10 May 2008
Our Enemies
Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin and Khaled Meshal are only our enemies if global politics is a zero-sum game. (In fact, in a zero-sum game, they are all enemies of each other, too.) Some of those players are more subtle than Gabriel Schoenfeld shows himself to be in his OpEd article, “Our Enemies and the Election,” that appeared in the May 10-11, 2008, Wall Street Journal.
As long as we have a no-negotiation-in-any-circumstances attitude, there will never be a “victorious” end to the Iraq War. The fiction of a centralized terrorist movement called Al Qaeda, tying together merely co-sympathetic antiestablishment groups in Spain, Indonesia, the Levant, Pakistan, the Caucasus and elsewhere, has energized the U.S. war effort in Iraq. None of these supposed component groups is made up of cave-dwelling operatives. They are all as careful and well-informed as the Iraqi insurgents, something that can’t be said of our own Pentagon planners.
It will indeed be a smart strategy for the insurgents in Iraq to step up the violence in October in order to bring America to our senses that we have placed ourselves hostage to their own fratricide.
Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin and Khaled Meshal are only our enemies if global politics is a zero-sum game. (In fact, in a zero-sum game, they are all enemies of each other, too.) Some of those players are more subtle than Gabriel Schoenfeld shows himself to be in his OpEd article, “Our Enemies and the Election,” that appeared in the May 10-11, 2008, Wall Street Journal.
As long as we have a no-negotiation-in-any-circumstances attitude, there will never be a “victorious” end to the Iraq War. The fiction of a centralized terrorist movement called Al Qaeda, tying together merely co-sympathetic antiestablishment groups in Spain, Indonesia, the Levant, Pakistan, the Caucasus and elsewhere, has energized the U.S. war effort in Iraq. None of these supposed component groups is made up of cave-dwelling operatives. They are all as careful and well-informed as the Iraqi insurgents, something that can’t be said of our own Pentagon planners.
It will indeed be a smart strategy for the insurgents in Iraq to step up the violence in October in order to bring America to our senses that we have placed ourselves hostage to their own fratricide.
Comments:
Post a Comment
