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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (36130)	3/22/2004 8:53:36 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793955

Pray tell what actions we could have taken that would discourage them? The ones Clinton tried, the ones Reagan tried or the ones Carter tried? I don't think Carter or Reagan can be said to have tried anything against terrorism. It wasn't an issue then. The responses under Clinton and Bush have been governed by political expedience, not by any prospect of efficacy. Clinton needed a response, but couldn't muster the political backing from either party for anything more than a high-tech drive-by shooting. As long as he could say he did something, he was happy, and so were the Republicans. Bush needed something big and visible, so he went with war. In order to make this work we need to acknowledge a few things. First, in a war on terror, intelligence isn't just everything, it's the only thing. A cruise missile is useless if it's sent to the wrong target, and the best SF teams in the world are no better than the intel on which their missions are based. The problem with Intelligence work, from a political perspective, is that it's invisible, so it doesn't look like you're doing anything. Once you have intel, you have to act on it, and this means precision. We have to seek out the threats and kill them, one by one, legally or illegally. The priority should not necessarily be the titular leaders, the public figures that everyone knows. The ones we need to kill are the operational leaders, the cell leaders, the ones who move the money, the ones who build the bombs. Again, this will have to be secret, wherever possible. We need to do everything in our power to build bridges between us and moderate Muslim leaders, and to make it clear that we do not see this fight as a Christian/Muslim religious war. The terrorists want to produce that image; if we allow them to dictate the terms of conflicy we play into their hands. We need to avoid falling into the Israeli trap, and to resist the temptation to adopt the Israeli model. They made their bed, and they're lying in it. That was their choice. We don't have to lie in it with them. Sometimes military force will be necessary. The Afghanistan operation was necessary, though the followup has been poor. As much as possible, we want to avoid large scale military operations and occupations. They are not effective against terrorists, and they serve as recruiting grounds for our enemies. This war is not analogous to WW2. It's more like the cold war, or even a step further. In WW2 we fought a group of States linked by a primitive and cruel ideology. In the Cold War the primary fight was against the ideology, though that ideology was epitomized by certain defined hostile states. Now we're fighting an ideology that exists across a number of states, but does not rely on any of those states. We have to base our tactical assumptions on honest assessment of the threat, not on politics. This is something we haven't done so far.