Cheney Wows Sept. 11 Commission By Drinking Glass Of Water While Bush Speaks

1:25:09 PM    comment []

Taking on Real Clear Politics

I mentioned recently that I started reading the website Real Clear Politics with some frequency, because it's a more measured conservative blog.  Know thine enemy.  There's too many things I disagree with to consistently reply to all of them, but there was a post yesterday that was, I think, quite important.   It began by defending Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Doctor Rantisi by saying that "anytime a terrorist dies it's a good day for America."

The post defines the other side's ("other side" is the best choice I can come up with; it's clear that the War on Terror is not partisan, since plenty of Dems use the same rhetoric as the GOP) position on fighting terrorism.  Given the gulf between the two sides on this, I thought it would be interesting to tackle this issues head on...

....we do not live in a static world. Every day we are either gaining ground or we are losing ground in the War on Terror.

When you strip away all of the speculation and mumbo-jumbo about this policy nuance or that programmatic detail there is a very real truth lying at the core: the actions our government takes and the actions other governments around the world take either make things easier for terrorists to operate or they makes things more difficult.

This is absolutely correct.  But how is it done?

There is an obvious partisan divide over what constitutes progress. Generally speaking, those on the left think that aggressive actions, but especially aggressive military actions (with the almost universally recognized exception of Afghanistan ) make the world "less safe."

This is entirely incorrect.  One simply cannot speak "generally" about "the left".  Opponents--for what it's worth--of the war on terror are opponents for a whole variety of reasons.  The number who just oppose all aggressive actions reflexively is awfully small--as a matter of fact I'm pretty sure it's just Noam Chomsky and my friend Brent.

I'd say that, generally speaking, those who oppose the Bush Administration approach to the war on terror oppose the notion that aggressive military actions should be the exclusive or nearly exclusive way that we approach terrorists and the like.  A more nuanced argument is that the war on terror, as currently practiced, is wildly inconsistent, and the benefits of the aggressive actions are consistently undermined by other policies that are at odds with our security.  To whit:

--Attacking Al Qaeda while refusing to do anything to reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels, which makes us need undemocratic regimes who will give us the oil we need

--Supporting "man of peace" Ariel Sharon while coddling the Saudi and Egyptian regimes, whose hideously oppressive policies fuel anger and frustration--the seeds of terrorism

--Attacking Iraq but failing to make sure that the experiment actually works by sending in insuffient troops and having no real plan

Etcetera, etcetera. 

It's like this:  no one believes we shouldn't do anything about terrorists, and only a few believe that some military action isn't necessary--just maybe not in Iraq.  But making the war on terror only about the tools of war without effectively utilizing the tools of diplomacy or generally altering energy policy or anything else means we get few benefits, while undercutting ourselves.  More on that below.

Finally, many of us on this side of the debate seriously chafe at the way that supporters of the GWOT attempt to shut down debate by refusing to look at the roots of terrorism.  This coincides with ad hominem attacks rather than substantive defenses of the position that we can best stop terrorism if we know why terrorists do what they do.  "Kill 'em All" is a Metallica album, not a policy.  In order to form a policy, we have to know what the policy should look like, and thus we need to know about the targets.  Know thine enemy, I say again, but this time not tongue-in-cheek.

The primary rationale of the "less safe" argument is that aggressive action "creates more terrorists." This claim is not only speculative but, even if true, impossible to quantify in any meaningful way.

Unlike the quantifiable policy of simply killing every terrorist. 

It's NOT speculative.  Everything from polls to the results in elections (South Korea, Spain) to reaction in the Arab media demonstrates that our overreliance on military tools to deal with terrorism is increasing hostility toward the United States.  That is WHY we are a target.

This is a very serious charge--the charge that the way we're approaching the war on terror is making more terrorists.  Dismissing it because it's hard to quantify and allegedly speculative is absolutely unacceptable.  Yet this is as good as it gets in this "debate".

Madrassas in the Arab world have been churning out radical Islamists for decades and there is simply no way to determine how many more would-be terrorists there are today as a result of actions taken in the War on Terror. Thus the "creates more terrorists" argument is more rhetorical than substantive, and probably isn't the best way of thinking about things.

This, of course, speaks to my earlier point about undermining ourselves; we complain about the madrassas, but not only continue to use enough oil that the Saudis can continue to fund them, but even tell the Saudis about our foreign policy plans before they're publicly known.

Beyond that, see above.  The inability to count the number of terrorists is NOT an answer.  It is not rhetorical to say that the failure to generate good will in the Islamic world is going to undercut our ability to "fight" terrorists.  Hostility generates terror.

Now let's go back to Rantisi for a moment. Did Rasisi's death make life for the rest of his fellow terrorists easier or more difficult? Again, the response from many on left is the theoretical assertion that Rantisi's assassination is counterproductive because it serves to inflame Arabs and "create more terrorists."

What's not theoretical, however, is the observation that as the leader of a militant terrorist organization, Rantisi's death makes it more difficult for Hamas to operate and decreases their ability to inflict terror. In both practical and symbolic terms, Rantisi's death is ground gained in the War on Terror.

Again, it's not any more theoretical than the claim that no one will emerge to do Rantisi's job just as well, or just as horrifically, as he did.  How is that not a theoretical claim?

I didn't write this to play a game of "pick on the conservative."  I hope, instead, that it's illustrative of what kind of differences there are between those who laud the Bush Administration for it's single-minded focus on the military side of the war on terror, and those of us who criticize that focus for making us all less safe.

1:23:27 PM    comment []