Can't win the WOT! Or the WOC! Or the WOP!


This ain't gonna happen with Islamofascists

Okay, I do have some thoughts after all on President Bush's usually-snipped answer to Matt Lauer this morning. The heart of the exchange went like this:

Lauer: “You said to me a second ago, one of the things you'll lay out in your vision for the next four years is how to go about winning the war on terror. That phrase strikes me a little bit. Do you really think we can win this war on terror in the next four years?”

President Bush: “I have never said we can win it in four years.”

Lauer: “So I’m just saying can we win it? Do you see that?”

President Bush: “I don't think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world –- let's put it that way. I have a two pronged strategy. On the one hand is to find them before they hurt us, and that's necessary. I’m telling you it's necessary. The country must never yield, must never show weakness [and] must continue to lead. To find al-Qaida affiliates who are hiding around the world and … harm us and bring ‘em to justice –- we're doing a good job of it. I mean we are dismantling the al-Qaida as we knew it. The long-term strategy is to spread freedom and liberty, and that's really kind of an interesting debate. You know there's some who say well, ‘You know certain people can't self govern and accept, you know, a former democracy.’ I just strongly disagree with that. I believe that democracy can take hold in parts of the world that are now non-democratic and I think it's necessary in order to defeat the ideologies of hate. History has shown that it can work, that spreading liberty does work.

Amazing that until just a few minutes ago all I had heard since early this morning on radio news reports was - Bush said terror war is unwinnable!

Obviously, not sound-snipping the answer reveals that what Bush said was in fact thoughtful, probing and well considered. He just blew the first sentence in a political sense. This is a war of a highly unconventional nature. Only two weeks after 9/11's attacks I wrote,

This war will not have a clear ending in either time or space. There will be no surrender ceremony of abject capitulation by the enemy. Victory, whatever that word will actually indicate, will be neither final nor obvious. To the question, "How will we know we've won?" the answer is, "We won't."

To buttress my point, and the president's let's change the question:

Q: Do you really think we can win the fight against crime in the next four years?

Would you not think it either arrogant or stupid for a president to answer, "Absolutely, and by the end of my second term there will be no more crime"?

Or let's take a time machine back to 1964:

Q: President Johnson, do you really think we can win the "War on Poverty" in the next four years?

And this answer - "Yes, by the 1968 presidential election, there will be no poor people anywhere in America."

We can "win" the fight against crime or the war on poverty only in the sense that fewer criminal acts are committed or fewer people live in poverty. But can anyone expect that the time will come when America will have no crime and no poverty, as much as we desire that day to come? Not I.

So it is with terrorism. Terrorism is a tool, a technique and in many cases a raging act of nihilism. Anyone expecting victory over that in the same manner as how Japan surrendered aboard USS Missouri is not thinking. I wrote in October 2001:

Almost everywhere in the world where international terrorism grows we find poverty and human oppression, especially toward women. Tribalism and ethnic hatred also remain strong. We Americans are more free of these oppressions than almost any other people. We and our western allies must lead the way out for those people. It will take a new kind of national commitment. It will cost a fortune. It will require new kinds of armies, armies not of soldiers but of engineers, agriculturalists, financiers, administrators and educators.

It will take decades and there are no guarantees.

Yet the war can be won in substantial and substantive terms by enabling democracies abroad. The race is whether we can do so sufficiently to lower the threshold of threat before al Qaeda et. al. can successfully carry out an WMD attack against us.

by Donald Sensing, 8/31/2004 06:29:24 PM. Permalink |