Apparently not everyone agrees with the position I took in the post below:
Apparently, I’m in the minority but I didn’t find his answer to Lauer’s question particularly noteworthy. We will never win the war on terror in the sense that we won, say, World War II.
James Joyner has lots of good links to various viewpoints.
I’m sticking to my guns. For forty years we (apparently) didn’t believe that the Cold War could be won either. Then Ronald Reagan came along and showed real determination to win and, by gum, we did.
If the objective is to manage terror, we will lose. The bare possibility of nuclear-armed terrorists makes the stakes intolerably high. We must fight to win.
I’m glad that Mr. Bush re-stated his position and I’m even gladder that Kerry-Edwards took him to task for the first statement. I’d rather have both tickets bidding against each other on how tough they can be in the War on Terror than bidding against each other on how expensive a prescription drug benefit they can pass.
We can win a war on al qaeda. When they stop getting recruits and the older guys die or give up, they’ll have lost.
We can’t win a war on terror any more than we can win a war on machine guns or a war on blitzkrieg warfare. If we survive long enough the rules will change and some other form of warfare will become more important. Terrorism may still have a part in the newer warfare the way machine guns and tanks still have a part.
What really bothers me about WoT against al qaeda is that they mostly aren’t even targeting us. They made a few attacks on us as publicity stunts. The last one was 9/11, almost 2 years ago. It caught out imagination as much as it did their target audience…. (Was the guy with the shoe bomb al qaeda? I tend to forget him since he seemed so pathetic.)
If we could, I wouldn’t object to killing off al qaeda to show other groups not to do their terrorist publicity stunts in the USA. Or say, if you figure we had 4000 casualties, give them 12,000 casualties and call it quits. Teach them a lesson and go home.
But it makes no sense to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives going after them, when they shouldn’t be that important. They aren’t worth it, except as the example we use to persuade other groups not to imitate them.
We desperately need to become less vulnerable. A bunch of amateurs hit us a shocking (though not particularly significant) blow, because we weren’t ready. We need to be harder to hit; next time it might be part of a real attack. Say we’re in the middle of a nuclear crisis with iran or north korea and a LNG truck blows up in the tunnel under the pentagon, and it disrupts the experts … it could have actual strategic importance.
Then, we have low-level radioactive waste lying around various places because we still don’t have the disposal problem worked out. If somebody got to a temporary storage area in a city and blew that up, they’d have their dirty bomb. We could have more economic disruption than Chernobyl. Croplands damaged, part of a city evacuated, and when the government tells people it’s safe to go home (when it’s only relatively safe) will they believe it? A giant mess.
It isn’t just al qaeda, it’s anybody who wants to hurt us or who wants the good will they get wherever they come from by very visibly hurting us. We could waste ourselves tracking down al qaeda and miss ten other groups.
What we have to do is improve our security so we’re harder to hit. As a first step, move the IT stuff away from cities and into small towns. As long as we have something that can pass as the internet we don’t need IT departments in cities where they’re vulnerable to terrorism. Lots of other stuff can spread out too.
Fighting terrorism is like fighting second-generation warfare. You can’t make artillery go away. You use earthworks instead of stone fortresses and you adapt. Same with terrorism. Be less vulnerable, adapt, accept that it’s now one of the tools in the toolbox.