Would you accept that an enormous increase in the burglary rate would constitue a failure of such a War?
Except that Bush argues it gives him the executive powers of Superman as CinC in time of war. He and his hordes of apologists don’t think it’s rhetoric. They think it makes him above the law and above the Constitution.
I didn’t say “solely because of Iraq” no need to post something that just agrees with what I was saying.
You’d have to demonstrate we’re helping terrorists by killing them. Just because they’ve increased the frequency of their attacks doesn’t mean they are winning. The Germans killed more Americans in 1944 than in 1943, that doesn’t mean they were “winning” at that point.
Trying to boil down the success or failure based on number of terrorism incidents isn’t an accurate way to analayze the matter. We could also compare number of successful U.S. operations against terrorist cells/forces/individuals in 2004 or 2005 versus in 2001 or 2002, more than likely those numbers have gone up as well. It’d be nice if we could easily or conveniently measure our success/failure in this “war on terror” but we can’t, and I’m suspicious of any attempt to engage in such simplistic analysis because it usually seems to be born out of a desire to either 1) demonstrate we’re winning/overstate our positives or 2) demonstrate we’re losing/overstate our negatives.
Only if we define the War on Terror on extremely strict and disingenuous grounds.
We’ve been in this thing since 9/11 and even I still can’t think up a better or more accurate term than “war on terror.”
Well, I’d argue that we’re helping terrorism by killing terrorist suspects and any innocents who happen to be in the same general area at the time.
I thought we’d agreed that this was a very poor analogy? If you’re persisting with it, are you suggesting that there will be a “1945” in which TWAT yields a lower incidence of terrorism below 2001 levels in future years?
Then why engage in it if you can never even tell if it’s productive or counterproductive?
I thought we agreed that it was a misnomer?
It is, but how else are we to describe it?
“The greater global conflict against terrorist, militant, and extremist groups which are independently seeking to do harm against the United States and its allies”?
I lament the fact that it’s a matter too complicate to easily label, as that means it is going to be a quandry for some time.
As long as you try to apply terms like win/loss or winning/losing I’ll keep using references to other wars.
This isn’t a win/loss type thing. The global “conflict” is more like law enforcement than an actual war. The difference being sometimes we are forced into war to successfully try and perform the law enforcement duties (talking about Afghanistan.)
Police departments aren’t about “winning” against criminals, it’s about providing a certain degree of protective presence against criminals and in attempting to apprehend and remove criminals from society.
Rising crime rates don’t mean the police department is “losing.” It means it is either 1) not dealing with crime as effectively as it could or 2) there are external factors that may be out of the PDs control that are contributing to out of control crime rates.
How about just “foreign policy”? And those few aspects of TWAT which impact upon airports and the like “domestic policy”? In fact, like pretty much every other industrialised democracy, the US could simply have a “counterterrorism policy” just like it has policies for anything else, and cut the melodramatic and laughably inaccurate hyperbole altogether.
But do you accept that it is possible in principle that the War on Terror itself is what is increasing terrorism rates so dramatically? Again, the analogy here is the police not merely failing to decrease crime rates but actively causing their increase.
Put simply, what is the point of the War on Terror, whatever it is, if you can never tell whether it’s helping or harming?
Yes, but I wouldn’t say that’s reason to stop trying to deal with the problem, rather it means we should deal with it another way.
Law enforcement brings a great analogy with it. The Rodney King beating was an example of law enforcement causing way more good than harm over a short period of time, the riots that followed were devastating.
I think this is one of the questions that will be a problem for world leaders for the forseeable future.
All I know is, after events like 9/11 there’s really no option for not taking some form of action.
Of course: The “counter-terrorism policy” is synonymous with “dealing with the problem of terrorism”. I suggest that any policy which increases the incidence of the problem it seeks to address is failing.
And action has been taken: security at airports and on aeroplanes has been dramatically increased in the US, and this can reasonably be said to be a success of the counter-terrorism policy of the US. Stretching that policy a little, the Taleban training camps where the dead terrorists met have been moved south or disbanded: arguably another success (although I’m not sure they were any more of a threat after the death of the hijackers).
As for pretty much every other element of TWAT, it looks very much like the fallacy of “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done”.
I honestly think there would be less terrorism in the world if the US had simply embarked on a War Against Lacksadaisical Airline Security, while pursuing individual international criminals like any other country.
“War on Terror” is a stupid phrase, since the enemy we’re dealing with is Al Qaeda, not “terror” in general. Al Qeada’s goal, long term, is the establishment of a Radical Taliban-style Muslim theocracy from Morocco to Indonesia. That would be victory for them and defeat for us and for humanity in general, including the poor saps who’d have to live in this theocracy.
Oh, and their short term goals are the destruction of Israel, the removal of all western presence from the Middle East, and the establishment of AQ sympathetic governments in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Quite so, Larry. And what was the main reason why, say, Iran voted in a hardline populist idiot in place of a thinking moderate? Because he could point to the US and say “See? It will be us next”. The War on Terror allows political extremists in Islamic countries to play the External Threat card, electorally successfully.
The Iranian election was complex and I’m not competent to speak about it authoritatively. But I don’t think the results can be attributed simply to a fear of the US in the general populace. The real power in Iran resides with the Mullahs, who are not terribly popular with the people.
Don’t get me wrong. I think the Bush administration is riddled with fools, and their anti-terror record is one of disasterous incompetence. But Al Qaeda is a problem any administration will have to confront. I recommend reading Richard Clarke on the subject.
to extend your analogy, what sort of riot do you suppose would have resulted if, unable to catch up with Rodney’s car, the pigs used a shoulder launched missile which blew him up as welll as 25 bystanders.
(the Philadelphia/M.O.V.E. option)
Of course, but this was the Presidential election which is based solely on popularity. This guy getting in was a genuine surprise - the question must be asked why he succeeded. One look at his vastly anti-American campaign should convince you.
praise Jesue, at last a description that makes some sense.
It THAT’s the worst case scenario, fuck, bring it on.
Citizens of thje Caliphate:Sorry 'bout your luck.
When you get fed up with the bullshit, as you soon will without the boogeyman of the Crusaders breathing down your neck, you will vote for drugs, sex and rock 'n roll like any sensible people.
Like I said, I really don’t know that much about Iranian politics. I’m sure there is a fair amount of anti-American sentiment there. I mean where isn’t there anti-American sentiment these days? However, from what I’ve read, there’s also a desire to modernize and secularize, and a strong dislike of the Mullahs on the part of the youth, at least. Of course a desire to be more modern and free isn’t contrary to a dislike of America.
I’m not disagreeing with you. I really have no idea what to make of Iran. My Dad was there about 2 years ago for vacation. (The trip before that he went to Uzbekistan. My Dad has interesting ideas about vacations.) Maybe I’ll ask him.
It’s hard to conclude too much from the election results because theSupreme Council of Jurisprudents “vets” all the candidates, and they have nothing to leafn from Stalin about the effec tive use of a central committee to control the political process before it even begins.
They are totally unshamed by knocking off a vast majority of the legislatyive candidates before the ballots go out. I think they did this in the prez election as well
This is really just a non sequitur.
(Also, I actually mistyped in my Rodney King analogy, should have been “doing more harm than good.”
Prevention like that is only part of the problem. Do you suggest we just ignore terrorist training camps and international terrorist leaders? Eventually these guys are going to get a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon. It’s “scaremongering” today, but anyone who really doesn’t think a terrorist group is ever going to get their hands on one of those weapons is fooling themselves. We need to proactively work to stop that from happening.
Are they still “poor saps” if they want to live in a theocracy? We all assume that the people in the Middle East want “freedom” as we define it, but I’ve got to wonder how many people in Afghanistan are living now almost exactly as they lived under the Taliban. Women may vote, but they still wear their burkas.
The key to destroying fundamentalism (or at least marginalizing it to inefficacy) is wealth. Generally, the more wealthy and materialistic that people get, the less religiously fundamental they become. I’ve often flippantly remarked that the War on Terror will be won with blue jeans and MTV. This is exactly what the fundamentalists are fighting: the decadence of Western culture is not its freedom, but its materialism. They don’t want their young people lusting after iPods and paying $3.99 a month to get the latest ringtones.
I’ve always been somewhat bemused by the prevelant notion that the people in the Middle East are secretly longing to cast off all of their inhibitions-- that women long to cast off their burkas and the authority of their fathers. A few months back, there was a thread in which the OP was outraged that some women’s groups were fighting for Muslim women to be allowed to wear their burkas-- in the OP’s mind, fighting to put them back in the clothing of repression. I guess it must have been utterly unthinkable to the OP that women woudl chose to dress like that when they had other options.
We sometimes seem to see Middle Eastern women as millions of prisoners begging to be set free. Somehow they ignore the fact that most people believe what they were raised to believe.