A further critique of the flypaper strategy

A VFR reader writes:

In your article, “What happened to the flypaper?”, you say that the idea of fighting the war over there instead of here makes no sense. Please explain if you get the chance. It seems the South would have been much better off had the Civil War been fought entirely in the North. Maybe I have hit on your reason. War is not a matter of where the war’s battles occur but who wins the war. Still, it seems a forward defense is usually best.

My reply:

First, the Baathists in Iraq apparently had nothing to do with the attacks on the U.S. So our fight against them would appear to be irrelevant to stopping terrorist attacks on America, now that they are no longer part of a regime thought to be in possession of weapons of mass destruction that could potentially be transferred to terrorist groups.

Second, the foreign jihadists coming to Iraq for martyrdom operations are of course the same people who would try to attack America. However, I see no necessary reason to believe that the fact that some jihadists are going to Iraq would prevent other jihadists from making attempts on America. Do you?

Now, I will admit it’s possible that every single actual and potential jihadist in the whole world is right now going to or wanting to go to Iraq, and that in fact we have created a 100 percent successful flypaper. But what reason is there to believe that this is the case? In fact, some people have been arrested recently for planning terrorist operations in the U.S., which means that not every potential terrorist has been deflected to Iraq.

A further problem, mentioned in the previous post on this subject, is that if the flypaper thesis is correct, then we must stay in Iraq to keep killing off the flies as they continue to swarm there. But that’s not what President Bush is proposing. He’s proposing that we leave Iraq as soon as is practicable. Therefore it is either the case that Bush himself does not believe the flypaper thesis, or that he believes our military actions in Iraq combined with the jihadists’ self-immolation in suicide bombings will make the total supply of actual and potential jihadists in the world dwindle toward zero in the next year or two. The former possibility would seriously undercut the flypaper theory as a rationale for Bush’s policy; the latter possibility would mean that Bush is detached from reality, so that his policy prescriptions for the war cannot be trusted in any case. Since his supporters will naturally reject the latter possibility, that leaves us with the former, that Bush himself does not believe the flypaper thesis. However, that should be no surprise, since, as far as I’m aware, Bush has never expounded the flypaper thesis. Some of his journalistic supporters have done so.

I asked another VFR regular for his thoughts on the above. Among his interesting observations, he points out that if the flypaper strategy is not to be ruinous, it must be recast as part of a traditionalist, rather than a liberal, vision:

The basic strategy may have some limited validity insofar that it draws jihadis to our forces (it clearly has) where they can be killed. Our failure lies in the serious underestimation of the number and will of Muslims in their quest to free this land in the heart of Dar-al-Islam from the blasphemous presence of the infidel army. This failure is rooted in the fundamental liberalism of George Bush and his advisors.

Rather than viewing Muslims as they are, and as they have been for 1400 years, the Bushites insist that they are just like us and will give up their crazy desires to kill people once they are elected to office and have to busy themselves fixing potholes. Sorry Jorge, that’s not how these guys think. They don’t care how many jihadis die on the field of battle. They will keep coming and setting off bombs and attacking. The potential number of jihadis is limitless.

If we’re serious about the flypaper strategy, we’re going to have to remain there, killing jihadis and taking casualties ourselves, for the next several decades at the very least. That is a political impossibility, as I see it. At the same time, we would have to get serious about the Auster proposal to start an outflow of Muslims from our own country and work to rid Europe of them as well—after which the oft-mentioned “cordon sanitaire” must be established. Far from doing any of these things, Bush and Co. insist on inviting Muslims here to be converted to the virtues of liberalism. As we traditionalists have stated over and over, there will be no victory in this war we’re in without rejecting and turning away from liberalism. The scales must fall off before we can even truly face the enemy.

Another reader writes:

One other point: Is our occupation in Iraq creating more flies globally than are caught by the flypaper in Iraq? Not all newly created flies can get to Iraq, but they could, perhaps, carry out T. operations locally, or nurse their rage until they have the capacity to get to an American interest somewhere on the planet, on U.S. soil or elsewhere.

This is a good point. Which is not to say that jihadism is “just a response to Western imperialism,” but clearly if we are planted in the middle of the Moslem world, that is going to stir up more jihadism among the Moslems, unless we can utterly crush their will, an object which at present we have neither any strategy nor any desire to achieve.

Another reader adds a third possibility to the two possible Bush beliefs I discussed above:

Or Bush doesn’t really have any intention of leaving in the near future, and is just trying to assuage people who are concerned about overstretching our military.

And if this is the case, then Bush arguably is following the flypaper strategy after all, but cannot admit it because it requires our forces to remain engaged in Iraq essentially forever.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 30, 2005 09:40 AM | Send