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August 27, 2003
There he goes again....
Bush gave another speech full of tough-talking rhetoric and platitiudes yesterday at the American Foreign Leigon in St. Louis, MO, including the following gem:
Our military is confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other places so our people will not have to confront terrorist violence in New York, or St. Louis, or Los Angeles.This sounds like a basic restatement of what's been called the "Flypaper" theory of war: Create a big target (say, a standing army) in the Middle East and draw all the terrorists there, so our military can kill them off and they won't have the manpower or other capabilities to attack us on our own soil.
Nice theory as far as it goes, I guess, but it has one major, fatal flaw. It seems to presume that there's a finite number of terrorists - that somehow we can get them all to focus on our troops in Iraq so we can kill 'em all, and then they won't be a threat. But that's just not how it works.
Everytime we do something that pisses off more Islamic extremists - stay in Iraq, fail to restore electricity, adequate food, water or security services, kill innocent bystanders or talk about them like they're some sort of barbarians we need to domesticate - we help create more terrorists. The number of terrorists is only limited to the number of people we can sufficiently piss off - and some days it seems like pissing people off is the only thing this administration can do well.
Saying in effect "we're going to keep you busy in Iraq so you can't come get us at home" is little better than outright daring them to come get us here, and we all know how well Bush's last little bit of rhetorical taunting went. Of the 163 people who have died since Bush announced the end of "major combat" operation, 76 of them have been killed since Bush made his "Bring 'em on" dare. The UN headquarters and Jordanian embassy bombings have also happened since his dare.
Richard Perle, one of the most rabid "lets attack Iraq"ers there is, is even now admitting that we've handled things poorly and says that we should turn over Iraq to the Iraqis as soon as possible. Since he's one of the main proponants of the PNAC's "domino theory", for him to be advocating that we get our butts out of there is pretty serious stuff.
In the meantime, we can only hope Bush's mouth doesn't get us into even more trouble. He may think that by waging this war, he's helping to defeat terrorism, but that's only because he fails to understand that new terrorists are created on a consistant basis - and right now, some of the main things helping create them are his policies and his words.
Posted by thorswitch at August 27, 2003 06:25 PM
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