Could anything be more stupid than this?
“One of the many layers of the arguments for invading Iraq focused on the difficulties of waging a serious war on terror from a distant remove. Being based in Iraq helps us not only because of actual bases; but because the American presence there diverts terrorist attention away from elsewhere. By confronting them directly in Iraq, we get to engage them in a military setting that plays to our strengths rather than to theirs’. Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn’t always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open.”
Andrew Sullivan, who wrote it, is not a fool, and, often very sharp. No doubt it is an admirable intellectual discipline to pretend that that George W Bush is an enormously wise and far-sighted leader, whose every action is part of a well-judged plan. It’s certainly closer to the truth than the Steve Bell ‘grinning chimp’ caricature. The intellectual muscles, the poise, and the self-assurance which this kind of high wire pretence demands are all worth having. But then, sometimes, you walk on a wire that just isn’t there. “Terrorism”, in the post above, is just such a wire.
For a start, it shows the damage done by the suggestio falsi that the Iraqis had anything to do with Osama bin Laden and that invading Iraq was in some way striking back at the people who crashed into the WTC. They are two different sets of enemies. A botched occupation of Iraq has hugely increased the number of Iraqi guerrillas without diminishing the number of Al Qaeda ones at all. Calling them all “terrorists” is completely unhelpful.
Secondly, and more seriously, the whole point about guerrilla warfare is that the enemy does not stick around to be hit back. It is implicit in Sullivan’s argument that militant Muslims are flocking from all over the Middle East to fight against the Americans in Iraq, where they can all be safely killed. But, though there was certainly a degree of “Jihad tourism” in Afghanistan, this was only possible because it was sponsored and encouraged by the Pakistanis, the Americans and the Saudis. The situation in Iraq, if it goes really sour, will be much more like the West Bank, or Algeria under the French, which are both almost entirely self-sustaining in “terrorists”. Which leads to the third point. Most of the people killed in this kind of warfare are innocent civilians. Every time the occupying army kills a civilian, they make another “terrorist” or “Terrorist sympathiser”. A project of drawing the “terrorists” all into one spot and killing them is like trying to eradicate dandelions by blowing the puffballs away.