(Part 1 is in the previous post.)
Even the concept of a War on Terrorism is misguided. Jerry Brown sensibly asked, how do you make war on a technique? And how do you know when you've won?
The main defenses against terrorism include things like effective secruity at airports, power plants, nuclear waste facilities, major buildings and bridges. Like good screening procedures in ports. Like good intelligence on hostile groups like al-Qaeda. Like cooperation with other countries on arresting terrorist suspects and interdicting their flows of money. Like making sure the public health infrastructure can cope with the release of a biological weapon.
None of these things provide easy opportunities for filming campaign commercials on an aircraft carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" banner in the background. And the blunt reality is, there is no perfect defense against someone like the 9/11 hijackers who are determined to give their own lives to kill other people. Especially when they're willing to target civilian non-combatants.
Now we are in a guerrilla war in Iraq which - whatever it may contribute to our overall national security - makes the short- and mediium-term danger of anti-American terrorism greater. Our understandable, but in retrospect sadly mistaken, tendency to see the 9/11 attacks as a "Pearl Harbor" event has unfortunately contributed to that result.
- Bruce Miller
4 comments:
Dear Bruce, While it's true that there are many dissimilarities between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both were very destructive attacks on US power and prestige, meant to destroy and intimidate. In both cases US leaders decided to destroy the threat to US national security by wiping out the heartland of the enemy. FDR didn't decide to fight a defensive or limited war against Japan, so why should George W. Bush decide to fight a defensive-only war against al-Qaeda? David
David, a better WW II analogy would be this: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Germany declares war on the US. The US then makes its main military effort a drive to conquer - Argentina. Because Argentina had a lot of ethnic Germans, including many admirers of the Hitler regime. If they got influence on the government, it might build some really bad weapons that sometime it might decide to give some of them to some enemy of the US that might use them someway, somehow against America.
Dear Bruce, I think very few people would agree with you that WWII Argentina was in any way comparable to Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a threat to US national security. A better analogy might be to compare WWII Italy with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and to argue that the 1943 Allied invasion of Italy was a British-inspired peripheral undertaking that did nothing to bring about the defeat of Nazi Germany. But in my view it was great to get rid of Mussolini, and it's great to be rid of Saddam. David
Oh, historical analogies are so much fun. But they have to be handled so delicately. Anyway, David, it sounds like you're agreeing that Iraq was peripheral to the so-called war on terrorism. Well, at least it was until the US invaded. Whether America is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power all depends on what kind of permanent postwar regime we put in place. At a minimum, I would hope that we could do better than the Baathist regime.
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