How would we know if we win the war on terror?

[blowero]

Hmmm…guess I’m gonna have to drag out the Time Magazine article…

@furt

Yes. It was ignoring for lack of a better solution, hoping it’d stop, combined with a law-enforcement approach and occasional ad hoc military strikes.

This is exactly why they didn’t declare was on Al-Qaeda.

Not sure who “they” is. If you’re talking about the year 2001, then yes, the issue was more or less ignored. But in 2000, a comprehensive plan was developed - a plan that was ignored by the incoming administration.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,333835,00.html

[Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy] Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. “I’m coming to this briefing,” he says he told Rice, “to underscore how important I think this subject is.” Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, “I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.” The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House’s point man on terrorism.
…

As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), [Richard]Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security “principals” on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. “We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20,” says a former senior Clinton aide. “That wasn’t going to happen.” Now it was up to Rice’s team to consider what Clarke had put together.

…

Clarke’s proposals called for the “breakup” of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to “eliminate the sanctuary” where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime.

Just curious, does that sound like a “law-enforcement” approach? It doesn’t to me; it sounds like a proactive approach.

The plan was estimated to cost “several hundreds of millions of dollars.” In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we’ve done since 9/11."

And that’s the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn’t averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington’s national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

So yes, starting with the Bush Administration, the issue was ignored. I think it’s entirely possible that had Clarke’s strategy been implemented, rather than ignored, that it might have had some effect. The current strategy of bombing the crap out of Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with al Qaeda, is ineffective. This is patently obvious due to the fact the very rationalization for the war has been changed to being a “liberation” of the Iraqi people, rather than a volley in the “War on Terrorism”, as it was originally billed.

Nonetheless the truth of the matter is that we’re not so much at war with Terrorism as a phenomenon; but the left would shit their trousers if they said it was a war against Radical Islam, which is far closer to the truth.

I think we can get even more specific, and say that it’s a war against Saudi Arabia. And I think everyone, especially the right, would shit their trousers if we admitted it, since the Bush Admin. is in bed with the ruling monarchy there.

I think the point to be made in this thread is not that we don’t need to take measure to combat terrorism, but rather that the thing we are calling the “War on Terrorism” is nothing of the kind.