I’ve just written a brief essay criticizing the course we have taken in the War on Terrorism and suggesting–briefly–what we should have done instead.
My main points include:
[ul]
[li]We should have focused on nation building in Afghanistan, pouring in more resuorces and being more militarily aggressive so as to make that failed state our showcase for democracy and US benevolence.[/li]
[li]We should have launched a diplomatic offensive, using sophisticated carrot/stick and good-cop/bad-cop tactics in leveraging the cooperation of every political entity in the Muslim world that can be reached.[/li]
[li]The US should have started talks with Iran while Khatami was still president, using Iranian support for terrorists as grounds for pressuring them for ror reforms while dangling the carrot of renewed diplomatic relations.[/li]
[li]American and other moderate Muslims should be less concerned with what little discrimination is taking place than with how to use their unique position to help build bridges. [/li][/ul]
But that was the best chance we had to make that kind of thing work. And how quickly you can bring stability and the straighten out the infrastucture are huge factors in acheiving success.
What about having a President and Administration that actually took terrorist threats seriously, instead of brushing them off and then playing dumb afterward?
And I think your essay overlooks one fundamental problem, which is that this Administration was gung-ho on going into Iraq on any reason. The only reason we went into Afghanistan at all was because the Administration’s brain trust realized that they couldn’t go straight from 9/11 to Iraq – they had to make at least a token effort to fight Al Qaeda on their home turf first, which is why Bush went from “Osama, dead or alive” to “Osama who?” inside of six months.
Fighting terrorism by invading Iraq is like extinguishing a campfire by dumping gasoline on it.
Just a single important point - don’t call it a ‘War’ on anything.
Like the he ‘War on Drugs’, terrorism is something that cannot be won by military force e.g. because there is no clear opponent, nor has any obvious sign of progress.