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Posted on 10/01/2006 5:18:08 AM PDT by FairPoint
War opponents are cheerfully heralding the National Intelligence Council’s national intelligence estimate that portrays our war in Iraq as the catalyst for increasing terrorist volunteers.
Completed in April but recently cited in The New York Times, the NIE reportedly assesses that we’re creating more terrorists by fighting them. Apparently, the alternative strategy is hoping that the enemy will surrender to the relentless blows of our acquiescence.
(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...
The report was apparently leaked by Mary McCarthy several months ago. The NYT held it until just before the election, and then published it in classic "October Surprise" fashion.
And why hasn't Mary McCarthy been prosecuted?
Yup!
been that way since the first caveman battles
The French have proved that surrender stops the enemy from shooting at you. (Although it evidently doesn't stop the enemy from burning your cars. Villepinhead is still working on that one.)
I see no reductions in the near future of willing suicide bombers and terrorists because that is the barbaric culture the civilized world has exposed. Those barbarians loath anything that signifys Jewish or Christian success, and believe Islam has to battle those successes.
I am tired of being portrayed as weak and sissified because our leaders have lost the gonads to stand up and fight for our way of life because "there may be some women and children hurrrrrt if we fight back.
Divide and conquor is the strategy of Islam. Blow up a few people, get some nukes, make threats, and scare people one by one into submission.
That is not exactly the way I want to be represented, or how I intend to go down. We have to make that clear to the panty waists in DC.
I would like to ask all the reality-challenged anti-Iraq war people why: if Iraq is not about fighting Al-qaeda, why are we fighting A-Q there? Furthermore if Iraq has nothing to do with the fight against terrorism, why does A-Q believe that it does? The argument that the war in Iraq is not about fighting terrorism is so absurd as to make it ridiculous to discuss. The fact is A-Q views Iraq as more important than anything else. Why the anti-Iraq morons can't view the obvious stuns me.
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It's not just war opponents, and it's certainly not cheerful. I think that theres a very deep strain of resistance to bad news that hurts our war effort, and makes our point of view increasinly myopic. We're not going to be able to win until we see what we're fighting clearly.
Completed in April but recently cited in The New York Times, the NIE reportedly assesses that we’re creating more terrorists by fighting them. Apparently, the alternative strategy is hoping that the enemy will surrender to the relentless blows of our acquiescence.
Where in the NIE summary does it say that?
Central to their alleged analysis is that Iraq has become a pivotal tool for attracting fanatical jihadists in numbers so vast and diverse as to present an agility that’s quite beyond our scope of competence.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. It just requires the ability of our side to look at what's causing the problem, and to apply solutions.
Assuming the full report bears out the media’s portrayal of it thus far, one wonders about its value as a guide. Yes, Iraq has been used to generate terrorist support against the U.S. — thank you, NIC, for sharing your report’s vice-like grip of the obvious. Now please tell us how that’s illustrative of why we shouldn’t be there.
No one is suggesting to cut and run. Furthermore, intelligence reports are just that. Reports. They're not plans, courses of action, or objectives. That's for policy makers to decide. The function of intelligence is to assess enemy capabilities and intentions. Just because there's an iceberg in the water, doesn't mean we can't sail. We just need to find a way around it.
The enemy’s accelerated recruitment is the natural bi-product of its resistance so what on Earth is the point behind this finding and why does it provide comfort to anti-war advocates? Never in our history has the enemy’s resistance become the self-serving justification for our not stepping up the war against them.
Here's where we get into the fundamental misunderstanding of what 'the enemy' is. First off, this war is so deeply unpopular in the Middle East, that most of the Arab nations would be on a war footing with us were they democracies. (An interesting bit of irony.
Al-Qa'ida, while a very unpopular organization religiously, is extremely popular politically. Their claim to being a legimate Arab resistance movement rallies Arabs in large numbers to their banner.
The trick being, you need something to resist first. In the normal course of events, AQ wasn't a very large organization, and was populated by true diehard fanatics. Their philosophy simply isn't popular enough to attract more. AQ siezes on popular issues and takes them as their own. Most Arabs are disgusted with the cowardice of their own governments, and laud UBL as a Pancho Villa like guy who may be a criminal, but one who's sticking it to the gringos.
Lumping them all in together may be politically convenient, but it's 100% against the principals of counterterrorism. There, you must seek to separate the communities, which are the real centers of gravity, from the resistance. Dismissing them all as 'enemy' with a brush of the hand is completely counterprodutive.
By that standard, bad-acting forces would have license to attack with impunity. “Don’t attack your attackers because they might again attack” isn’t much of a winning tactic.
It sure can be in counterinsurgency. The use of firepower can be downright detrimental to your chances of victory.
America has had only two reasons for putting an end to its fighting in one location or another: winning, or no longer believing in the effort. Standing down because of the enemy’s predictable opposition and its equally foreseeable increase of fighters isn’t worth the pathetic prize of angering a few less jihadists.
It's a little more complicated than that. Simply put, the Muslim world, from presidents in Pakistan to taxi drivers in Tunisia, don't like how we do business. We need their help fighting terrorism, and they can make our lives hell by doing a halfhearted job. Terrorists aren't created, but the conditions in which they incubate and hatch can be made better or worse, depending on how we go about conducting the GWOT.
According to The New York Times, unnamed counter-terrorism officials associated with this report have asserted that we’re preoccupied more with combating terrorists than with how they’re created — suggesting that the emphasis should be reversed. This school of thought seems incredibly counter-intuitive because it forgets that no one has control over the power of someone else’s ingrained delusion. We have consistently vanquished the ideologies of past enemies’ only after definitively and unambiguously crushing the mechanisms that would otherwise give them continued hope for victory.
FR loves the WWII comparison. As I said earlier, the centers of gravity are in the Muslim communities themselves. Trying to apply conventional maneuver warfare logic to a counterinsurgency doesn't work, unless you're willing to occupy and break the will of all those communities that produce conditions favorable to jihadist recruitment.
What’s additionally infuriating about the report’s supposed stance is its blind allegiance to the position that battlefronts should be chosen in a fashion not so objectionable to the enemy. Whatever angers the fanatical jihadists most should be done more often not less because that very result usually exposes what they perceive as their greatest weakness — that just goes to the nature of humans.
Again, a fundamental misunderstanding. Actual hard core jihadists are upset about Iraq, but they're upset about a lot of things. What's different now is the the Arab world is equal upset, and this allows AQ to absorb that anger into their own ranks, giving them a surging river of manpower, funds and support.
Trying to avoid angering hard core jihadists is a waste of time. Only death will satisfy them. Trying to avoid angering the Arab world in such a way that it would be beneficial to terrorist recruiting is much more doable.
Yet, these same voices so eager to champion the NIE’s analysis also wish to ignore some of its other parts — such a bin Ladin’s repeated contention that Iraq is the main battleground in their war against the West. It makes you wonder. How are we on the wrong front if the enemy calls it the central front?
It's the central front because Bin Laden knows how to tap into a tidal wave of Arab public opinion when he sees the opportunity. This is proving to be a golden opportunity fo him. Not just does this war increase jihadist recruits in the short term. It's also pushing his fringe, unpopular religious views closer to the mainstream. That's why people in places as distant or non-Arab as London or Indonesia are starting to answer the call to jihad.
On a much more distant second note, he's probably happy to have less troops looking for him and AQ senior leadership.
If you really want to strengthen terrorists, you cut and run.
I'm not anti-Iraq war by any means, but I'll give that one a shot.
Iraq wasn't about fighting AQ, it was about regime change and WMDs. The AQ guys that set up resistance did so because the Arab world really doesn't want us there. AQ knows that fighting us makes them popular, and believes that terrorism is the best tool to make us leave.
Does AQ care more about us being in Iraq than they do the fact that we have women's rights, religious freedom, or that we fly kites? No, they really don't. But they sure as heck know an opportunity when they see it, and Iraq is an opportunity to portray themselves as an Arab resistance movement.
Just like in WWII, when fighting Nazis made more Nazis.
One of the main anti-war arguments is that A-Q is fighting is in Iraq because we're there. I guess I'm stating the obvious, but Al-Qaeda could have also tried to destabilize Hussein's regime. Instead Al-Zarqawi appeared to have worked with Hussein. Critics of the war promote all the well-known anti-war arguments and ignore the fact that Hussein himself was a terrorist with ties to A-Q and other Islamicist terrorist orgs. For that reason and others Hussein had to go. Leaving a vacuum would have made it far easier for A-Q to take over.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." -Manuel II Paleologus
That's a good point, and one that we can often kick ourselves for. We hand billions of dollars a year to places like Egypt and Palestine, and for the favor they have middle school cirriculum that reads like a Michael Moore creative writing assignement. In many cases, we're paying top dollar to people who teach their children to hate us. Thank you, U.S. Departement of State.
When the people in Iraq see that the Jihadists are blowing up lots of innocent women and children, while the Americans are building schools, it is much harder to swallow Bin Laden's and Al Jazerra's lies.
A mixed bag, there. Most Arabs don't trust our motives, even when we do good things. They think that we're just trying to butter the locals up so we can stay longer and control the oil flow from Iraq.
For any lies we counter, there are 10 more that swirl around it. Truth be told, Arabs believe what they want to believe, and lie whenever the fancy hits them. Reality has little bearing on the subject.
I don't believe that muslims are compatible with anyone but other muslims, and even that is debatable. They are way too angry and insecure. There are only stages of discontent, each with it's attendant stage of violence or reproach towards everyone else. In this war, personally, I prefer that we make them mad as often and as completely as we can. As long as we still, as a society, believe that there is any hope of living with Islam we will suffer murder, rape, torture and destruction at their hands. "The West" needs a shot of understanding as to what's going on here. Far too few do. So let them rage and rampage and escalate their jihad! And let us respond in kind, preferably preemptively. And if I am wrong, if there are muslims out there who just "want to live in peace" they are first going to have to go to war openly and totally with their bellicose brethren or they will be lumped in with them. This is a historical inevitability.
"For any lies we counter, there are 10 more that swirl around it. Truth be told, Arabs believe what they want to believe, and lie whenever the fancy hits them. Reality has little bearing on the subject."
There in lies the heart of much of the problem. When faced with a psychology that is willing to deny much of reality, only naked force will do. It has worked before, such as when the whirling dervishes were put down at Omderman.
That's almost new tagline material, there.
And if I am wrong, if there are muslims out there who just "want to live in peace" they are first going to have to go to war openly and totally with their bellicose brethren or they will be lumped in with them. This is a historical inevitability.
Here's the deal. Islamic culture is in danger of being annihilated by modern culture, technology, and politics. There simply isn't room for them to hide any longer. The world has gotten too small.
Within the next 50 to 100 years, Islam will mutate into either a peaceful, docile faith that pretty much denies it's heritage, or into a shambling, psychotic cult. Possibly it may fracture into both. What it can't do is exist as it has for hundreds of years. It's core teachings are simply incompatible with reality, and are losing their ability to insulate it's followers from the outside influences.
What we're seeing now is that last charge of the Islamic light brigade, into the jaws of an enemy they can't beat. They'll cause us some damage, to be sure, but victory is not in the cards. At some point, they'll have to choose either to join the modern world, at the cost of some core beliefs, or to hide from reality by shutting out the outside world, physically, politically, and economically. That's when the war you describe will come.
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