In light of this British car bomb terrorist plot can we all agree that the presence of British and American soldiers in Iraq does not, in fact, constitute a physical barrier against terrorists attacking western countries? You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence.
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Over Here, Over There
02 Jul 2007 10:31 am
Comments (36)
Didn't we learn that two years ago in Britain? Or three years ago in Madrid?
Time to send our police to Iraq. That'll show 'em.
Oh, schtop it. You're using logic and facts. We know that's not allowed.
Just because they can't stop all terrorist acts, don't mean they ain't stopping most of them. The 64 dollar question is how many there would have been without the War on Terror. So I admit this case is hard to make over Iraq. But look at recent the assassination of a former KGB agent in London. Of course the British government has a pretty good idea of where the assassins came from and who sent them but the Russians flatly refuse to extradite them. You can have all the policing you like, if the criminals have sanctuary and training over your borders the police are useless. That certainly applied in Afghanistan which is not exporting a lot of terrorism any more. It would apply pretty well to Pakistan I think. It may apply in Iraq but probably not. Policing ought to be the first priority but it can't be the only one. We need the military option.
On the other hand it does seem like most of the competent terrorists are "over there".
Yeah, but we know that for the Swaggering Boys in charge the military option is the only option.
We need the military option.
And we used the military option. It was the one almost 100% of the country supported. (Afghanistan)
Then, greedy Bush decided he'd smush things up a bit and elide them a little. Then, a little more. Then, well, it's hard to tell when to stop. The possibility of using prolonged military adventurism for domestic advantage just proved too hard to resist.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, conservatives made the (largely correct) argument that the right posture for the struggle against terrorists was one of war, not of law enforcement. We tried the law enforcement approach throughout the 1990s with only mediocre results* (pros: stopped Millenium bombers, didn't cost much; cons: didn't address root causes after Kenya and Cole attacks).
Now, in light of the ungoing debacle in Iraq, it has become fashionable for liberals to again argue that this was wrong-headed, and that we fundamentally face a law enforcement problem, not a warfighting problem. "You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence" and all that.
But its almost certainly the case that the best thing we've done to stop terrorist attacks in the last few years was sending the army into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime that was allowing a whole bunch of terrorists to plan and prepare in relative safety. That wasn't a "law enforcement" operation, it was a warfighting operation.
Now, that doesn't mean that ANY war, executed ANY way is still the optimal approach to dealing with terrorists. One can see the wisdom of treating our efforts with the gravity and aggressiveness of a war without endorcing military conflicts that don't actually have much to do with the terrorists who seem to like to bomb us so much. That is, the "war" approach, even if its the right approach, can still be bungled.
* Note: Lest this be interpretted as a jab at Bill Clinton I should point out that the approach to terrorism in the 1990s was largely signed off on by both parties.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 2, 2007 10:59 AM:"And we used the military option. It was the one almost 100% of the country supported. (Afghanistan)"
True but why did almost 100% of the country support it? I expect it was only because 9-11 was too fresh and the usual suspects were too intimidated to kick up the usual fuss. There is almost no argument that applies to Iraq that does not apply to Afghanistan with a bit of stretching.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 2, 2007 10:59 AM:"Then, greedy Bush decided he'd smush things up a bit and elide them a little. Then, a little more. Then, well, it's hard to tell when to stop. The possibility of using prolonged military adventurism for domestic advantage just proved too hard to resist."
I agree that having started smashing states it is hard to find where to stop but the rest of your post proves my point - the claim of domestic advantage is neither fair nor true. It is so unfair and untrue that I would assume it is a cover for another agenda. There is nothing wrong with the military option it is just that the "America is always Wrong" crowd will not support it in any but the most extreme circumstances and will rationalize their opposition. Because, after all, if one thing is true, it is that they did not want or expect prolonged fighting. They expected to be in quick and out quick.
Well, the popular trend these days to call this a law enforcement problem comes from the fact that liberals desperately need to defeat the whole 'war on terror' meme. So its understandable. Its also mostly true. Sure, Afghanistan. But not many governments will continue to be brazen enough to sponsor a terrorist group whose sole purpose is conducting terrorist attacks on western targets. It just isn't sound policy. The flip side of getting too carried away with the "its more than law-enforcement" line is Iraq. I'd say pick your poison, except that everyone supported the Afghan war so obviously the liberal approach doesn't lead to nearly as disastrous results. I don't count Palestinian efforts here. Israel... well, they're screwed, but that's a bed of at least partially their own making.
There is almost no argument that applies to Iraq that does not apply to Afghanistan with a bit of stretching.
Afghanistan had the guy who planned 9/11 and refused to give him up.
Iraq had... sand?
I agree that having started smashing states it is hard to find where to stop but the rest of your post proves my point - the claim of domestic advantage is neither fair nor true.
Unsupported assertions. Distortions of the source material your replying to. Disconnected sentences.
If, in the end, domestic advantage drained away, it wasn't always thus. He did get some tax cuts through and a couple of horror-show Supreme Court nominees to the bench.
"You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence."
Or in this case, you don't stop the terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence, but you luck out and their bombs don't go off properly.
I agree that having started smashing states it is hard to find where to stop but the rest of your post proves my point - the claim of domestic advantage is neither fair nor true. It is so unfair and untrue that I would assume it is a cover for another agenda. There is nothing wrong with the military option it is just that the "America is always Wrong" crowd will not support it in any but the most extreme circumstances and will rationalize their opposition. Because, after all, if one thing is true, it is that they did not want or expect prolonged fighting. They expected to be in quick and out quick.
My experience is that commenters on this blog prefer to see specific examples and logical reasoning. So, HeiGou, maybe you could cite by name one member of the "America Is Always Wrong" crowd and we'll take it from there.
Or in this case, you don't stop the terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence, but you luck out and their bombs don't go off properly.
Well, right. But we didn't stop these attacks by invading Iraq either. And I doubt there's any other country we could have invaded to stop them, either.
My favorite dumb argument is "fight them over there so you won't have to fight them here".
Dumb for 2 clear reasons.
First is what Matt points out. Fighting them over there is not a barrier to their coming here.
Second is the notion that giving you enemy a choice of where to fight you is a good strategy. I doubt you'll find that in Clausewitz. Starting a war in Iraq at best gave Al Qaeda a choice of fighting there or not fighting there, since they were not there to begin with.
My favorite dumb argument is "fight them over there so you won't have to fight them here".
Dumb for 2 clear reasons.
First is what Matt points out. Fighting them over there is not a barrier to their coming here.
Second is the notion that giving you enemy a choice of where to fight you is a good strategy. I doubt you'll find that in Clausewitz. Starting a war in Iraq at best gave Al Qaeda a choice of fighting there or not fighting there, since they were not there to begin with.
There is almost no argument that applies to Iraq that does not apply to Afghanistan with a bit of stretching.
Well, except for the whole part where Afghanistan harbored terrorists who launched a devastating attack on the United States, and Iraq didn't.
Posted by Steve | July 2, 2007 11:15 AM:"Afghanistan had the guy who planned 9/11 and refused to give him up. Iraq had... sand?"
Or perhaps "Iraq was really about oil and so the US invented some intelligence justifying war and so was Afghanistan". There is no shortage of people who think that the CIA was behind 9-11 and that Afghanistan was invaded over oil pipelines. No matter how many times you tell them they will not accept that Karzai never worked for Unical.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 2, 2007 11:22 AM:"Unsupported assertions. Distortions of the source material your replying to. Disconnected sentences."
Pot. Kettle. Black. I would love to see some evidence of your domestic advantage claims.
Posted by Steve | July 2, 2007 11:40 AM :"Well, right. But we didn't stop these attacks by invading Iraq either. And I doubt there's any other country we could have invaded to stop them, either."
In the short term perhaps. But if Iraq had worked out well and a few more Arab democracies had been created, we would be well down the road to doing something about it. The Neo-Con plans were utterly unrealistic and utopian, but they did have a plan of sorts for ending terrorism which is more than anyone else does.
Posted by jk | July 2, 2007 12:01 PM:"Fighting them over there is not a barrier to their coming here."
Yes but they are more likely to save money and kill American solders in Iraq than civilians in America. Of course a lot more of them can afford Iraq rather than America.
Posted by jk | July 2, 2007 12:01 PM:"Second is the notion that giving you enemy a choice of where to fight you is a good strategy. I doubt you'll find that in Clausewitz. Starting a war in Iraq at best gave Al Qaeda a choice of fighting there or not fighting there, since they were not there to begin with."
Hindsight is always 20-20. However although you may not find that in Clauswitz, if you look at Callwell's Small Wars, a classic in the counter insurgency genre, he says that you have to bring people to battle. You can do that by seizing something they value (like their food or their cows or their villages). The insurgents value Iraq a lot more than America. They will come out and fight in Iraq in a way they would not elsewhere. Of course, if you took that logic to its extreme, you'd seize Mecca and then every radical in the world would be on the next flight to Jedda. They would have to come out in the open and fight.
Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 2, 2007 12:05 PM:"Well, except for the whole part where Afghanistan harbored terrorists who launched a devastating attack on the United States, and Iraq didn't."
I can trivially find you people who think that neither Afghanistan nor Iraq ever harbored terrorists who launched devastating attacks on the US.
And for the record, while I admit it is not a significant point, Iraq was sheltering known terrorists who were involved in attacks on US nationals like Leon Klinghoffer, which I am sure was pretty devastating to those who knew him.
"You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence."
It would seem that you encourage terrorist attacks with lefty multicultural immigration and non-assimilation policies. How many British lefties thought it was great to welcome so many Muslims to Britain and encourage them to keep their own separate culture, no matter how nihilistic, violent, and backward? What a fucking disaster.
The Neo-Con plans were utterly unrealistic and utopian, but they did have a plan of sorts for ending terrorism which is more than anyone else does.
I'm just going to let this line stand as-is, as a testament to the depth of HeiGou's views. No response necessary.
But if Iraq had worked out well [...]
Still thinking about that ol' pony, huh?
The Neo-Con plans were utterly unrealistic and utopian, but they did have a plan of sorts for ending terrorism which is more than anyone else does.
Of sorts. Of utterly unrealistic and utopian sorts, as you yourself say. How much credit do you give the old Soviet Communists for exactly that? Not much more than I do, I suspect.
And what if we'd spent, oh, a tenth of what we've now pissed into the sand in Iraq on actually building up Afghanistan and making it prosperous? The jihadi recruitment surge we've seen over the past few years would have been a tough sell. A lot of us said as much at the time. You might say we had plans, of sorts.
Of sorts neither unrealistic nor utopian (i.e., the Marshall Plan is actual, recorded, history), they just weren't on the neocon agenda, to all of our great misfortune.
-F.
"But if Iraq had worked out well and a few more Arab democracies had been created, we would be well down the road to doing something about it. The Neo-Con plans were utterly unrealistic and utopian, but they did have a plan of sorts for ending terrorism which is more than anyone else does." -Posted by HeiGou
You may substitute "magical incantations" for "Iraq" in the above without altering its merit as an argument.
There is one way in which "fighting them over there" keeps us safe. As long as we have troops and allies there, it will be our allies who are attacked at home, not us. Attacking us would generate sympathy for us. Attacking our allies makes the people of those nations resent the US.
It's a little rich to read lefties mock the utopianism of the neocons about Iraq, when this foolishness was based largely on lefty ideas like multiculturalism and egalitarianism. Remember all of Bush's blather about how Arabs longed for freedom, how talented Iraqis were, etc.? As Sailer pointed out: PC Thinking = Disaster, This Time In Iraq
Wow, I'm kind of awed by Harry's "peace through racist nationalism" proposition. I think he could be onto some sort of final solution to these problems.
Seriously, Bravo!
I don't think Harry understands the history of how all these Muslim populations found their way into the British Empire, does he?
I would love to see some evidence of your domestic advantage claims.
You mean other than the timing of the war, the demonization of opponents, and the results?
Does it matter to anyone that the chaos in Iraq has been a gold mine for al Qaeda in terms of both recruiting and fundraising through criminal activity? Or that bin Laden himself wrote that he was pleased about the war in a letter to an operative in Iraq?
A rogue state like Afghanistan can indeed be a pretty good friend to terrorists. But a terrorist's best friend would seem to be a failed state with a population that hates the U.S.
At any rate, the justification behind the war in Afghanistan was not to start some generic ruckus to divert international terrorist activity to a defined location. It was to, you know, achieve an ACTUAL strategic objective by knocking out a state that ACTUALLY supported al Qaeda. But yes, Iraq was exactly the same because blargle boom norg multiculturalism teh left.
These aren't foreign terrorists. These are all home grown British citizens, 3 of them so far are Doctors. So this says a lot more about the system of delusional multiculturalism in the UK than anything else.
Dave: kindly distinguish between what you just said, on the one hand, and "I hate wogs!" on the other.
-F.
Following Up Dave and Fingal's reply to Dave:
If they want to re-fight the Crusades, why won't anyone actually SAY that? If ALL Muslims are murderous thugs -- simply because Islam breeds murderous thugs -- why are we dying to save a few in Iraq?
Seems to me we've got a case of the contradictions.
Posted by Steve | July 2, 2007 12:27 PM
:"I'm just going to let this line stand as-is, as a testament to the depth of HeiGou's views. No response necessary."
Indeed. And yet what was the alternative to the Neo-Cons absurd utopian optimism? It seems that the line around here is that we should just take a few hundred casualties a year from terrorism. That we need to manage and accept terrorism. I don't think that sort of defeatism is a good idea nor do I think most voters will accept it either. Something has to be done. The Neo-Cons had some ideas. They have not worked out but the only other alternatives, doing nothing more or less, are worse. In the 80s everyone said we had to learn to live with street crime. Well no we did not. I don't see terrorism is any different.
Posted by Fingal | July 2, 2007 12:31 PM:"How much credit do you give the old Soviet Communists for exactly that? Not much more than I do, I suspect."
Well I happen to think that you cannot understand Communists without accepting that the majority, especially the early ones, were motivated by a desire to make the world a better place. A murder a lot of people along the way. The Neo-Cons are mostly former Marxists of one sort or another and I don't think the basic mentality has changed that much.
Posted by Fingal | July 2, 2007 12:31 PM:"And what if we'd spent, oh, a tenth of what we've now pissed into the sand in Iraq on actually building up Afghanistan and making it prosperous?"
Who knows? It may well be the case that it is the presence of American soldiers that makes things worse and so the fewer soldiers and the little money in Afghanistan works better than the many and the much in Iraq - it certainly forces the locals to be more self-reliant and presumably means there is less corruption and looting. But who knows? The West has so little experience of such pathological societies.
Posted by Fingal | July 2, 2007 12:31 PM:"The jihadi recruitment surge we've seen over the past few years would have been a tough sell. A lot of us said as much at the time. You might say we had plans, of sorts."
I see no evidence of any jihadi recruitment surge. Indeed the brutality of al-Qaeda in Iraq has done the remarkable - it has brought Arabs out on the street to protest against terrorism. Not when the Jihadis kill us, unfortunately, but when they kill Shia the Shia is Bahrain protest, when they kill Sunnis in Jordan, the Sunnis in Jordan protest. It is a start. You can see the collapse in CAIR's membership as a sign that Muslims are deserting the Jihadis and their fellow travelers. Even Britain's MCB is moderating.
As for the plan, I see no evidence anyone had any plan apart from the Bushies and the Chomskyites if I can use those two phrases. The former's plans were dumb. The latter's evil and I have no doubt that if not for Iraq, they would be protesting Afghanistan.
Posted by DMonteith | July 2, 2007 12:56 PM:"Wow, I'm kind of awed by Harry's "peace through racist nationalism" proposition. I think he could be onto some sort of final solution to these problems."
Although Iraq has been very interesting from precisely that point of view. The conservatives - the genuine paleo-Cons - always said that culture is important and that the Arabs or Muslims or people in the Third World generally, were not yet ready for democracy (with the usual sub-text that they needed a firm White hand at the levers of government like in the good old days). The Neo-Cons were, well, former Leftists by and large. They bought the Enlightenment Liberal line that democracy and human rights were the universal rightful aspirations of all humanity. The Left, especially in Europe, has slowly come around to rejecting that point of view and adopting an open endorsement of soft-Stalinism - Saddam was better than democracy because he kept the violence down through terror and brought about modernism such as rights for women. So it is ironic that Patrick Buchanan and Noam Chomksy are more or less on the same page - no democracy for Arabs.
Posted by Steve | July 2, 2007 1:17 PM:"I don't think Harry understands the history of how all these Muslim populations found their way into the British Empire, does he?"
In the case of Iraq, a League of Nations mandate. How do you think they came to be part of the British Empire?
Posted by Jake H. | July 2, 2007 1:44 PM:"Or that bin Laden himself wrote that he was pleased about the war in a letter to an operative in Iraq?"
Actually Osama wrote to Zarqawi and hold him to be less violent and aggressive because it was hurting the cause across the Muslim world. I don't see much evidence that Iraq is helping the Jihadis at all. Why do you think it is?
Posted by Dave | July 2, 2007 3:20 PM:"These aren't foreign terrorists. These are all home grown British citizens, 3 of them so far are Doctors. So this says a lot more about the system of delusional multiculturalism in the UK than anything else."
Actually all arrested so far are said to be of Middle Eastern origin. The two named are Iraqi and Jordanian respectively.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6260722.stm
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 2, 2007 4:14 PM:"If they want to re-fight the Crusades, why won't anyone actually SAY that?"
Well Al-Qaeda does. Jihad means the same as Crusade.
Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 2, 2007 4:14 PM:"If ALL Muslims are murderous thugs -- simply because Islam breeds murderous thugs -- why are we dying to save a few in Iraq?"
That is an interesting question. It is clear that most Muslims are not murderous thugs, but it is also clear that most of them are not totally intolerant of murderous thugs - the Muslims of Europe in particular are not exactly rushing to do anything other than release hang-wringing press releases. But it does not follow that whatever they are now is their destiny forever. I think that democracy would change the totalitarian culture of the Middle East and change Islam profoundly.
Comments closed July 16, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Oh Matt, why must you embolden our enemies?
Posted by DMonteith | July 2, 2007 10:39 AM