War is Peace. Ignorance is Strength.

Getting Creationism into those Iraqi textbooks would be a real mark of progress.

A few years ago, I felt pretty strongly that the adjective “Orwellian” was overused in describing political discourse. I miss those days.

From the Washington Post article:

“The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react,” Bush said as he sat in the Oval Office with L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq. He added: “The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can’t stand the thought of a free society.”

The snide little Orwellian comments aside, the President seems to be saying that the attacks are happening to detract from the progress being made in Iraq – whether to get the folks back home to focus on the casualties or to make the Iraqis uncertain about their future.

As more and more progress is being made, it becomes increasingly less likely that a Saddam Hussein-style government could return to power which understandably would make the old guard and/or the proponents of an Islamacist-style theocracy more desperate. Since they cannot win by actually defeating the coalition forces in combat, they have to resort to nuisance ambushes and attacking softer targets in the hopes of winning through attrition. The more success the coalition has in rebuilding, the more the attackers have to step up the violence to counteract from it. In which case its going to come down to the political will and resolve to finish the job in order to send the message that the real purpose of the attacks (to get the coalition to fold and go home) will not succeed.

It actually makes sense when you try to honestly understand what is being said rather than setting up strawman arguments about Orwell.

Coming, guys, haven’t you seen any of the White Man’s Burden movies?

“It’s quiet tonight, Captain.”

“Yes, sir — **too quiet**”

When things quiet down, then we’ll know we’re in trouble.

What I don’t understand is how some people are able to view terrorism as a finite resource.

Like the rationale floated by Sullivan and others when the attacks first fell into a regular pace: “The Bush administration planned it this way. They want to deal with the terrorists when they attack our troops in Iraq rather than U.S. citizens in the streets of our cities.” As if, at some point in the future, there will be no more terrorists to deal with (i.e., we’ll kill or arrest them all).

It just seems to me that “terrorism” isn’t something that can used up, destroyed or controlled. At least not without addressing some underlying issues that lead to the creation of fundamentalist ideologues and those they use as their tools.

So, what? When Iraq becomes fully modernized and stable the terrorists will just give up and disappear? We’ll kill them all? They’ll be good losers and shake hands with the troops on their way to another third-world country?

thorley,
You are one wacky kind of guy. Did Japan know it was making great progress in WWII when we dropped the big one at Hiroshima? After all, we were demonstrating a desperate attack against a soft target.

What I don’t understand is how some people can treat terrorism as a finite resource. Of course it is a tactic, not a nation or group of dead-enders.

Should we continue killing and humilating people in other countries and unequivocally supporting governments that do the same and even worse, thereby creating more terrorists?

What if we turn more and more of the world against us? We can’t kill them all.

I think Bush is right that these attacks indicate progress on our part and desperation on the attackers’ part, and these Orwellian references are silly.

When they attack the Red Cross (Crescent), the average Iraqi knows that these people are not on his side. It’s clear that they are attacking people who are there to help Iraqis, not oppress them. It seems that they have given up on trying to rally popular support and are pinning their hopes on driving away helpers before the imminent political changes can become irreversible.

That seems like desperation to me.

Now I know what I haven’t been missing these past few months. And I know why the Cold War has passed into another and sickening phase. How galling – to have defeated Communism in the Soviet Union while it triumphed among the state-paid university elite at home. But they’ll soon be terrorist targets, just like the Red Cross. THEN we will get a real intellectual treat.

I don’t know anyone who says it cannot be expanded

I think you do, dear Weevil: they’re the advocates of the ‘flypaper’ strategy (or was that last season’s Bush justification?). The point is not that terrorists are an ‘infinite’ resource, but that they are a non-discrete resource. Meaning that the ‘one terrorist in Iraq = one less terrorist in the US’ line of reasoning doesn’t come close to being justified.

Nice strawman, though.

Also: call me a snob, but I’ll only consider arguments that the attacks signify ‘desparation’ when those making them spell the word correctly. And will then point out that the IRA must have been pretty bloody desparate to keep sending ‘dead-enders’ out for 20 years or so.

gil:

I’ve been wondering that myself. He seems to imply that I did: at least he shifted from criticizing me by name (or pseudonym) for something else to criticizing some unnamed person’s bad spelling. A self-described snob who makes a point of correcting other people’s spelling might want to be more careful about clarifying his references. Bad spelling isn’t the only kind of bad writing.

As for the more substantial argument, no one has said that the total number of terrorists is absolutely fixed, and I find it odd that Nate should insist that I am the one making a straw man argument. Both william and nate-dogg insist that the number is not “finite”. Either they don’t know the meaning of the word ‘finite’ or they think there could be an infinite number of terrorists, which is absurd.

Here’s an analogy:
I’ve lived in a new apartment for five weeks now. In the first two weeks, I caught 21 mice. Those captured in the second week were generally smaller and (I assume) younger than those captured in the first. Mice reproduce quite rapidly, and it’s not hard to show that two mice could theoretically produce millions in very few years. Is the struggle to keep my apartment rodent-free therefore doomed? A pedant could argue that it is: there’s obviously nothing I can do (on my finite salary) that would make it ABSOLUTELY impossible for any mouse ever to get in. But in the more important sense, it is not doomed. An aggressive mouse-trapping policy has in fact led to the capture of only two mice in the last 3 weeks, and the food in the traps has been undisturbed for several days now. Though I plan to keep the traps baited and cocked, I think the tide has turned.

The idea that guerrillas or terrorists inevitably win is just as absurd as the idea that I shouldn’t have bothered trying to keep the mice out because failure was inevitable.

Woa! The wingnuts are beseiged by mice. Surely that should make the rest of us think twice about associating with them. Is that fellow piggybacking on my healthplan? He’s unclean!

How galling – to have defeated Communism in the Soviet Union while it triumphed among the state-paid university elite at home.

As a member of the state-paid, left-wing elite, I just want to say, “Hi, Charlie!”

But they’ll soon be terrorist targets, just like the Red Cross. THEN we will get a real intellectual treat.

Wouldn’t you rather have ice cream?

A Different Chris,

You suggest that I should:

Think about why the Iraqis aren’t turning any of these “desparate people” in, gil.

Ok. Think about why they are.

From here, according to General Richard Myers:

In terms of intelligence or valuable tips, Iraqi citizens are turning in former regime loyalists who are working against the future of Iraq. And there is a definite rise in those willing to come forward with information on subversive activities.

I don’t believe that “desperate”, meaning “hopeless”, has “different spellings in different countries”. Perhaps ‘a different chris’ could name the countries in which “desparate” is considered correct, and quote a dictionary or two to prove it? No need to check http://www.dictionary.com: a search on ‘desparate’ gives this result: “No entry found for desparate. / Did you mean desperate?”.

Perhaps he is thinking of “disparate”, an unrelated word that means something like “different, various”.

Of course, PNAC has never offered a mouse trapping strategy for Iraq, nor have I. I was only trying to offer a very simple analogy to make a single point: just because a hostile group (terrorists or mice) can expand in numbers doesn’t mean it will inevitably win. Apparently my analogy was not quite simple enough for ‘a disparate chris’ to grasp.

He might also wonder how Bush can be a coward if he has voluntarily chosen a career in which roughly 9% of the previous incumbents (4/42) were murdered on the job. Just in the last 40 years, we’ve had one successful assassination (Kennedy), one that came within an inch or so of succeeding(Reagan), and at least three more that were way too close for comfort (two different women shot at Ford and the Iraqis attempted to blow up Bush I in Kuwait). Have I forgotten any? The job of president of the U.S. is certainly more dangerous than being a policeman, fireman, cab driver, night clerk at the 7-11, or most kinds of soldiers. Special forces and bomb-disposal experts may be more dangerous. Of course, I am not saying it’s the most dangerous job in the world, just that a coward would not have taken it. Nor would an ordinary coward have flown jets in the Air National Guard when he could have gotten a crooked doctor to write him a fake medical excuse to avoid service entirely, like some other politicians we know.