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How do we defeat militant Islam, September 2003
The previous entry, “Bush’s latest twist on terrorists,” is the most recent of many critiques of the Bushite call for “victory” that I’ve written at this site over the last four years. Here is one of the first, from early September 2003. Troubled by a speech by President Bush in which he gave no notion of what “victory” would consist of, but just talked about “staying the course,” I engaged in two dialogs with war supporters trying to figure out their thinking. The first was with a gung-ho female commenter at Lucianne.com, who proposed that we kill millions of Muslims and dismissed as appeasement my idea that we separate the Muslims from ourselves. The second was with a “Correspondent,” who, I now reveal, was Michael Ledeen, tireless promoter of Democratic Revolution, and author of The War on the Terror Masters. I sought to get an idea from each of my interlocutors what a plausible and attainable “victory” would consist of, and in each case failed to get a satisfactory answer. Indeed, what I encountered, both from the “grass roots” of the pro-Bush party at Lucianne.com, and from the “elite,” was a reliance on slogans and phrases, a refusal to think through the issue. Ledeen’s Terror Master’s thesis—that if we changed the terror supporting regimes, the terrorist themselves would fade away—was interesting to me, but, as I told him, not persuasive. I said to him:
Ok, your point is that we don’t have to defeat or kill every possible terrorist in the world, we just have to topple the governments that back the terrorists, and that would end the terrorist phenomenon. Maybe that would work. But it still introduces the problem of what government succeeds the defeated Terror Masters. That government would have to have the force to maintain itself in existence against all the forces that wanted to bring the Terror Masters back. Such a government would have to be a despotism. What do you say to that?I think my question was more penetrating than I realized at the time. Even if we overthrew all the terror supporting regimes across the Mideast, that would only trigger a vast guerrilla war against the occupier, us. It would be Iraq multiplied. So Ledeen’s Terror Master’s thesis seems like an exercise in self-delusion. Toppling the regimes is not the answer. We would have to occupy all those countries for at least a generation, with a least half a million men in each country to keep order, facing constant terror attacks. And at the end of that time, we would still have to leave, and whatever regimes we had set up would soon fall.
Here again the blog entry from September 2003. Email entry |