Bacevich: Bush’s GWOT is ended; we need a new strategy

Andrew Bacevich writes in the L.A. Times:

Don’t expect to hear this from the White House any time soon, but the global war on terrorism conceived in the wake of 9/11 has effectively ended…. War requires adherence to principles. Once a conflict becomes an exercise in improvisation, it ceases to be meaningful…. The Bush administration is no longer engaged in a principled effort to address the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism. In lieu of principles, the administration now engages in crisis management, reacting to problems as they pop up.

Bacevich then proposes a new set of principles to guide U.S. policy, among which are:

* Let Islam be Islam. The United States possesses neither the capacity nor the wisdom required to liberate the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, who just might entertain their own ideas about what genuine freedom entails….

* Reinvent containment. The process of negotiating that accommodation will produce unwelcome fallout: anger, alienation, scapegoating and violence. In collaboration with its allies, the United States must insulate itself against Islamic radicalism. The imperative is not to wage global war, whether real or metaphorical, but to erect effective defenses, as the West did during the Cold War.

While this last is a bit vague, especially the business about “unwelcome fallout,” Bacevich’s phrases “containment,” “insulate itself,” “erect effective defenses,” “not to wage global war,” clearly point in the direction of Separationism. If he also made it clear that Islamic radicalism is practically inseparable from Islam, and added the idea of stopping and reversing Muslim immigration, he would definitely be a separationist.

However, as I always do when discussing this subject, I want to make it clear that Separationism is not about isolating ourselves, but about isolating the Muslims. It is active, not passive. While Separationism is aimed at reducing Islamic-Western contact and the resulting conflict to a minimum, the West must engage in a systematic, pro-active strategy to make this happen.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 06, 2007 09:11 PM | Send