I continue to hear, on a regular basis, the rubric that underpins much of the opposition to the Iraq War. The suggestion is that the war has always been counter-productive because by invading Iraq we have been creating more terrorists than we have been killing. The corollary is that we should have been, and certainly now should be, more directed toward diplomacy than force.
There are some obvious problems with this formulation and some not so obvious problems.
The obvious problem is that no one has yet been able to come up with a way to measure the production of terrorists pre and post Iraq; furthermore, no one has any way to measure the effect of the war on over-all production of terrorists. I would suggest that even if we grant that the war has created more terrorist, which is likely, that does not mean that not going into Iraq would have had a different outcome on the production of terrorists. Furthermore, I would suggest that it is not the production of the average, low level terrorists that is the major problem; the key issue is the production of skilled, high level terrorists, and here a good argument can be made that the terrorists leadership cadres have been degraded by the war. Again, though, there is no metric by which one can measure these things so it comes down to a matter of opinion.
At this point, however, the question is moot. We are in Iraq and the question has evolved: Will staying in Iraq make us safer or not?
Here's where it gets interesting, and by "interesting" I mean vitally important.
Richard Holbrooke has an piece in the New York Sun today which suggest that the Bush administration's Diplomatic failures have been instrumental in bogging us down in Iraq and putting Israel at risk in Lebanon. He starts his piece with a litany of failures and dangers:
Two full-blown crises, in Lebanon and Iraq, are merging into a single emergency. A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay. Turkey is talking openly of invading northern Iraq to deal with Kurdish terrorists based there. Syria could easily get pulled into the war in southern Lebanon. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are under pressure from jihadists to support Hezbollah, even though the governments in Cairo and Riyadh hate that organization. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of giving shelter to Al Qaeda and the Taliban; there is constant fighting on both sides of that border. NATO's own war in Afghanistan is not going well. India talks of taking punitive action against Pakistan for allegedly being behind the Bombay bombings. Uzbekistan is a repressive dictatorship with a growing Islamic resistance.
The only beneficiaries of this chaos are Iran, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and the Iraqi Shiite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, who last week held the largest anti-American, anti-Israel demonstration in the world in the very heart of Baghdad, even as 6,000 additional American troops were rushing into the city to "prevent" a civil war that has already begun.
His prescriptions are telling, and are likely to be the Democratic policy prescriptions for November:
President Bush owes it to the nation, and especially the troops who risk their lives every day, to reexamine his policies. For starters, he should redeploy some American troops into the safer northern areas of Iraq to serve as a buffer between the increasingly agitated Turks and the restive, independence-minded Kurds. Given the new situation, such a redeployment to Kurdish areas and a phased drawdown elsewhere — with no final decision yet as to a full withdrawal from Iraq — is fully justified. At the same time, we should send more troops to Afghanistan, where the situation has deteriorated even as the Pentagon is reducing American troop levels — which is read in the region as a sign of declining American interest in Afghanistan.
On the diplomatic front, America cannot abandon the field to other nations (not even France!) or the United Nations. Every secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright negotiated with Syria, including those Republican icons George Shultz and James Baker.
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The same is true of talks with Iran, although these would be more difficult. Why has the world's leading nation stood aside for over five years and allowed the international dialogue with Tehran to be conducted by Europeans, the Chinese and the United Nations? And why has that dialogue been restricted to the nuclear issue — vitally important, to be sure, but not as urgent at this moment as Iran's sponsorship and arming of Hezbollah and its support of actions against American forces in Iraq?
Containing the violence must be Washington's first priority. Finding a stable and secure solution that protects Israel must follow. Then must come the unwinding of America's disastrous entanglement in Iraq in a manner that is not a complete humiliation and does not lead to even greater turmoil. All of this will take sustained high-level diplomacy — precisely what the American administration has avoided in the Middle East. Washington has, or at least used to have, leverage over the more moderate Arab states; it should use it again, in the closest consultation with and on behalf of Israel.
Richard Holbrooke is a seasoned Diplomat, and in keeping with the old rubric that , "to a hammer, every problem is a nail" it seems that to a diplomat every problem is an opportunity to talk.
Allow me to digress for a moment. Through the years I have had the occasion, from time to time, to see Couples who were in distress. Typically, I would meet with the couple together, then schedule appointments for each individually. By understanding a bit about what each person was bringing to the marriage, I would have a better chance to understand what was going wrong in the marriage. One fact stood out and the results hinged upon this simple fact. If both parties were committed to making the marriage work, therapy had a very good chance of success; if either party was already convinced that the marriage could not be saved, but was coming in as a last ditch effort, no amount of work would save the relationship. In other words, in order to negotiate between the two parties, both had to be committed to the negotiations.
Digression over, but the point should be clear. There is a mountain of evidence that the opposition sees themselves at war with us and will only negotiate as a part of their ongoing war strategy. Richard Holbrooke may be a brilliant diplomat, but any diplomacy that we engage in with Iran is simply another front in the war. Murdering Jews, Americans, Westerners, and eventually everyone who opposes them is the core value of the current Jihad; without this central organizing fantasy, the movement would die.
At the same time, I agree with Holbrooke that this is a war of many fronts, all related to each other. Here we have a reprise of Seattle:
Peace activist murdered by Palestinian
Angelo Frammartino, a 24 year-old student from Italy who arrived in Israel as a human rights organization activist, was stabbed to death Thursday by an Arab knifeman.
"He believed in what he did and was always ready to help others," a friend described him.
The website of Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera reported that Frammartino was working for the setting up of a children's supper camp for Palestinians in Jerusalem's Old City, and was supposed to return to Italy on Friday.
The youth was stabbed in the back while walking with four friends in the Sultan Suleiman street in the capital, near the Prahim Gate.
The attacker left the knife at the scene of the crime and fled. Police set up checkpoints in the area and arrested three suspects for suspected involvement.
It is believed that the attack was a nationalistically motivated terror attack, and not an attempted robbery.
The assailant didn't care that the Peace Activist was a pacifist and preferred to talk our way to a resolution; the killer never gave his vicitm a chance to plead his case, he stabbed him in the back. There is no negotiating with such people until they are ready to give up their desire, their need, to kill us.
Ralph Peters, who has been quite critical of our war efforts in the Middle East, has an article that Holbrooke ought to read, about Uri Lubrani, ISRAEL'S 'MR. IRAN'. Lubrani believes we need to take Ahmadinejad at his apocalyptic word:
Lubrani has no faith in the worth of negotiations and cautions that Westerners shouldn't underestimate the fanatics in Tehran. "Bear in mind three things: They have 3,000 years of culture; they're patient - a nation of carpet-weavers, and of chess players."
Right now, Iran's priority is preserving Hezbollah, its advance guard against Israel. The longer-term view nudges Lubrani toward despair when he comtemplates the possibility that the regime might be able to stay in power. "The Iranians will have the bomb. All Iranians want it. The question is: Who will have his finger on the button?"
At the Biblical age of four-score years, Uri Lubrani's a prophet in the Land of the Prophets. And the rest of us had better listen.
As luck would have it, I have some very smart people commenting on my site and Orson made an excellent point in a comment on my post Meta-Communications in the War on Islamofascism. He pointed out the shortcoming of calling the present struggle with terrorism WWIII or WWIV, and made an illuminating analogy:
The usual anolgies of Jihadism to WWIII or IV, or to Nazism, or even Islamofascism attempts to graft the challenges facing us today with those of recent vintage. In other words, struggles we remember. But they fail.
The better historical analogy is to the Indian Wars, a 400 years struggle that climaxed in the US West in the last half of the 19th century. Back then the strategic alterntives were assimilation (tried), extermination (immoral), and pacification. By default, the latter strategy often prevailed, despite forays into both others.
Why is this a better analogy? Both are longer struggles, started by Europeans but reqiring the US to finish, and because both conflicts will only end with pacification. In short, this is another long-term war to pacify nativist who simply reject peaceful alternatives.
Considering the developed world's dependency on oil in the ME for the energy to propel our economies for the next three decades, that's why Iraq is still a sensible investment of blood and treasure. Reform and change is not always bloodless. But Bush's "military adventurism" bears the great benefit of changing an externalized conflict into the internal civil war it has to be - because only Muslims can square their medieval religion with the demands of modernity. We cannot.
Orson's analogy is very useful in extending our understanding of the war, but it also helps illustrate the ways in which the current conflict is unique. The present day primitives are willing, and sometimes able, to strike within the heart of our civilization, not just on the frontier; further, it is the "savages" who threaten us with smallpox infected blankets, not the other way around, and most chillingly, these savages own sanctuaries in which to develop, and from which to spread, more and more lethal weapons to use against us. If we only were worried about bow and arrow attacks, even if there were risks of such attacks in New York as well as Seattle, Jerusalem, Bale, etc, the problem would be manageable. Luckily, the Indians did not have nuclear weapons. Our contemporary "savages" are working overtime to obtain them.
Perhaps a better title for this post would have been "Peace activism murdered by Palestinian"?
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