At RealClearDefense Willis Krumholz asks two very good questions:
- What is the scope of the Global War on Terror?
- Why are we supporting Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen?
I wish he had addressed the question posed in the title, “How Does the Global War on Terror End?​”, but those two are good question. I can only presume that the question of the title is rhetorical. It never ends. Or it ends when we end the conditions that make it possible. Or it ends when the radical Islamists win.
There is no end, and there can be no end. It can only be managed. Without the political or religious goals, terrorists are criminals, and they run criminal organizations.
How it will be managed is the question, but that begins with the realization we are not in a hot war against Japan, Germany, N. Korea, or a cold war against the Soviet Union.
There is a difference, though. Terrorist groups, at least the ones we’re facing, are millennialist. That means that they must act and they must escalate.
I disagree. They do not do anything that would achieve their goal.
Bin Laden was not in a cave somewhere leading the movement. He was hiding in a comfortable house eating popcorn and looking at porn.
ISIS is/was the only group that had some chance of moving toward their goal, and they were fighting the wrong enemy. Had they turned south, it would have been a step towards that goal, but the urge to chop off heads and burn people alive was more important.
They have a shelf life of a few decades, at most, and then, they will be ushered into the dustbin of history.
Fundamentalist religious groups killing people has gone on forever. It may go away for a while but it will pop up again later. I suppose we can do some things to make it less likely they will go jihadist, but a lot of it is stuff we cannot control. Everything isn’t about us. So do those things that might help, but the one thing we can control is our response. We should concentrate on that more than anything.
Steve
The “war on terror” is a bit of GW Bush idiocy. There is no war on terror, but merely a war on terrorism.