Hold on there...
The question isn't whether a counter-attack should be made. It's who should be hit and how?
Bin Laden had nothing to do with Iraq. The stories in Weekly Standard are at odds with everything else we know from intel and DOD, and certainly the rest of the world.
Hitting Afghanistan made some sense, had bin Laden's chiefs not been allowed to escape, along with OBL himself.
Remember, the bottom line is freedom from terror, not how massive we can counter-attack. As the Rumsfeld memo reveals, there is a real growth of terrorist recruits from military attacks. To ignore that is to spiral down into a war of attrition with large numbers of suicide warriors. What do you think the costs to America will be of a war of attrition?
Ignoring the obvious reality means submitting America to decades of Israel-like terrorism and martial law, complete destruction of the American way of life. It's the same temptation as Curtis LeMay's plan to preemptively nuke the USSR. Imagine the world after that had happened.
When you undertake the "kill them all and let God sort them out" type approach, you play into their hands, escalating the fight into millions or hundreds of millions.
As tough as it is, we have to maintain a deliberative "slog", in a much more open gov't process that we now have, which leads to cover-ups and suspicions. The mistake we make is going it alone simply because we can. The neocons drunk with power need to be replaced with diplomatic adults who know how to use power responsibly, who will bring in international participation. Every country needs to have skin in the game, or else it will be America against the rest of the world. That's neither wise nor moral nor practical.
We certainly have the power to lay waste to large sections of the world. That we don't do that is a more important force to creating peace in the world than doing it.
There is a technological trend making overwhelming force a self-defeating policy - Bill Joy's "The Future Doesn't Need Us" describes the processes by which smaller and smaller numbers of people can create larger and larger damage in the world. This process will continue to the point where a couple kids in a basement can cobble a Black Plague virus.
Moral authority, technical oversight, transparency in governance and deserved, verifiable trust in governance are the only counters to what technology has in store. Preemptive violence and overwhelming force are useless to punish a small number of suicidal actors. That's fighting the last war. |
