In a piece last week in The
Atlantic entitled “Terrorism
Could Never Threaten American Values—the ‘War on Terror’ Does,” James
Fallows says it’s high time that President Obama shows he understands the truth
of that article’s title, and calls to put a stop to the “open-ended ‘Global War
on Terror.’”
Fallows, a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, has argued
at least as far back as 2006 that we had al Qaeda on the run, and that even
though its “successor groups in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere will
continue to pose dangers… its hopes for fundamentally harming the United States
now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or
goad us into doing.”
There is some undeniable truth to this. All one has to do is
look at how Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, who wasn’t even successful in his attempt
to bring down Flight 63 from Paris to Miami twelve years ago, transformed our
air travel experience into a tedious, massively bureaucratic and intrusive TSA
nightmare, detrimentally impacting our economy in the process (in a succinct
summation of Fallows’ argument, famed atheist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted
his irritation over what he deemed the pointless idiocy of airport security
extremes: “Bin Laden has won.”). And of course, one could look at how terrorist
acts have resulted, even more intrusively, in the surveillance state that
emerged under George W. Bush and which has metastasized exponentially under
Barack Obama.
“But if it saves a few lives…” goes the seemingly reasonable
rationale for all this “security.” Of course
we should protect American lives; the question is, are there more effective and
reasonable ways to accomplish that and to combat terrorism which also don’t
require severely diminishing our freedoms and individual rights?
Fallows acknowledges the seriousness of terrorist acts
themselves. “Attacks can be terribly destructive, as we saw in hideous form 12
years ago,” he continued in last week’s article. “But the long-term threat to
national interests and values comes from the response they invoke. In the case
of 9/11: the attack was disastrous, but in every measurable way the rash, foolish,
and unjustified decision to retaliate by invading Iraq hurt America in more
lasting ways.”
Perhaps Fallows misspoke here, because surely he knows we
didn’t invade Iraq in retaliation for the 9/11 attack. We went into Iraq
because during a “decade of defiance,” as Bush put it, Saddam Hussein had
become an increasingly clear and present danger: harboring terrorists,
financing terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction, and ignoring years
of UN demands about those weapons. Maybe Fallows means that going after Saddam was
an unnecessary extension of the
ill-named war on terror, but the “lasting ways” in which America has been hurt
in Iraq and Afghanistan resulted more from our ongoing,
blood-and-treasure-sucking, nation-building efforts there than from our
invasions of those countries.
Fallows complains that “over-reach by [the NSA] and the
security establishment… is badly harming American interests, ideals, and
institutions. The President is the only person in a position to signal a change
in course, and he had better do it fast.” He says that
“the revelations that come out every day of programs that
began under Bush and have continued under Obama suggest that he doesn't grasp [the
fact that the war on terror threatens our values more than terrorism does] as
clearly as he should.” I submit that Obama grasps this perfectly clearly, but he
is not about to change course – not because those program are essential to
combating terror, but because it suits his broader totalitarian
agenda to perpetuate and expand them.
Waging war against such an enemy is not the problem; not waging one, or waging it without a
commitment to win, is the problem. When our own Homeland Security does not even
allow mention of the words Islam or Muslim, downgrades “jihad” to “workplace
violence,” and considers American patriots more of an existential threat than
the Muslim Brotherhood, then this administration is ensuring our own defeat.
When our soldiers overseas are tasked with winning hearts and minds rather than
eradicating the Taliban to the last man, all the while straitjacketed by the
most suicidally restrictive rules of engagement in the history of warfare, then
this administration is ensuring our own defeat. When our officials actively
work with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation toward the criminalization of
defamation of Islam rather than defend the First Amendment, then this administration
is ensuring our own defeat.
Calling an end to the “war on terror” is not a solution,
because terror is not the enemy – Islamic supremacism is, and it has been a
threat to the west for many centuries and isn’t going away overnight,
particularly not with Barack Obama in the White House. Fallows is right insofar
as we must avoid the trap of exchanging our values and liberties for a false
security; how do we do that? Stop playing defense, stop reacting, stop trying
to win hearts and minds, and take the fight to the enemy on every front, unapologetically
committing to total victory in the way we once committed to total victory
against the ideologies of Japanese imperialism or Nazism. The enemies of
civilization are ruthless, relentless, and morally unconflicted – in defense of
civilization, we must be more so.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 11/8/13)
