What happened to the flypaper?

In reply to my comments about President Bush’s speech, a conservative writer writes:

Excellent points. The flypaper theory presumes that we must always stay there to act as flypaper. If we leave and remove the flypaper , won’t they just follow us out? Rumsfeld a year or so ago boldly asked rhetorically whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. Too bad no one has taken up that question.

My reply:

Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. What is the end of the flypaper strategy? We could only leave when all jihadists and potential jihadists in the world had been drawn there and we had killed them. But as I said in a dialog I recently had with a conservative supporter of Bush, the number of jihadists and potential jihadists in the world is infinite. So when could we leave? Not only that, but why would we want to leave? If fighting them there protects us at home (which makes no sense to me), mustn’t we stay there forever to protect ourselves?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 29, 2005 08:09 AM | Send