or that, by tying his mission to that of the Palestinians, he ultimately undermines their efforts to make the world more sympathetic their plight.

In his Dec. 20 strip, "The World Deliberates," his gives us a familiar setup: a discussion of a country wherein "nearly half the population is composed of ethnic groups who have never held power," where "women are treated like dirt ... marginalized, underpaid, and not permitted to hold the highest offices." The third panel goes on to describe the country as "a virulent theocracy" with a "state religion." The country in question? Yup, the United States. Didn't see that one coming. If the gag seems familiar, that's because it's the exact same bait and switch device employed in Aaron McGruder's Thanksgiving Day Boondocks strip, where McGruder compares bin Laden to Bush. Of course, McGruder's effort is much more successful because his descriptions can easily fit both parties. None but the most intellectually dishonest polemicists can compare the plight of women in the United States with that of Afghan women, or describe the United States as a theocracy.

On the last day of 2001, Rall's strip describes the reaction he got from people in the Islamic world when he told them he was from New York. In the space of one panel each, they elicit more sympathy for the dead than Rall has displayed in all the work he's published since the collapse of the towers. His ultimate point is that "being the focus of a pity party does have its advantages." Namely, allowing New Yorkers to "feel good" about the bombing campaign. What do you say to someone who describes the sympathy felt for New York City as "a pity party"?

Foot enters mouth again in his "Postmodern War Heroes" strip from March 11, when he portrays an imagined moment somewhere in the decades ahead, when veterans of the Afghanistan campaign are trading war stories. "That's my old buddy Joey from Queens, New York ... died in a helicopter crash," says one melancholy G.I. to another over beers. They then wistfully recall their other buddies, Ben, "who loved his whiskey" and whose helicopter "went down on the way to Afghanistan," and Brenda and Ken, who each fell out of helicopters. Aside from his typically inhuman coarseness toward the loved ones of those service members who died in accidents up until that point (is he implying that their grief is any less real or less justified because they didn't die at the hands of the enemy?), the strip really starts looking depraved when viewed after the combat deaths of eight U.S. soldiers during the Battle of Gardez. Of course, the strip is an implied jab at the lack of ground troop usage up until that point in the war, but he could have avoided his embarrassing shortsightedness had he thought ahead and realized that his premise might look ridiculous if just one U.S. service person subsequently died in combat.

Sketchy Facts

Rall's treatment of the facts is as sloppy as his logic. On Oct. 16, he says, "18 out of the 19 hijackers were Egyptian; 1 was Saudi." The hijackers, and their nationalities were first identified on Sept. 15. "Most came from Saudi Arabia," wrote Matt Kelley of the Associated Press. One can't help but think that a newspaper would have disabused Rall of many of his factual shortcomings.

He also insists, on Jan. 29, that "at least 6,000 people have vanished off the streets of the United States. Kidnapped by government agents." Putting aside Rall's tendency toward hyperbole in using Gestapo-like terms to describe the unconstitutional detention of hundreds, if not thousands of mostly innocent but illegal immigrants and visitors, his numbers are just plain wrong. It's hard to get an accurate number, because the Justice Department still refuses to release details, but most estimates -- including those from the New York Times -- put the number of detainees somewhere around 1,200, with most having been deported for immigration violations. Rall also says "they haven't been granted access to lawyers or allowed to call their families." That's another inaccuracy. Actually, the detainees are prevented from talking to the media, not attorneys or families. None of this is to downplay the seriousness of the detention of these nameless and faceless people. The handling of the detainees is both one of the most disturbing facts of the current conflict and a source of great embarrassment for the American criminal justice system. But by inflating the number of people affected and misrepresenting the conditions under which they're held, Rall only undermines the efforts to make the world more sympathetic their plight.

He uses the same deceptive technique in his efforts to deal with the issue of the detention of Afghan and Arab prisoners of war. Again, many of the actions by the Bush administration in the handling of these combatants are unquestionably illegal and unwise in their violation of Geneva Convention protocols; another area of the prosecution of the war Americans should be ashamed of. But Rall repeatedly not only insists that Vice President Dick Cheney (dubbed "Vice President Klaus Barbie," yuk, yuk) wants to torture prisoners (column, Jan. 29), but that it happens regularly in the detention centers in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (his strips from Jan. 28 and 31 repeat the motif of al-Qaeda captive as tortured victim). As he rightly points out, there have been repeated, substantiated charges of beatings by U.S. soldiers in the temporary Army detention center and of prisoner mistreatment by General Rashid Dostum at the prison in Shibergan, but no one is accusing the U.S. of state-sponsored torture at the centers. He offers no proof upon which to base such charges -- they are pure flights of fancy. There is a difference between the sort of mindless violence that accompanies war, such as the killing of German P.O.W.'s by American soldiers during World War II, and a state-sponsored program of torture. At least it's a difference plain to most everyone except Rall.

Bombing The People Out of the Stone Age

Perhaps Rall's worst feat of sophistry is his repeated insistence, in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that the war in Afghanistan has accomplished absolutely nothing. In fact, he argues, we've only made things worse for the Afghans. And it is here, in his repeated attempts to distort the facts related to the efficacy of the bombing campaign, that Rall's nihilism must be most strenuously resisted. War is a morally complex affair, and the propriety of a just war, as Robert Falk argues in The Nation, must constantly be evaluated according to the principles of proportionality, discrimination, humanity and necessity. There is evidence that the plight of the Afghan people has improved since American military involvement -- but Rall ignores it.

First, we'll examine Rall's evaluation of what the war in Afghanistan has accomplished. "We've lost this war," he declares in his dispatch from Dasht-E Qaleh, Afghanistan, published the week of Dec. 12. He goes on to claim that Afghanistan "has actually moved further away" from the goal of developing into a modern nation. But, as he makes clear near the end, the effort was doomed from the start. "And so we've lost this war, not because they're good or we're not, but because of who we are," he says before advocating a full withdrawal from Afghanistan. He uses Bush's State of the Union speech to refute claims of success in Afghanistan on Feb. 5. Titled "Everybody Must Get Stoned: A Kinder, Gentler Afghanistan," the column attempts to explain why all of Bush's claims of improved life in Afghanistan are lies. He says that, "in all the ways that matter," Afghan women are still captives in their own homes. Rall goes on to assert that "nothing has changed in Afghanistan," meaning that the justice practiced by the interim government differs little from the medieval sharia law practiced by the Taliban. In his Feb. 19 column, "Bush's Vietnam: An Afghan Quagmire Begins," he tells us why the course of the war has validated his suspicion that "the United States was in big trouble back in November." Apparently, the effect of all those "indiscriminately dropped bombs" has been a nation of Afghans who now believe that "we're the terrorists."

A bleak assessment indeed. Now let's look at what Rall leaves out.

First of all, he ignores the $4.5 billion in international aid to Afghanistan that wouldn't have been sent had the Taliban remained in power. The Ahmed Rashid books he cites ad nauseum should have taught him that the Taliban were known for pushing aid organizations out of the country for such "violations" as being Christian. The World Food Program reports that food aid is now successfully reaching 6.6 million people in Afghanistan. According to UNICEF, who, coincidentally, also voiced opposition to the bombing campaign at first, the international aid agency is now able to go forward with the "biggest logistical operation for many years" in Afghanistan. In an aid update from January, UNICEF workers immunized 572,000 children in Kabul during the first two weeks of 2002, "six times higher than the total immunization coverage in 2001." They also vaccinated over 700,000 children against measles during the first two months of 2002, in a country where, as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in the Feb. 1 New York Times (hard to miss, Ted), "virtually no one had been vaccinated against the disease in the previous 10 years." That alone will save the lives of at least 35,000 children each year. Kristof also quotes Heidi J. Larson of UNICEF saying that she expects maternal mortality rates in Afghanistan will halve as a result of improved health care over the next five years. That's another 112,000 children and 7,500 pregnant women saved each year. So, contrary to Rall's rhetoric, the lives of women in Afghanistan seem to be improving in at least some ways "that matter." Consider that more than 1.5 million schoolchildren have been enrolled in Afghan schools this year ... double the number of children in school last year. All of the girls, who the Taliban prevented from attending school, are going to school for the first time in their lives. It's safe to say, then, that not everyone in Afghanistan is fueled by a desire for revenge against the United States.

It is, as Christopher Hitchens has said, the first time in history a country has been bombed back out of the Stone Age.

Even a Stopped Clock ...

To be fair, I should deal with Rall's portrayal of the Bush administration. It's on the topic of Bush that Rall most often approaches something that could be described as resembling humor. His characterization of "Bush Deux" (my personal favorite, although Rall prefers the more Naderesque "Resident Bush") as a banana-republic dictator is obvious but effective. America should not forget how a presidential candidate and his network of cronies and friends seized power in the closest thing to a coup this country has ever experienced. Floridian voter rolls were purged of Democrats. Police blocked polling sites in some of the state's black areas and sent many voters home. Jews voted for Buchanan. Illegal overseas military ballots were rammed through with a patriotism plunger. And Antonin Scalia was riding shotgun in the getaway car. Bush ain't legit, and it's good and proper to get angry at that. Angry is what Rall does best, so Bush is what Rall does best. His gags on the Chimp-In-Chief can, on a good day, make one laugh. When he imagines Bush at his personal daily war briefing, we can see the stupid-George jokes coming from a mile away (Ha-ha! He called it the Southern Alliance!), but they still leave us satisfied. Of course, Rall doesn't buy into the empty-headed notion that wartime puts the president beyond criticism, so it's neither intellectually dishonest nor improper that he should pick on the spoiled rich kid. It makes you wish he would stick to ripping on him.

Rall's take on Enron, too, is accurate. He rejects the notion that the energy giant was an aberration, and argues that there's more of a systemic problem with the way business is conducted in America. Of course, that fits Rall's (as best as I can triangulate his particular philosophical persuasion) Chomskyite-on-crack worldview, but he must be given credit for having the courage to hew to common wisdom on the Enron scandal.

These strips give us a glimpse of the Rall that could be. One who is a little insightful, and a little funny. It's frustrating, because he is clearly talented, but too often blinded by his own preconceived ideological notions. He can't see the true nature of the world since Sept. 11 because he seems to only see the world before Sept. 11. The attacks have prompted many people to open their minds a little and consider points of view they hadn't entertained before. For some, that meant rethinking a lifetime of opposition to American military power. Rall seems to have had no such urges. His strip from Sept. 13 was a tired old litany, a la Noam Chomsky, of America's foreign-policy crimes. That's the same day he blamed American hubris for the collapse of the World Trade Center.

By picking on still-grieving widows and the honestly heroic men who run into fires and crumbling buildings to save people, he's gone beyond being a simple contrarian. He looks down on a country he sees as ignorant of the world and of its own crimes, but goes beyond reminding us of our imperfections. Seeing America -- warts and all -- is necessary. Seeing only America's warts is just stupid. But moreover, it means Rall's opinions -- and the strips and columns those opinions inform -- are fatally flawed. Factor in exaggeration, inaccuracy and outright lies, and what's left is an utterly worthless political cartoonist.

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