The terror bombings in Amman were horrendous, as all such events are meant to be, but it is worth wondering how they fit into the overall war on Islamic fascism and whether they are evidence (metrics) of success or failure in our efforts.
Among the Western liberal elites the war in Iraq is depicted as a failure, a Vietnam-like quagmire, which primarily serves to increase al Qaeda recruiting and is based on lies. The Bush administration's curious passivity in the face of such attacks has been disquieting and has served to abandon the theater to the opposition, which has lead to the "Bush lied" meme propagating throughout the LSM and eagerly embraced by the Democratic party.
Among those who support the war, Iraq is seen as just one theater of the global war on Islamic fascism. The outcome is uncertain but on the ground the situation offers grounds for optimism. Every step of the way, the political process has become more inclusive and the fledgling democracy more sturdy.
Essentially then, we have an anti-war side which believes Bush lied and there is no global war; they believe we should focus on the need for more integrated police action and less military action which only increases the size and proficiency of the enemy. On the other side are those who believe there is, indeed, a global war and it requires a mix of police action, plus the occasional requisite military action against rogue regimes.
In view of these two incompatible political positions, I would propose we start looking at events to see how they fit into the competing narratives, and will use the Amman attacks as a prototypical example of such an analysis.
The anti-war side would assign partial responsibility to the Iraq war for the attacks in Amman; this was actually asserted overtly by some journalists yesterday, but in any event is inherent in the idea that the war has increased terrorism. In this view, the Jihadists, lead by Zarqawi, learned their bomb making skills in Iraq. Bill Roggio remains one of the best sources for information from the Iraq theater and quotes Zarqawi:
Zarqawi has claimed credit for the Amman bombings, but even without this claim, the attacks bear the hallmarks of an al Qaeda strike: the target selection and locations, multiple suicide strikes, the timing of the attacks, the media impact. The reasons given for the Amman bombings are standard al Qaeda fare: essentially hatred for the entire civilized world.
These hotels were chosen because they became the favourite place for American and Israeli intelligence and other western European governments to carry out their invisible attacks which they call the war on terror... Egyptian, Palestinian Authority, Saudi and Jordanian spies also operated there to plot against the mujahideen (holy warriors) in Palestine and Iraq... The hotels are also a safe haven for the infidel Iraqi government to live and hold meetings after our fire has burned their Green Zone [in Baghdad]...
Obviously, Zarqawi agrees with those who suggest the war in Iraq was a mistake, though Bill convincingly makes the point that the attacks in Amman are signs of al Qaeda weakness rather than strength:
Zarqawi’s forces are taking a terrible beating at the border, and their need to remain relevant in the region drives these attacks. Make no mistake, Zarqawi is striking from a position of weakness, not strength.
Following Bill's description of the fighting in Iraq, it is clear we are winning militarily on the ground. Be that as it may, of necessity, the view of Iraq as isolated from a greater war on Islamic fascism suffers in this perspective, but can still be incorporated into the anti-war view. In this viewpoint, the primary determinative metric of success is body counts, with a specific hierarchy of American and Israeli deaths as more valuable than British and Australian, which are more valuable than other Europeans, which are more valuable than Iraqi Sunnis and so on.
The argument would be much stronger however, if there wasn't so much evidence accumulating that home grown, nurtured, and reared, Islamic fascists are endemic in almost every country in the world. There is no need to assume deep connections between al Qaeda, the rioters in France (and copy cats in Germany, Holland, Belgium), the beheaders of Christian school girls in Indonesia, the terror arrested in Australia, the 7/7 or 3/11 attacks in Europe to recognize the global nature of the information war being waged on the willing pages and screens of the LSM.
The unfortunate fact is that it does not require any particular special expertise to make a bomb and blow oneself up in a crowded venue. The recipes are available online, the ingredients are not terribly hard to find, and crowds are ubiquitous. The hardest part is to find someone willing to kill himself to murder infidels and on this measure, the bombing in Amman was a disaster. Athena at Terrorism Unveiled has comments from Jordanians outraged at Zarqawi's perfidy.
While some have been distressed that there has been so little past outcry from the Arab world when the victims of Islamic terror were Jews, Americans, Europeans, Hindus, Australians, et al, this should not surprise anyone. Most people are fairly parochial and fail to react to other people's problems until they become their own problems. One of the metrics by which to determine the success of our strategy in the war on Islamic terrorism is the extent to which the "Arab street" identifies the victims of al Qaeda inspired terror as either "them" or us and the extent to which they identify the greatest danger to themselves and their own as either the US military or al Qaeda terrorists. Once the great majority of relatively apolitical Muslims sees the victims of most terror being "them", we will have gained tremendous support in our war and the enemy will have been weakened. Therefore, the better we are at attracting enemy combatants to Iraq and the better our soldiers are at defending themselves, the more likely la Qaeda targets soft targets, which means Muslim innocents. As we succeed in Iraq, therefore, the unfortunate side effect of our success is that the immediate threat to us recedes (as it obviously has) and the American public, which relates to the war primarily through images on the TV distorted and presented by the LSM, sees the carnage in Iraq and the dead American soldiers ("us") without seeing the victims whose deaths have been rendered virtual rather than real by our success in forestalling attacks at home. This has always been a problem for America and is worsened by the shameless and irresponsible opportunism of the democrats and the LSM, compounded by the shamefully inept defense by the Bush administration of its policies.
It may be a harbinger of good news that the Bush administration seems to be finally recognizing the seriousness of their situation and has begun to respond. Alcibiades has a report on the beginnings of what we might hope will be a concerted campaign to redress the disinformation promulgated by the Mediacrats (the LameStreamMedia and their Democratic allies) and Eli Lake in The New York Sun today asks Joe Lieberman to speak out about the way his party is trying to drive the country over ac cliff for short term political gain. (It may be by subscription only so I will include part of his article):
Dear Senator Lieberman: By now it's apparent that the majority of your party has taken leave of its senses with regard to the war. It was bad enough that Senator Kerry courted the likes of Michael Moore to energize the base in last year's presidential election. But now it's as if the leaders of the Democratic Party have morphed into those marginal bedfellows it befriended in 2004.
The latest talking points are reviving those canards about a cabal deceiving the public and its representatives to fight an optional war. It must make you nauseous. Senator Reid has now made it a priority to pressure the intelligence committee to release a report on how the administration used the intelligence from the CIA that you know full well supported the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Senator Durbin is now saying the Justice Department ought to subpoena Ahmad Chalabi, a man you know well. Sadly, the party of Truman and Kennedy today looks like a gaggle of spoiled children pandering on about their pre-war gullibility. "We were lied to," so many Democrats now say.
As I pointed out before, if the Mediacrats succeed in convincing the country that Bush lied when they know it is not true, they will tie the hands of future administrations at a time when the risks can only escalate. A nightmare scenario would include a Democrat in the White House unable to use the military, even as a threat, because no one will accept any intelligence as "beyond a reasonable doubt", while Iran develops their bomb, the Saudi's follow with their (probably purchased form the Pakistanis), various al Qaeda cells, with the support of state security and military apparati in Iran, in a anarchistic and/or Islamicized Iraq, the Gaza strip, Somalia, and various other lovely neighborhoods...
If the Harry Reids and Teddy Kennedys of the world succeed in imprinting the "Bush lied"* meme in a majority of their countrymen, future terror assaults will likely be orders of magnitude worse than what we have seen so far. The upside will be that it will regain our attention; the downside will be all those dead innocents.
* The "Bush lied" meme already seems to have become entrenched among the liberal elites and no amount of facts seem able to shake their belief. I suppose it is easier to believe a simplistic idea that Bush lied than that we were perhaps wrong, or perhaps there is still WMD out there unaccounted for. Does anyone know where the terrorists, from Syria, got the WMD they were stopped from using in Amman last year which would have killed as many as 80,000 people? The attacks were stopped so I guess it never happened, down the sink hole of memory...
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