Instead of a "War On Terrorism", why don't we just declare war directly on Al Quiada and then go balls out, burning villages and napalming mountainsides til nothing is left.
A superpower can beat cave dwellers if we put aside the failed, and historically recent, notions of humanitarianism and just do it old school.
Later on in the comment thread, Gino made another point, to wit:
i'm not comfortable with waging wars on abstractions.
To which Tully asked:
Isn't Al-Quaeda an abstraction? It seems it's more of an internationally popular brand-name than an entity.
What do you think?
3 comments:
The "War on Terrorism" is certainly an abstraction, like the "War of Drugs," my particular favorite, the "War on Christmas."
The brand name part of Al-Qaeda is an abstraction. The multi-national organization of tangible humans and literature, however - a very dangerous non-abstraction.
Okay, Amanda. So now here's the follow up. How do you fight the dangerous non-abstraction? Ultimately, you end up having to take the fight to a specific place, which in this case is a sovereign nation. And how do you conduct the fight? That was what Gino was talking about. So what do you do?
Terrorism, by its definition, is intermittently "successful" because the enemy often cannot be detected until they have attacked.
I don't feel that I live in a world where terrorism will cease to exist. As terrorism is the choice method for Al-Qaeda, then I suppose directly we fight them by attempting to route out their locations with intelligence. Which is what we've been doing. The US has had to LEARN how to fight terrorists, and unfortunately different host countries, with different political, cultural, and geographic complexities, will always make this very difficult. One way, however, is to help secure the country that we aided in destabilizing (the Taliban had to go, but we weren't going to take the trouble until 9/11). Going all 'Nam on Afghanistan - I don't think that will necessarily win the hearts of the people there. How could they possibly participate in our infrastructure-rebuilding efforts if we're killing their people?
(We would be so much farther ahead, but for all the time, money, and LIVES spent on Iraq.)
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