A More Mature Response to 9-11

[jordan179]

Some people have argued that we should have simply tried to deal with Al Qaeda through "police work" -- arresting terrorists when we found them, and not attacking Afghanistan. And certainly not Iraq. So I'm going to speculate how this would have worked.

Comments

[foomf]

You and your commentators are mistaking a terrorist group with a legitimate army

[jordan179]

You are assuming that these are inviolable categories. But when a state allows a terrorist organization to base off its soil and attack another state, that first state is committing an act of war against the second state, and the second state may legitimately undertake warlike actions against the first state in reprisal and self-defense. Furthermore, when a state shelters terrorists, "counter-terror agencies" are fairly useless against those terrorists, since the authorities in the area are protecting the terrorists. The Terrorist State (term for a state which shelters international terrorists) must first be defeated in war and thus its protection peeled away, before the terrorists hiding behind that state can be defeated.

[foomf]

Two responses, not sure if you edited or just replied twice, but I appreciate the thoughtful responses

[jordan179]

The problem is that simply attacking governments is not any effective answer either, as you well know, because "peeling away" the protection requires "peeling away" the entrenching government, or at least, those powerful persons in the governments who are supportive or at least not hostile to the terrorist agencies. Too fast, you get another Iraq, too slow, you get nowhere AND you increase the pool of potential terrorists everywhere else.

The evidence is very strong that not only has the Iraq campaign not increased "the pool of potential terrorists everywhere else," but that it has actually attracted potential terrorists from places such as Arabia and Europe into Iraq, where they could be conveniently sent to their proper fate of feeding the worms. Had they not gone into Iraq to scream and leap against humans ready to gun them down, they would have remained alive and able to hurt humans less able to fight back. It has, in short, drained the pool, as Al Qaeda has now discovered and more or less admitted.

We did not defeat Libya "in

[foomf]

I call the two Iraq wars the "Bush" wars the same way I call Grenada the "Reagan" war. Every bit of pejorative is intended and accurate; especially the current ongoing debacle which has effectively bankrupted this nation

[foomf]

And I forgot to correct "chinese" in the last paragraph there to "communist" in general. While China was appearing to follow Soviet direction, even then they had their own agenda.

Gulf Wars (I)

[jordan179]

I call the two Iraq wars the "Bush" wars the same way I call Grenada the "Reagan" war. Every bit of pejorative is intended and accurate; especially the current ongoing debacle which has effectively bankrupted this nation.

First of all, why would you use a "perjorative" to describe Reagan's victory in Grenada, which proved the turning point in the rollback of Communism from the Western Hemisphere? Communism is bad -- almost as bad as Naziism -- so surely a war which liberated a country from the Communists and led to the liberation of another (Nicaragua) should be celebrated, not condemned?

Secondly, the first Iraq war took place because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Why would you condemn George H. W. Bush's subsequent defeat of Saddam Hussein and liberation of Kuwait? Do you actually prefer for small states to be conquered by aggressive, oppressive foreign dictatorships

Gulf Wars (II)

[jordan179]

The second Bush war ... I suppose I could call it the Cheney war, and be more accurate, except that it was H who sold it.

Calling it "the Cheney war" would be really inaccurate, since George W. Bush was President and Dick Cheney was merely Vice-President -- and hence Bush had the power to decide on war or peace with Iraq in a way which Cheney did not.

I don't believe the evidence supports any conclusion that the pool of potential terrorists has been reduced or mollified by the opportunity to find a direct battlefield in Iraq. I think that alQaeda has blacked its own eyes by killing more of the people it pretends to protect, and that the result is that alQuaeda is having recruiting issues.

Ah, so you don't think that killing tens of thousands and severely wounding hundreds of thousands of Terrorists has at all shrunk the recruiting pool? Do you imagine that there is an infinite supply of enemy recruits? And how do you explain this historical singularity, since in all previous known wars, death and failure have been deterrents, not

Libya and North Korea

[jordan179]

I'm not convinced that Gaddafi ever thought America would attack in force.

I think that we must otherwise consider it quite a coincidence that he changed his policy most drastically in 2003, the year that we dramatically demonstrated our willingness to hold even a very powerful Terrorist State responsible for its actions.

Even the very directed bombings in 1992 did not change his behavior, and that was well after the first Bush war reached its (intentionally) limited success.

Why should Gadaffi have been deterred by a limited success, one which left Saddam in power?

If you think we "won" against North Korea.... uh, no. The war there was against Chinese expansion, and the fact that there IS a North Korea rather strongly invalidates any claim of "winning" ... North Korea was completely propped up by China until 1992 and has been slowly falling apart since they lost that economic support.The war was launched by Kim Il Sung in 1950 with the objective of conquering South Korea. We launched our war against North Korea that same year

Re: Libya and North Korea

[foomf]

Me: Even the very directed bombings in 1992 did not change his behavior, and that was well after the first Bush war reached its (intentionally) limited success.

You: Why should Gadaffi have been deterred by a limited success, one which left Saddam in power?

I was not talking about any attack on Iraq in 1992. I was talking about the US bombing of Libya with a bunker-buster that was aimed at Gadaffi's home.

Re: Libya and North Korea

[jordan179]

Are you sure you're not talking about the bombings of 1986? One big difference in 1986 was that the Cold War was still on and thus Gadaffi had a strong Great Power backer; in the 2000's, Gadaffi would have had to fight alone, which would have greatly reduced the likelihood of his regime's -- or even personal -- survival.

Re: Libya and North Korea

[foomf]

(re-check) Damn, got my date crossed. Yes, 1986. My mistake there. Also, when talking totalitarian dictators, regime is really nothing, it's all about the personal power and the regime is simply the manifestation. Anything inconvenient to the consolidation of that power, like a constitution, a system of laws, other government bodies created for checks and balances, is suborned or suppressed, for as long as the dictator is able.

As for the much-ballyhooed claims that Gadaffi gave up his WMD's only after Bush terrified him into it, it's more the case that nobody was willing to believe him until the politically expedient moment. He'd been making the offer for at least four years by the time they finally accepted his offer.

[jordan179]

... and I dispute that a military approach to fighting terrorists has failed. Several tens of thousands of terrorists have died in Iraq fighting the US military. Many of them came from abroad, and might have struck at soft targets in other countries had they not wasted their lives attacking harder ones.

Why did they do so? Because if they failed to fight they conceded the battlefield to the Americans, and gave America a stable, friendly base right in their heartlands.

And in the end, they failed anyway. And died. And not one of those who died will fight again.

Even more, we have presumably wounded 4-10 times as many. Many of the wounded are maimed to the point where they won't fight again either.

Iraq has been a signal victory in the war against terror, and may have crippled Al Qaeda past the point of recovery, because Al Qaeda may well have drained the pool of potential recruits to fight that war. And now, most of those recruits are dead or facing a future as cripples.