Tuesday, 24 June 2003

Lying to ourselves. L.T. Smash (via Instapundit) says "it's not over yet" in the War on Terror:

After the September 2001 terror attacks, we were faced with two options.

The first option was to look within ourselves, to attempt to understand what had happened and how it had occurred. We would examine not just the intelligence and security failures, but how our foreign and defense policies had provoked such rage against us. We would then invest heavily in intelligence and homeland defense, to make sure it would Never Happen AgainTM. We might launch surgical strikes against those who attacked us, but only when we had sufficient evidence of guilt or complicity and could be certain that collateral damage would be minimal or non-existent. Finally, we would re-tool our foreign policy to be less offensive to the Islamic world, encourage Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians, and pull back our military from the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. Hopefully, this would remove any incentive for terrorism against the United States, and we could go on with our happy and peaceful lives.

I call this option "withdrawal." It is exactly what our enemies hoped that we would do.

I've asked this before, but: What is it with warbloggers and this pathological fear of introspection? Reviewing our intelligence lapses is not "withdrawal." Improving our homeland defense is not navel-gazing. Engaging in diplomacy is not a sign of weakness. We are not so resource-limited that we must give up these pithy luxuries in order to gird our loins and take the battle to the enemy. We can agree that America's best approach to preventing future September 11ths is not to withdraw into our shell and be less offensive in the future—and we can agree this without automatically ruling out public accountability for elected officials, effective and credible homeland security, and reform of our turf-war-happy intelligence community. These goals are not mutually exclusive.

L.T. Smash continues:

The second option was to carry the fight to the enemy. We would take away their sanctuaries, force them to go deep underground, and hunt them to the ends of the Earth. We would undermine or overthrow governments that supported them. We would sever them from their networks of financial support, disrupt their planning, and arrest their leaders in the dark of night. We would humiliate and discredit them. Rather than wait for them to strike at our weak points, we would force them to confront our strength. We would draw them into battle, and slaughter them. We would sow discord and division amongst their ranks. Finally, we would bring the war to their homes, and kill them where they live.

I call this strategy "engagement." This is how we win wars.

You might as well say "I call these strategies Democratic and Republican" and be done with it: There's no other reason to group our "options" into these two artificial categories. There's no categorical limit on our ability to take the fight to the enemy—none that would explain why we've failed to conduct public hearings into 9/11 intelligence lapses, why our states and cities face unfunded mandates to meet new homeland security obligations, or why we had to burn our diplomatic bridges to fight a war in Iraq. We fought a war in Europe four years ago and handled the diplomacy with far more aplomb; simply declaring "Iraq was an either-or between diplomacy or force; we chose force, it was the right choice, let's move on" is hardly a complete account of the last six months, and lets a lot of people off the hook who should be held accountable.

If FDR could appoint a bipartisan commission to investigate Pearl Harbor, then there's no reason why GWB couldn't appoint one for September 11th: It would not have impeded the march to Afghanistan and Iraq. There's no reason why "Homeland Security" has to be a color-coded joke: We could have had (and still could have) a serious look at securing our infrastructure without impacting the war effort. There's nothing that says we could have won Canada or Turkey or Germany's support for the Iraq war, but Dubya's attempts suffered a lack of sincerity: France may have been wrong to oppose us, but we were wrong to deceive them. A bold leader would have declared that Saddam must go whether he has WMDs or not, instead of trying to manufacture the proof we didn't have and strong-arm other nations into accepting it. Saddam had plenty of sins that justified armed intervention to remove him, and opening up a real live debate on how well the Peace of Westphalia is holding up after 400 years just might do wonders for America's reputation and security and silence the critics who fear a world where America alone determines the limits of national sovereignty.

I don't know who that bold leader is, much to my dismay; Dubya passed up the opportunity, I don't think Gore would have invaded Iraq (I do think he'd have taken the war to Afghanistan, though), and so far the 2004 candidates haven't wowed me with boldness yet. But I refuse to accept that I have to choose either an effective military strategy or a persuasive diplomatic strategy, either an offense or a defense, with no possibility of having both. I think we can do better.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:10 am. comments.