07/10/2008
The War on Terror...update
Flying back from Oregon the other day (I was out at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials a great event if you have the opportunity to catch it in four years or further down the road), I read a June 30, 2008 article from The Weekly Standard that I had put aside by Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Gerecht asked the question, ‘Are we safer?’ post-9/11.
“Safer than before we invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein?”
Gerecht argues we are.
“Post 9/11, under President Bush, the situation changed drastically, as it certainly would have changed also under a President Gore. What is striking about (Barack) Obama’s Iraq- obsessed critique of the Bush presidency is his unwillingness to give any credit where credit is obviously due. Today in the mainstream press, with its pronounced anti-Bush reflexes, we are more likely to see articles and op-eds about America’s unfair and labyrinthine visa system than about its effectiveness in our counterterrorism campaign. (And yes, the system is offensive, inflexible, and denies entry to many innocent, talented, and potentially pro-American Arabs, Pakistanis, and Iranians.) But if Obama wins in November, we can be assured that he will leave it in place. It is just too effective in complicating the operational planning of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
“As president, Obama would also likely leave untouched the intelligence and security liaison relationships energetically developed by the Bush administration. Listening to the Illinois senator’s speeches about America’s current place in the world, one would think because of our many transgressions, we no longer have helpful friends.”
Gerecht points out that cooperation on the intelligence front between the United States and Europe, for example, has blossomed; with both recognizing Europe is actually the key battleground, especially in Britain with its large Pakistani immigrant community. Here and in France and Germany, Iraq isn’t where European jihadists place their emphasis, but rather the war in Afghanistan
Gerecht:
“It is impossible to overstate the importance of Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, and France’s internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, to our fight against al Qaeda and its allied groups. If European-passport holding jihadists get past the European services, the odds are not great that the FBI is going to catch them on this side of the Atlantic.” Gerecht adds “Obama could fairly criticize the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress for its post-9/11 handling of the FBI.”
Yet Obama has said zero about “Europe’s essential role in America’s defense against Islamic radicalism,” as Gerecht observes. Then adds:
“Obama is not alone in under-appreciating what the Europeans are doing for the United States. Focused on the failure of the continental Europeans to fight well – or often at all – in Afghanistan, the American Right tends to overlook their contribution to the larger battle against Islamic extremism.”
And, “does Obama really think al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts are ‘stronger’ now after the world’s principal security services have been focusing on the organization for seven years, and when well-known Islamists and the Arab media are seriously debating the ethics that allow young men and women to slaughter civilians in the name of Allah?”
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Re Pakistan, Gerecht comments:
“The increase in violence in Pakistan does not mean we are less safe; it means the Pakistanis are beginning to tackle the excruciatingly difficult problem of extirpating bin Ladenism from regions of the country where it put down deep roots. Jihadist sentiments are now widespread in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal areas, the North-West Frontier Province, and even the Punjab, the critical geographic and cultural bridge to India. Reversing this growth will likely be an erratic, ugly process as Pakistan’s reborn democracy responds to the widespread anger about the American presence in Afghanistan.”
But while this may produce “small waves of jihadists trying to gain access to the West and attack Americans and Europeans,” it is progress nonetheless
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Back to Iraq, Gerecht asks:
“When do we get to start asking whether the Iraq war, with its hard-won-however-imperfect democracy, might actually be a good thing, worth the American blood and treasure? If 85 percent of the Iraqis say it was worth the hellacious voyage, and the unelected Sunni Arab rulers of the region say it was not, might we not think with the former? If millions of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Iraqis vote in the provincial elections, will Obama really want to say, one month before the U.S. presidential elections, that America’s sojourn in Iraq has failed? If Iraq contributes to the current intellectual debates in the Muslim Middle East that seem to be diminishing the ideological appeal of bin Ladenism in Arab lands, might that mean that the bloodshed in Mesopotamia hasn’t been a waste?”
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Hot Spots returns next week.
Brian Trumbore
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