Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Donald Rumsfeld's Untimely Epiphany.
Donald Rumsfeld, December 7, 2006:
- Q: "With what you know now, what might you have done differently in Iraq?"
Rumsfeld: "I don't think I would have called it the 'war on terror.' I don't mean to be critical of those who have. Certainly, I have used the phrase frequently. Why do I say that? Because the word 'war' conjures up World War II more than it does the Cold War. It creates a level of expectation of victory and an ending within 30 or 60 minutes of a soap opera. It isn't going to happen that way. Furthermore, it is not a 'war on terror.' Terror is a weapon of choice for extremists who are trying to destabilize regimes and, [through] a small group of clerics, impose their dark vision on all the people they can control. So 'war on terror' is a problem for me."
- In defeating the governments of Germany and Japan, the United States had defeated the enemy it was fighting--end of story.
That isn't the case in the "War on Terror". This war is being fought against an amorphous entity that exists within and apart from the governments of any country. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 aren't a government, they aren't financed through government taxes, and they don't have factories, roads, and buildings to bomb.
Defeating the government of Iraq (or Iran, or Pakistan, or even Afghanistan, if you can call the Taliban a government) won't stop the terrorists. It ends those governments, no question, but it doesn't defeat the terrorists. In fact in many ways it aids them.
The terrorists are groups of individuals. They're financed by individuals. Destroying the governments of the countries in which they operate will no more stop their functioning than it would stop a religion.
How to fight a war against millions of individuals is the essential question the Bush administration has failed to grasp. Declaring "war" on an abstract noun -- in this case "terror" -- may make for great soundbites, but bombing it turns out to be problematic. Ultimately you end up bombing places you think it may be hiding near, but that tends to create more problems than it solves -- especially for the innocent people who happen to live in the vicinity.
What you end up with is a global game of "whack-a-mole", the carnival game in which no matter how hard you swing at the mole, it disappears while another one pops up somewhere else. You can turn around and shoot the carnival owner, of course, but then you have to contend with his family. Do you shoot them, too? Then what?
Welcome to "whack-a-mole".
The hard answer, of course, and one that makes for very poor soundbites, is that it's impossible to stop individual acts of terror, especially through conventional warfare. You can no more bomb away "terror" than you can bomb away "sin" or "ugliness" or "murder".
