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05/12/2004

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Oscar

Nice post. Particularly the point about showing your hand.

On the practical level, though, this may not have actually happened. There are several places in the ME that would be in a world of hurt if we suddenly sicced the Navy on them, and the Navy isn't doing much right now. The Air Force is also underutilised at the moment. What we have done is show the limit of our invasion-leading-to-nation-building potential, which certainly weakens the Pearle/Frum approach.

If enough people in this country get a chance to see what happened Nick Berg, there might be a constituency to use some of our unused power in other places than Iraq. The "Let's waste Mecca" brigade could get it done without raising a sweat, for example.

I am beginning to think that this is not a war at all: it is a game of chicken (shades of Thomas Schelling - one of my favorite writers back in the early 60's). Or to cite a rather different writer (Anthony Burgess): this struggle will only be ended by that "good old ultraviolence" when we "let that korova flow" and flow and flow. RAther deressing, what?

Oscar

OOPS, second last word should be: depressing

Kingdaddy

Yes and no. Unless you're the most extreme form of pacifist, you have to accept that defeating terrorists means using nasty, violent means. That's not the same as granting carte blanche to do anything, however. And we don't need to match atrocity with atrocity to win--quite the opposite.

I'm for the pursuit of al Qaeda to the ends of the earth, so that every terrorist in that organization is either in a prison or in the grave. However, the blunderbuss approach--using conventional forces to raze Fallujah, for example--is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Obviously, we're not fighting al Qaeda in Fallujah, we're fighting someone else. And the siege of Fallujah was shockingly destructive, killing innocent bystanders so that we could "prove" that no one disses the US and gets away with it. How exactly is that supposed to defeat the Army of the Mahdi, let alone al Qaeda?

I'm for what the Israelis did with the PLO, starting in the 70s. Among other measures, the Israelis assigned hit teams to track down and kill the Black September terrorists who slaughtered the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. As the excellent book Vengeance shows, even as careful as they were, the Israelis did make mistakes (killing a waiter innocent of being a PLO operative, for example). Certainly, some people will object to even that innocent person's death as being an unacceptable cost. However, if we really want to "get" al Qaeda, it's going to take an effort like Israel's.

Or what we were trying to do with FD/TRODPINT before 2001, or Task Force 121 afterwards.

Oscar

Well, I think you and I see the root causes differently. I think that the thing that needs change is Islam. Until certain interpretations become totally unacceptable, Islam is a time bomb endangering every none Muslim on the planet. The problems are two:
1. The denigration of other religions
2. The unity of religion and politics

Fortunately, Chrisitianity got through the one period when both held for it, and there was always "render unto Caesar" to help out.

Thus, for me, "the pursuit of al Qaeda to the ends of the earth" is insufficient. I wish we could try Sharon's wall on the Islamic world: as been suggested elsewhere on the blogosphere, this would force the Muslims to either learn to live with each other (historically no easy task) or will kill off so many of them that the remainder might finally give up in exhaustion (sort of like Lebanon). Of course, this is fantasy, so that is why I asked the rhetorical question you were begging for in a previous post.

I await your answer with interest, as I expect some ideas that hadn't occurred to me.

ff14rmt

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