Many comparisons were made in my drone thread to what is happening now and WW2. Of course, this war is much different, because we don’t really know who our enemies are, and they are not confined to specific nations. I would also argue that war leads to more terrorism. When we overthrew Saddam, we strengthened Al-Qaeda, which lead to the rise of ISIS. The only winners in this war have been the defense contractors. Is it in any way possible for us to “win” the war like we won WW2? Or is the only way out a President who thinks it isn’t worth the blood and treasure and ends the war?
Not to get Bill Clintony here, but it depends on what your definition of terror is. If you mean permanently degrading organizations that can mount 9/11 scale operations, then yeah.
If you mean preventing radicalization of individuals, including American citizens, who then go on rampages, not so much.
Has any war on anything but a country been won?
The war on terror could be won very easily, but would require morally repugnant methods.
We could stop suicide bombings pretty much dead (ahem) if we were to execute the bombers’ parents, brothers, sisters, etc. But the family are not the criminal actors so we don’t do that.
We’d have a much easier time against ISIS / Taliban / etc if we made it publicly known that it was your responsibility to not be near them when we attack them. But we respect the civilian distinction so we don’t do that.
We’d stop organisations like ISIS pretty much dead if we carpet-bombed or nuked the cities they held. But we don’t commit mass murder so we don’t do that.
Of course there isn’t going to be a World War II type of end to this conflict, in which the heads of various terrorist groups end up surrendering. Comparisons to WWII are far off-base, so if you want to think about how/if this war can be won, you’d probably do better thinking about how the Cold War ended (though this is not a perfect analogy either).
During the Cold War, there were really two major threats wrapped together. First, there was the military threat of the Soviets possibly deciding to roll into Europe, not to mention the conflicts of Korea, Vietnam, and many other smaller insurgencies.
Second, there was the ideological threat of communism, in which many, many people all across the world were convinced that the status quo of Western political and economic power were the root of what is wrong with the world, and communism was the rational choice if you were against that Western view of things. Regardless of the state of armed conflict (described above), the fact was that communism sought to upset the existing order of things with big promises of how much better communism would be.
To achieve an end to the Cold War, it would not suffice to have battlefield victories lead to a surrender of the communist-oriented leaders and countries of the world. In the end, we had to wait until the concept of communism fell apart. I think it is most likely true that this came about not only because communism rotted from inside out, but also that the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan accelerated people’s recognition that communism was a failure.
Once again, this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think that something similar probably must occur with the radical terrorism that is opposed by nearly all countries on earth: at some level the ideology (or maybe mythology) of the general idea of reactionary Islamic states headed by nutjobs probably just has to fall apart for the whole thing to be over.
it could be won if Islam has a reformation. How could that happen?
The US and other western countries need to embrace REAL reformers, like Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, etc., and give them the bully pulpit at the UN. There, the US should team up with other western countries who have been victims of Islamic terrorism, and force Muslim majority nations to engage with them and reform their religion. Only when Islam becomes a personal faith instead of the universalist political system that it currently either is in many places, or is commonly wanted to be, can the war on terror be won.
Neither of whom are Muslims.
Bush I served as the director of the CIA for a while, from back when we were setting up puppet states, funding dictators, and destabilizing nations. He knew enough to know that even when you do everything right and try to back someone who seems good, give a country a nice constitutional government, etc. you will still generally end up with a tyrannical oligarchy and a bunch of rebels hiding in the mountains, terrorizing everyone. When it came to Iraq, he decided that it wasn’t worth the bother trying to make a go at it.
Unfortunately, I seem to have known more about Bush and the CIA than his son did.
Theoretically, nation building could probably work. If you compare Hong Kong to say Indonesia, I think you’d generally find that the Brits did a good job of establishing rule of law, Capitalism, and something like a Democratic spirit (though, they never tested that). But they owned (in a controlling sense, not a monetary/legal sense) the territory and they maintained it over the course of a hundred years. They started with a rock, with almost no people, and slowly built up the population from a small number, each receiving British schooling.
But, you can’t nation build by taking out the central government in a nation defined by arbitrary boundaries, containing groups of people who hate each other, and then stand back and tell them, “You’ve got to write a Democratic constitution - on your own, as though you really meant it - and we’re not going to help you actually establish or enforce the leadership of it, nor protect you from outside forces, nor protect you from inside forces.” Well…joy.
If we’d determined to occupy and control Iraq, for a period of 40-80 years, where we control the government, military, and police, giving appointments and firing people based on modern standards of meritocracy, justice, and morality as well as controlling the education of the children, then yeah, maybe we could have reformed the country. But it would be a hell of an investment, and you’d only really be able to get away with it if the majority of Iraqis - from each of the different races/religions/tribes/denominations all voted that they wanted to live in a better, more peaceful, and richer country that followed some basic Western ideas.
But, to win that vote, well first you’d have to actually announce such a vote. And to get people to sign on to it, you would probably need to make some big compromises as part of the deal - like maintaining sexist policies, illegalizing abortion, illegalizing homosexuality, etc. And you still might not (and probably wouldn’t) get the people to support it. And at that point, unless you’re willing to go in and kill, lock up, or deport everyone who voted against, you’re basically boned.
So, before you go tearing down the government of a nation, you probably want to have a pretty good idea as to whether you can sell them on something better. If you can’t, then either don’t destroy their government or accept that the people are boned and get out while you can.
You can’t defeat an idea or ideas. You can suppress it and a lot of well connected people will make a whole lot of tax payers money from that but people tend to fight imperialism, oppression and state interference in their own affairs.
You can’t kill an idea with a bullet, but ideologies get thrown into the dustbin with enough regularity that one cannot say that ideologies are immortal.
Sort of. It’s hard to get them truly thrown away, but you can make the followers such a small percentile of the community that when they go crazy and kill folks, it’s not statistically meaningful.
What counts as “statistically meaningful”, though? Even the 9/11 attacks didn’t add up to more than one average month’s worth of traffic fatalities, in terms of lives lost.
If “statistically meaningful” implies “more deaths annually on average from terrorism than from falling elevators or lightning strikes”, then AFAICT the war on terror is already won.
Domestic lone wolves are still terrorists, IMO. In some ways, they are the larger threat to American citizens. The Orlando shooter may have been an ISIS supporter, but he acted alone.
Here is a list of many of the terrorist attacks to hit the USA since 9/11. The page splits them into islamist and right-wing, but the real point is that the vast majority were commited by individuals or small groups. These attacks are not grand schemes by Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
As I discussed in the other threat, Al-Qaeda’s senior leadership has been very thoroughly dismantled. They have been denied Afghanistan as a base of operations, which has forced them to relocate to places like Yemen. Arab foreign fighters and Al Qaeda in particular have been all but exterminated in the Afghan theatre. You may have noticed that the only recent attacks on Americans come from self radicalized attackers who do not receive support from a larger network. There has not been a sophisticated and coordinated 9/11 style attack on the US since 2001… That is not an accident. That happens precisely because these organizations are no longer able to operate the way they used to.
If winning means eradicating or degrading a certain network to the point that they cannot function effectively, then yes, it is entirely possible to win.
If you mean you expect a single person to sign a treaty in which they renounce terrorism as a concept and abolish it forever, then no, that is not going to happen. FWIW, the phrase “War on Terror” refers to the use of military force against what used to be considered a law enforcement problem. It does not literally mean that we expect Terrorism to surrender.
I’ve got to ask… Where have you been form the last fifteen years? People have been asking this exact question ever since George Bush first used this phrase back in 2001. Did you just now decide to tune in or something?
That would be true (in the US).
Terrorism is only an issue because it’s politically sexy. If people really cared about saving lives, they’d ask to have the speed limit lowered, and to spend the money that is being spent on terrorism, on medical research instead.
Of course, if people really cared about recycling, they’d vote to raise taxes so we could hire low wage workers to sort trash, rather than putting four separate trash cans everywhere. And if people really cared about the poor, they’d ask for a more scientific approach to public social programs and stop giving money to beggars on the street. If people really cared about drugs, they’d stop drinking alcohol and caffeine and institute laws based on the actual danger/addictiveness of a drug, rather than whatever mystery system guides the current system.
The things we care about have nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with what we say it’s all about. If people and government were rational, the world would be a much different and alien place.
Yup. Distracts people from home issues, scares them enough to not look too close or to stomach police state things - I should know, France’s “state of emergency” still hasn’t been lifted from the Charlie Hebdo attacks and while it’s on the cops have been veeeery diligent in pursuing political goals, repressing demonstrations and so forth. Plus it’s also a way to funnel state money into friendly pockets, which is always nice.
Booga booga booga !
boffking is that your plan then, just end the war, walk away and not do anything? I’d argue that was largely what Clinton and Obama did (early in his term) and I don’t think it got us anywhere. It’s easy to point fingers.
What is your plan?
What is your plan for ending the war? It shouldn’t go on forever.
Of course it will go on forever., it’s now literally designed to go on forever.
Great for business.
Global terrorist insurgencies will always exist. That is the new normal as far as warfare goes. Things are never going back to the way they were now that the genre’s out of the bottle.
It doesn’t particularly matter when we want to end the war, because the enemy still gets a vote.