Connecting some dots. Brad DeLong notes that the president sees/saw Al Queda as an organization rather than a movement.
Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Richard Clarke Is Moderately Shrill:
George W. Bush asked for an organizational chart of Al Qaeda so that he could cross people off as they were killed or captured. A very “MBA” way of looking at it, it seemed to me. I remembered “The Battle of Algiers”. At the end, the French have caught and tortured and killed all of the urban guerrilla leaders they had identified at the start. And the French had lost the war.
Gregg Easterbrook sees fit to revive the “flypaper” theory. Shorter flypaper theory: our troops are set up as a honeypot on the enemy’s turf and all the terrorists come to kill them but are killed themselves as a result of our genius. No more terrorists.
The New Republic Online: Freedom Core:
Finally, a thought: History may judge the invasion of Iraq a political fiasco, or simply judge it as morally wrong. But is it necessarily a diversion from the war against Islamist terror, as the Fallows article contends? What if the invasion of Iraq is having the unintended consequence of drawing terrorists and killers to that country, where our army can fight them on our terms? Supposedly bin Laden and a few others of his ilk trained thousands of fanatical followers. Though there have been awful terror strikes since September 11, world events have simply not reflected what might be expected to happen if thousands of fanatical terrorists were loose in the Western nations. Now there are said to be “foreign fighters” crawling all over Iraq, and whatever else is going wrong there, our military is killing significant numbers of armed fanatics, many of them not Iraqi. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq and drawn them there, where might these guys be instead, and what harms might they be doing?
I wonder if the reverse is true? Perhaps the terrorists have set up their own honeypot and by stretching the military thinner and thinner, they can do some unanticipated damage.
Is it not obvious that these terrorists, whoever they are, eschew conventional military doctrine and strike in ways that are hard to defend against?