You Can't Win At Chess With All Pawns
It was nice to see Paul at Powerline make the same point I made in this post about the notion that we "are creating more terrorists." In a typically fine post today he says:
"But the real issue for purposes of assessing our safety is not the number of terrorists world-wide but their capacity to inflict harm on Americans."
Exactly. If I could eliminate a seasoned terrorist trained in advanced weaponry and replace him with an inept boob who couldn't operate a toaster oven (or two or five or ten), I would make that trade all day. Destroying terrorist capital, both physical and human, can only be viewed as progress. It bewilders me that this logic gets so little respect in the debate over the GWOT and takes a back seat to winning the idealogical battle. I agree that we have to focus on that too, we have to provide Muslim societies an alternative vision, but don't short change the demoralizing effects of success against capabilities. We can't give short shrift to the fact that people generally don't desire to join a team that consistently loses and is constantly deprived of resources. Making terrorism a futile business will keep its ranks restrained while we fight their idealogy with a competing idealogy.
"But the real issue for purposes of assessing our safety is not the number of terrorists world-wide but their capacity to inflict harm on Americans."
Exactly. If I could eliminate a seasoned terrorist trained in advanced weaponry and replace him with an inept boob who couldn't operate a toaster oven (or two or five or ten), I would make that trade all day. Destroying terrorist capital, both physical and human, can only be viewed as progress. It bewilders me that this logic gets so little respect in the debate over the GWOT and takes a back seat to winning the idealogical battle. I agree that we have to focus on that too, we have to provide Muslim societies an alternative vision, but don't short change the demoralizing effects of success against capabilities. We can't give short shrift to the fact that people generally don't desire to join a team that consistently loses and is constantly deprived of resources. Making terrorism a futile business will keep its ranks restrained while we fight their idealogy with a competing idealogy.
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:33 AM
2 Comments:
Thanks for the explanation on timing the turn-around. It seems very difficult to do. I guess Dell and Intel are turn-around now?
Don't you think that the source of the islamic terrorism is regimes such as Iran, Syria, etc? Would it be much easier to fight crazy regimes instead of a religion?
Yes I do. I don't mean to suggest that we are fighting a religion, we are fighting a supremacist idealogy. That can take the form of people withoug state power like OBL or people with state power like the Iranian mullahs. We must get the Iranian regime. Syria is a middleman for hire, neutralize their sugar daddy Iran and you neutralize them. But the difference between Ahmadinahead and OBL is simply state power, we should focus on both.
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