Inevitability
Seth:
Nicely put, Josh. This is not a situation open to negotiation. Their goals will persistently escalate. The most radical, who would use violence, who would kill themselves to kill us, must be found and imprisoned; if they fight, we can act out of self-defense. This is a proactive form of protection. We have to protect ourselves in other ways, too. At the same time as we use force surgically, we must use our (more powerful) soft power to destroy their ideological grounding and prevent others from joining them. Moderate Western and Islamic cultures both offer compelling visions of society that can ostracize still more this fringe movement, so long as we bother to make the arguments. (I absolutely believe that the rise of suicide bombing and the Islamic radical ideology are reactions to social changes within the Muslim world that are still transforming moribund traditional societies. The West triggered these changes, which are inexorable though not leading toward a set end.)
As an unlimited, worldwide, unconventional, asymmetric, but non-total war, analogies to WWII are flawed. Moreover, the ideologies the Allies defeated--Nazism, Fascism, and autarkic, ethnocentric, aggressive nationalism (how to sum up WWII Japanese policies? )--fit into Western systems. Today, our enemies operate outside of state structures, with goals as unacceptable as the Axis'. But the Allied defeat of the Axis, in a total war, totally discredited those ideologies and forced those countries to reject them unequivocally and to accept the liberal status quo. We're not in a total war now. Escalating to a total war would be impractical and counterproductive--it would drive more people away, and it's better to convince people than it is to kill them (provided they can be convinced--see above). So, soft power becomes key.
Ok, tedious sermon over. (Christopher Hitchens has me well beat anyhow on that sort of thing. I disagree with him on Iraq, but he's pretty solid on a lot of other things.)
Back in late 2001/early 2002, the executive editor of the Wall Street Journal came to speak to the Yale Daily News, which I was an editor of at the time. I asked him if he thought New York would be able to come back from 9/11. He said yes, so long as the subway wasn't attacked. Bear in mind that well before that point, there was a plot to bomb the subway in Brooklyn (at Atlantic Ave.) that was only disrupted because one person turned informer only days before the plotters were going to act.
Subways--hell, anywhere people gather freely--are an easy target, and it's always only a matter of time before something bad happens anywhere. It's awful.
Oh, and I think it's pointless to look for patterns in specific dates of attacks (not something you've done). Terrorists make their point--which goes well beyond any tactical issue like Iraq or the G8 summitt--by killing people. It doesn't particularly matter when--mass death draws attention whether it happens 30 months after 9/11, to coincide with a major summit, or on a random September morning.
Nicely put, Josh. This is not a situation open to negotiation. Their goals will persistently escalate. The most radical, who would use violence, who would kill themselves to kill us, must be found and imprisoned; if they fight, we can act out of self-defense. This is a proactive form of protection. We have to protect ourselves in other ways, too. At the same time as we use force surgically, we must use our (more powerful) soft power to destroy their ideological grounding and prevent others from joining them. Moderate Western and Islamic cultures both offer compelling visions of society that can ostracize still more this fringe movement, so long as we bother to make the arguments. (I absolutely believe that the rise of suicide bombing and the Islamic radical ideology are reactions to social changes within the Muslim world that are still transforming moribund traditional societies. The West triggered these changes, which are inexorable though not leading toward a set end.)
As an unlimited, worldwide, unconventional, asymmetric, but non-total war, analogies to WWII are flawed. Moreover, the ideologies the Allies defeated--Nazism, Fascism, and autarkic, ethnocentric, aggressive nationalism (how to sum up WWII Japanese policies? )--fit into Western systems. Today, our enemies operate outside of state structures, with goals as unacceptable as the Axis'. But the Allied defeat of the Axis, in a total war, totally discredited those ideologies and forced those countries to reject them unequivocally and to accept the liberal status quo. We're not in a total war now. Escalating to a total war would be impractical and counterproductive--it would drive more people away, and it's better to convince people than it is to kill them (provided they can be convinced--see above). So, soft power becomes key.
Ok, tedious sermon over. (Christopher Hitchens has me well beat anyhow on that sort of thing. I disagree with him on Iraq, but he's pretty solid on a lot of other things.)
Back in late 2001/early 2002, the executive editor of the Wall Street Journal came to speak to the Yale Daily News, which I was an editor of at the time. I asked him if he thought New York would be able to come back from 9/11. He said yes, so long as the subway wasn't attacked. Bear in mind that well before that point, there was a plot to bomb the subway in Brooklyn (at Atlantic Ave.) that was only disrupted because one person turned informer only days before the plotters were going to act.
Subways--hell, anywhere people gather freely--are an easy target, and it's always only a matter of time before something bad happens anywhere. It's awful.
Oh, and I think it's pointless to look for patterns in specific dates of attacks (not something you've done). Terrorists make their point--which goes well beyond any tactical issue like Iraq or the G8 summitt--by killing people. It doesn't particularly matter when--mass death draws attention whether it happens 30 months after 9/11, to coincide with a major summit, or on a random September morning.