Analyzing Bush’s unintelligible war slogans

“We will strike the terrorists abroad,” Bush said in a speech in Mason City, Iowa, last week, “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

This argument has never made any sense to me. It makes as much sense as that other meaningless Bush slogan, that we’re defeating the terrorists in Iraq by “staying the course,” i.e., by keeping our troops in that country and helping Iraq head toward an elected government. There is, as I’ve been saying for a year, no causal link that I can see between creating a new government in Iraq and defeating the terrorists who are trying to destroy that government. We must first defeat the terrorists, and then the new government would have a chance of surviving. But, as I’ve also been saying for a year, we have not been pursuing any discernible strategy aimed at defeating the terrorists. Just yesterday, 50 newly trained, unarmed Iraqi soldiers were captured and systematically massacred on the side of a road. No government, “democratic” or otherwise, can be created or be maintained under such conditions. Far from moving toward a new government and victory over its terrorist enemies, Iraq, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, resembles Algeria in the 1950s.

In the same way, there is no causal connection that I can see between striking the terrorists abroad and not having to face them here. How does the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afganistan prevent possible Moslem terrorists from entering the United States as immigrants and travelers from any number of Moslem or European countries? Has Bush even made a stab at explaining this? Has anyone ever asked him? Thus a slogan that makes no logical sense is accepted, both by Bush’s supporters and his foes, as an adequate and intelligible statement of Bush’s foreign policy.

Furthermore, not only is the statement illogical, it is based on a false factual premise, since, as already mentioned, we are not actually striking the terrorists abroad in the sense of a sustained comprehensive plan to destroy and defeat them. What we are doing is keeping our forces hanging out and getting shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan while only intermittantly ordering them to hit back at the enemy there.

A Bush supporter might reply that our forces in Iraq are engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign, which takes time to bear fruit. But this does not meet the fundamental problem, repeatedly raised by Michael Ledeen, that our enemy is not restricted to Iraq but is regional, which means that in the absence of a regional strategy the enemy in Iraq can be continually replenished. Here the resemblance is not to Algeria but to Vietnam. Under Johnson and Westmoreland, our troops in Vietnam kept going on search and destroy missions in which lots of enemy were killed. Yet that had no effect on the enemy’s overall ability to keep waging war against us, particularly as we continued to respect the neutrality of Laos even as North Vietnam kept sending troops and supplies to the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We were “staying the course,” but it was not a course directed at victory. We were staying the course of going through the motions of waging a war.

Since the statement “We will strike the terrorists abroad, so we do not have to face them here at home,” makes no sense in itself, yet resonates so powerfully with Bush and his supporters, it occurs to me that Bush has some other meaning in mind when he says it. Maybe what he really means is this:

Let’s fight the terrorists abroad (or rather let’s go through the motions of fighting them abroad) so that we don’t have to face the reality of terror supporters who are immigrating into and living in our own country. By fighting jihadists abroad, we pretend to ourselves that we’re addressing the jihadist problem, which makes us feel that it’s safe to keep inviting jihadists here. Waging a half-war, an unserious war (a “war on terror” rather than a war against jihadist Islam), enables us to preserve and maintain what we really care about: America’s status as a liberal society open to the entire world.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 25, 2004 03:03 PM | Send