Does Foxworthy Know As Much as a Fifth Grader?

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy was talking the other night on one of the cable news channels about why he supports the Iraq occupation. Now just to back up for a moment, Foxworthy is best known for his hilarious “You know you’re a redneck…” routine. More recently he’s hosted a quiz show where adult contestants try to answer questions from a fifth grade examination. If the contestant get’s it wrong, he or she has to face the camera and accept the humiliation of admitting, “I am not smarter than a fifth grader.”

Let’s get back to the news interview. Foxworthy said he supports the occupation in Iraq because, “If we don’t fight terrorism there we will have to fight it here.”

He’s not the only one saying this. You hear it all the time from GOP presidential candidate John McCain and no doubt you’ll hear it here in Georgia from Senator Saxby Chambliss and Congressman Tom Price. And it does make a great sound bite—short and emotional. After all, wouldn’t you want the danger zone to be across an ocean rather than up the block?

But does it make sense? Let’s think about it.

The statement “If we don’t fight terrorism in Iraq we will have to fight it here” implies certain assumptions.

The first is that all the terrorists are occupied in Iraq and they aren’t available for assignment in America. But this seems rather at odds with what we hear on the news and from the rightwing politicians. According to them, al Qaeda today is operating all over the world— like Iraq, Darfur, the Sudan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Algeria, and even Northern Ireland.
Actually, according to CIA testimony these groups are “al Qaeda-like” bands. (Maybe al-Qaeda is a franchise like McDonald’s or Starbucks. Only bigger.)

You would think with all these terrorists under one control they could spare a few to send to the United States. After all, 9/11 only involved something like 19 operatives, hardly a large army.
Next, the statement suggests that the strategists at al Qaeda headquarters are so involved with Iraq that they don’t have the planning resources to deal with America. Again, if they can command operatives in so many different countries, they certainly could coordinate one more attack.

And finally, the sound bite implies that all their financial resources are tied up in Iraq. This hardly seems probable. According to news reports at the time, 9/11 was financed by wealthy Kuwaiti oil sheiks. The cost was about a million dollars, pocket change for these guys. And now with crude oil prices up over $100 a barrel it doesn’t seems hard to imagine it would be difficult to find some Persian Gulf oil-rich Muslim fanatic eager to lay down a million dollars or two for another attack on America.

The reality is we’re not confronting al Qaeda or any international terrorist movement in Iraq. We are dealing with warlords who are fighting a religious war that has gone on for centuries. The only thing they can agree on is they all want the U.S. out. Yes, there are some foreign operatives in Iraq. These are mostly mercenaries from places like Kazakhstan or religious fanatics from Saudi Arabia. These are under the control of the local Shiite and Sunni militias.
So what this all amounts to is that the counter insurgency in Iraq has no real bearing on the terrorist threat in the United States.

This really isn’t hard to figure out—any school child could do it. This leads us to the proposal that when defenders of the Iraq war and occupation, like McCain, Saxby, Price and Foxworthy, use the sound bite “If we don’t fight terrorism in Iraq we will have to fight it here in America,” voters should demand that each face the camera and humbly admit, “I am not smarter than a fifth grader!”

Copyright 2008 Paul M. Troop. All rights reserved.

Paul M. Troop is a retired political and business reporter and editor now living in Johns Creek. In addition to working for such newspapers as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, his articles have been distributed worldwide by such news agencies as Reuters and the NANA syndicate.