The email alluding to the bombings in London whose victims were
still being pulled from the rubble where they died arrived Friday
morning. It was a single sentence from my friend, Ann. "Gosh, I'm
so happy Bush's plan to 'fight terrorists in Iraq so we won't have
to fight them in...oh...say, England?' is working so well," she
wrote.
That indictment says more than Ann probably intended about her
outlook. I marked the statement for its unstable foundation,
misplaced attribution, and turd-in-a-punchbowl sarcasm. But before
chivalrous readers rise to decry an "ad feminam" argument where I
mean none, let me add that Ann's reaction differs in degree but not
in kind from opinions expressed by other progressive pundits.
In a logical world, her sentiment would be as rare as allergies
to tennis balls among Golden Retrievers. But you're more likely to
see a polar bear in a fez driving a go-cart for the Shriners at a
Fourth of July parade in Havana than to find an intelligent
discussion of "flypaper" strategy among doctrinaire Democrats.
Want to use events in the sceptered isle to justify leftist bile
over flyspecked tile? If so, your quarrel is as much with the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and the Fearsome Neocon Establishment (tm) as with
President McChimpy Bushitler, whom we're told has no gift for
"strategery" anyway.
"Fine," runs the rejoinder, "but the buck stops with the
president, competent or not." All well and good in the realm of
abstraction which the progressive mind calls home. But to apply
that to what happened in London last week is to misunderstand
American power, Islamist motivation, and European politics.
In the first place, American military might cannot alone defeat
terrorists throughout the world any more than one piece of flypaper
can trap every flying insect within a square mile of Aunt Irma's
potato salad. We're good, but we're not that good. One example of
many: investigating last year for the New Yorker magazine,
Lawrence Wright reported that planning for the bombings in Madrid
of March 2004 had started even before President Bush sent American
Special Forces operators into Afghanistan in the wake of
9/11/01.
In the second place, the testimony and sacrifice of people in
the Sunni Triangle edition of Flypaper Central makes clear that
non-Iraqi terrorists play a significant part in the carnage there.
In other words, the flypaper strategy is working, and it's
reinforced by the Islamofascist predilection for what the U.S.
military calls "red on red" violence between co-religionists. More
scrupulous murderers wait for fatwas to embolden their trigger
fingers. Less scrupulous murderers invoke the Koran while blowing
up rival mosques, not to mention trains, buses, planes, buildings,
and infidel Zionist toddlers.
In the third place, as Andrew McCarthy wrote recently for National Review
Online, "when parliament enacted a tough anti-terrorism law,
the House of Lords threw out the provisions permitting
national-security detentions," because "detaining terrorists
without trial violated European human-rights
standards."
One hopes the House of Lords didn't have postmodern nihilism or
Dutch sanction for euthanasia in mind when it emoted about European
notions of human dignity, but on this side of the Atlantic, one is
also grateful for things like the Second Amendment and the detainee
camps in Guantanamo Bay. Safeguards like those complicate logistics
for the death cultists whose business cards identify them as al
Qaeda party planners.
Try this on for size: the flypaper metaphor describes an
effective strategy now being used in the hottest theater of the war
on terrorism. It's shorthand for "their turf on our terms," which
by definition is more desirable than our turf on their terms.
We do well to remember, as Christopher Hitchens does, that the
grievances of jihadists predate and transcend Anglo-American war
with Saddam Hussein. One online friend of impeccable judgment
speculates that the president himself may inadvertently be a kind
of insurance policy for American cities, so long as jihadists share
the progressive fear that he's crazy enough to drop the hammer on
Mecca if Dick Cheney or Karl Rove is provoked too much.
The obvious but under-appreciated point is that Anglo-American
military prowess doesn't relieve the rest of us of our duty to be
vigilant. Progressive critiques of current policy seem laughable
not only because they bring no credible alternative to the table,
but because people who distrust or condescend to the martial and
conservative culture of the U.S. military almost invariably invest
both that military and its commander-in-chief with ridiculous
powers, if only to put a respectable veneer on their own abdication
of responsibility.
I'm willing to concede that the flypaper metaphor for combat
strategy along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has a problem. As
metaphors go, it's too tame. In flattering light, progressive
caterwauling of the kind that provoked this essay represents a cry
for help, and a rebellion against flypaper's benign image as
genteel pest control near the mint juleps in the dog days of
summer.
Given the bombings in England, Indonesia, Israel, Iraq, Russia,
Spain, and the United States itself, it shouldn't be hard to push
progressives to the recognition that we're in a worldwide war on
multiple fronts with nonuniformed adversaries whose religious
fanaticism neither asks for nor gives any quarter, but many still
fail to see that the only coherent response to Islamofascism is
Churchillian. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the
landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
Some pundits don't see that, but then conservatives have long
maintained that the education, litigation, and medical marijuana
lobbies have lots to answer for.
topics:
Education, Business, Religion, Islam, Law, Military, Iraq, Russia, Israel, Fascism
