Khizr Khan and The Triumph of Democratic Militarism

TED RALL

Against the wishes of her New York Democratic constituents, Hillary Clinton voted with Senate Republicans to invade Iraq. (It was a pivotal vote. Without Democratic support, George W. Bush’s request for this war of aggression would have failed.)

Humayun Khan, 27, was an army captain who got killed during that invasion.

Khizr Khan berating Trump. (Screen capture, GP)

Khizr Khan berating Trump and whitewashing the most vicious militarism in modern times. (Screen capture, GP)

Eight years later, the dead soldier’s parents appeared at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — not to protest, but in order to endorse one of the politicians responsible for his death: Hillary Clinton.

Even more strangely, Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump is the one who is in political trouble – not because Trump sent Khan to war, but because Trump committed a relatively minor slight, especially compared to the numerous outrageous utterances to his name. Trump didn’t denigrate the dead Humayun Khan. Nor did he directly insult his parents. Lamely trying to score a feminist point concerning radical Islam, Trump insinuated that Mr. Khan didn’t allow Mrs. Khan to address the crowd because as a Muslim, he doesn’t respect women.

Let us stipulate that no one should impugn the courage of the war dead. (Not that anyone did here.) Let us further concede that Donald Trump is a remarkably tactless individual. Those things said, the Khan controversy is yet another spectacular example of the media distracting us with a relatively minor point in order to make a much bigger issue go away.

A week ago corporate media gatekeepers managed to transform the Democratic National Committee internal emails released by WikiLeaks from what it really was – scandalous proof that Bernie Sanders and his supporters were right when they said the Democratic leadership was biased and had rigged the primaries against them, and that the system is corrupt – into a trivial side issue over who might be responsible for hiking the DNC computers. Who cares if it was Russia? It’s the content that matters, not that it was ever seriously discussed.

Now here we go again.

Hillary’s vote for an illegal war of choice that was sold with lies, was a major contributing factor to the death of Captain Khan, thousands of his comrades, and over a million Iraqis. Iraq should be a major issue in this campaign — against her.

Instead, it’s being used by his parents and the Democratic Party to bait Donald Trump into a retro-post-9/11 “Support Our Troops” militaristic trap. Khan, you see, was “defending his country.” (How anyone can say U.S. soldiers in Iraq, part of an invasion force thousands of miles away where no one threatens the United States, are “defending” the U.S. remains a long-running linguistic mystery.)

“Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son ‘the best of America,’” Khizr Khan told the convention. Unfortunately, the moniker can’t apply to once-and-possible-future-first-daughter Chelsea Clinton, who never considered a military career before collecting $600,000 a year from NBC News for essentially a no-show job. But anyway…

“If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America,” Khizr Khan continued. The cognitive dissonance makes my head spin. Obviously, Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims is racist and disgusting. Ironically, however, it would have saved at least one life. If it was up to Donald Trump, the Khans would still be in the United Arab Emirates. Humayan would still be alive. As would any Iraqis he killed.

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SIDEBAR
The Khans’ appearance on the Dems’ political circus has apparently detonated similar critical reactions on both poles of the political spectrum. Read below what a certifiable rightwinger, a former NY Post bureau chief and currently with the Moonies’ Washington Times, has to say about Khan pere and his suspect role ∏robably as a patsy—in the Clinton campaign. Parts of his analysis are quite incisive and true. Unfortunately, Hurt mars his essay by wrapping his denunciation in the super chauvinist garbage that characterizes rightwing arguments. Apparently for Charles Hurt imperialist wars are alright and those who fight them are automatically heroes defending us all, “dying to defend their country”, instead of being witting or clueless pawns carrying out the criminal designs of an abjectly unpatriotic global plutocracy. It is sobering and extremely depressing that most parties in this sordid affair—from the Clinton hacks who enlisted the benighted Khan, to the Trumpian rightwing critics—are complicit in using the sublanguage of half-truths, the most dangerous and insidious of all falsehoods.—PG

How the Dems used a naive believer in imperialist goodness. Click here.

Khizr Khan was tricked into smearing Donald Trump

By Charles Hurt, contributor to The Hill

Khizr Khan is a fine American and the father of a true American patriot. But now he is also everything that is wrong with American politics today. It is not entirely his fault, though he has only himself to blame for allowing his dead son to be used for the most hideous of purposes and dragged through the gutter of nasty and dishonest partisan politics.

Khan and his wife took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia last week to deliver an impassioned rebuke of Donald J.Trump that was universally celebrated by the media. Even Republican politicos swooned at the gambit. The Clinton campaign trotted out the Muslim couple because their son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed by a car bomb in 2004 while guarding a base in Iraq.

“If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America,” said Khan, sliding easily into the political tradition of lying and distorting the position of one’s opponent. “Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims,” he went on. “He disrespects other minorities, women, judges, even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls and ban us from this country.”

Despite all efforts by the media to distort Trump’s position about “banning” Muslims, he has made perfectly clear time and again that he does not want to ban all Muslims. He wants to simply perform thorough and complete background checks on all immigrants coming from countries presently in the grips of violent Islamic terrorism. Yes, that means if you are a Muslim who wants to immigrate from Syria or Afghanistan, you are going to get a lot more scrutiny than if you are a Jew trying to immigrate from Canada. (Hurt in this follows the conventional wisdom of thinking anyone can come to America, as there are no filters or only weak filters. He is obviously quite ignorant about the existing vetting process.—Eds). That is most unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as innocents getting slaughtered by 10th Century savages killing in the name of Allah.

Anyway, this higher scrutiny should be no obstacle for the likes of Khizr Khan and his family, except for the additional hassle. So, why would Khizr Khan choose to insert himself into politics and demean his son’s sacrifice by lying at a political convention on national television? The answer is simple: He allowed himself to be tricked into it. And the Clinton campaign was all too eager to take advantage of him and his family and Capt. Khan and use them for their own political partisan purposes.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself how exactly the Clinton campaign arrived at the decision to trot out the Khan family in the middle of their highly-choreographed, exhaustively produced convention? Were they just looking to give voice to the parents of a soldier? That would be a first. Did they want parents of anyone who had died abroad in the defense of their country? Gee, why not pick the parents of one of the fallen warriors who died defending the U.S. consulate in Benghazi? Oh, that’s right. They would have called Hillary Clinton a liar. Can’t have that. No. Politicians like Hillary Clinton do not see people like Capt. Humayun Khan as a soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice on a foreign battlefield in defense of his country. Politicians like Hillary Clinton see him only a demographic, a dispensable political pawn to be scooted around an electoral map, the way generals used to move armies across giant maps of the lands they were invading. But instead of liberating Europe from evil fascists, politicians like Hillary Clinton use their long, worn croupier rakes to move their pawns about with the singular goal of advancing their own personal political careers.

To her, Capt. Khan is not a just soldier who died defending his country in a foreign land. First and foremost, to her, he is a Muslim of Pakistani heritage and therefore is a perfect political pawn for just the right situation. For just about every American alive, Capt. Khan is an inspiring and unifying figure. To Hillary Clinton, he is a tool to be used to divide people. In her false promise of unifying America, she creates a national political Babylon. Her avaricious greed for more and more power knows no bounds. It is an open secret in Washington that politics is the last bastion of rampant racial profiling. Both parties do it, but Democrats have taken it to a whole new scientific level. Politicians like Hillary Clinton slice and dice people into racial and gender groups. Then they toot on all their little “dog whistles” to send all their little demographic pawns scurrying in various directions. That is how you wind up with Khizr Khan standing on stage beside his head-scarved wife, waving around the U.S. Constitution and distorting Donald Trump’s position on keeping radical Islamic terrorism at bay.

Perhaps a better testimony from Khizr Khan would have been for him to talk about how Hillary Clinton was in the U.S. Senate when she voted to invade Iraq. Years later, after that position became politically unpopular, she changed her mind and joined new political forces to vacate all the land across Iraq that so many great American patriots like Capt. Humayun Khan had died for. It was her vote that sent Capt. Khan to his death. And then it was her decisions later to render that sacrifice worthless. Try sticking that into your dog whistle and blowing it.

Hurt writes the "Nuclear Option" column for The Washington Times. A former D.C. bureau chief for the New York Post, he has covered the White House, Congress and presidential campaigns since 2001. Follow him on Twitter @charleshurt.

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“Let me ask you: Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?” asked Khizr, who is originally from Pakistan. “I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law.” A good question. While we’re at it, however, where does it say in the U.S. Constitution that the president can send troops overseas for years at a time without a formal congressional declaration of war? Where does it say that the United States can attack foreign countries that have done it no harm and have never threatened it?

As you’d expect Trump, he of little impulse control, has handled this about as poorly as possible. Asked about Khizr Khan’s remark that Trump hasn’t made any sacrifices, he idiotically attempted to compare his business dealings with the death of a son. Still, you have to grudgingly admire Trump for fighting back against a guy you are officially not allowed to say anything mean about.

It has been widely remarked, always approvingly, that this year’s Democrats have successfully appropriated images of patriotism and “optimism” – scare quotes because this is not the kind of actual optimism in which you think things are going to actually get better, but the bizarro variety in which you accept that things will really never get better so you’d might as well accept the status quo – from the Republicans. This is part of Hillary Clinton’s strategy of taking liberal Democrats for granted while trying to seduce Republicans away from Trump.

The Khan episode marks a high water mark for post-9/11 knee-jerk militarism.

Even the “liberal” party whose sitting incumbent two-term president captured the White House by running against the Iraq war demands that everyone fall to their knees in order to pay homage to the “good” Muslims — those willing to go to the Middle East to kill bad ones.

Next time you see a panel of experts discussing a foreign crisis, pay attention: does anyone argue against intervention? No. The debate is always between going in light and going in hard: bombs, or “boots on the ground.” Not getting involved is never an option. As long as this militaristic approach to the world continues, the United States will never have enough money to take care of its problems here at home, and it will always be hated around the world.

Most Americans believe the Iraq war was a mistake. Who speaks for us? No one in the media. And no one in mainstream politics.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ted Rall, syndicated writer and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is the author of the book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower.

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