The Blog of toussaint

Both yesterday and today on C-Span, I was listening to Bruce Riedel, former Senior Director of the National Security Council and 30 year veteran of the CIA.  He pointed out something I knew but of which I had to be reminded.  If you look back at history, all wars start with some big act of provocation (i.e., Pearl harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, the assassination of the Arch Duke Ferdinand etc.)  9/11 was just such an act.  Al Qaeda is playing chess while we are playing checkers.  They are thinking moves ahead of the current play and have studied well the example of the demise of the Soviet Union.  The Soviets went down in part because they were spending way too much money on wars like Afghanistan, and they had to have a huge army to hold the Iron Curtain in place.  They over-spent on nukes and other missiles and gadgets that they will never get to use.  A similar hemorrhage of the military industrial complex is exactly what Al Qaeda seeks to induce for us.  The cost of 9/11 is chump change compared to what we are spending on Iraq.  The debt we are creating right now will have consequences that will be felt for generations to come in the form of higher taxes.  I bet Bush has never been in a fight in his life because had he been, he would know that just because you can win a fight doesn't mean you should engage in the fight.  Once, a guy picked a fight with me to impress his friends.  I knew I could beat the tar out of him and I started to do so; but as the fight started, I noticed he had 3 friends in the crowd.  I knew from past experience that as soon as I got finished whooping on this guy his friends would jump in to help their boy.  So I walked away, even though I knew people would call me names.  Three weeks later in gym when his friends weren't around I taught him why he should leave me alone.  When his friends saw his face they decided that they would leave me alone, too.  And believe it or not we became friends and remain so to this day. (I sure hope he isn't reading this article because he had a growth spirt and is bigger than me now and he might decide to get a little revenge.)  The point is that as a country, we were drawn into a bad fight: one that the other side can't win but one they can sure make bloody. As the administration cranks up the hard-line rhetoric, we should be careful not to repeat this mistake in Iran. 

Now, let's talk about our next few moves now that we are were we are.  We must kill Bin Laden.  A lot of experts say he doesn't matter but every day he is alive, the myth will grow and he will provide inspiration to the idiots willing to blow themselves up.  It also says to the bad guys that there is someone beyond the reach of the mighty US.  We are losing the propaganda war for this reason and many others:  our poor execution of the war in Iraq; our enthusiastic embrace of despots in the region; and our flagrant insensitivity to the Palestinian issue.  To foster the democracy we claim to seek in the Middle East, we have got to give the moderate people there some fire power.  When a moderate voices a favorable opinion of us, a radical has many examples of our misconduct to shout him down.  To regain some credibility, we should force Israel to move toward final settlement.  We need to freeze aid to and contacts with all the governments that are abusing their people just to hold on to power.  But we can't do any of these things now because of our dependency on the "big O": Oil.  

But wait: there's more! We had better wake up to the threat of Pakistan right now and start taking action.  Pakistan already has nukes and a bunch of radicals that want to steal them from the government.  That government is very shaky and if a coup happens, some nukes might come up missing for the right price.   We have got to secure these nukes by working with Pakistan and telling them that if a nuke gets loose, we are going to blame them and bomb them back to the ice ages.  They either need to let us have the info we need to secure the weapons or suffer our wrath.  They also need to let us send in some covert ops. people to look for Bin Laden.  They will let us do this if we tell them that if he plans another attack on the West from inside their borders, we will bomb the entire area we think he is in.  I know I sound a bit hostile but this matter is serious.  While I propose we wave the stick, I alsobelieve that we need to take pro-active economic measures: create some hope in these countries by creating jobs.  People who drive nice cars and have nice houses and families to go home to don't blow themselves up .