phoenix80
Banned
Reuel Marc Gerecht
October 3, 2007
Dear Phil:
My apologies for taking so long to reply to your considerate response. I was actually in London talking to British officials about Islamic terrorism and how we deal with it. Among other things, I was probing to see whether our "special relationship" had been damaged by America's tactics and mistakes in the "war on terror." You will be relieved: Despite Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the intelligence and security relationship keeps getting closer. Nor did I detect, by the way, any analytical confidence among the British that the Second Iraq War had produced more holy warriors among its enormous Pakistani immigrant population than had the American invasion and NATO occupation of Afghanistan. It is always striking how critics of the Iraq War--and you have certainly been a more thoughtful critic of this campaign than have many on the American Left--can talk endlessly about the generation of jihadists created by our actions in Iraq and our supposed moral failings in our fight against Al Qaeda ("there are millions if not tens of millions of people out there deciding whether they want to be 'with us, or with the terrorists'..."). But they rarely, if ever, talk about how Afghanistan plays into jihadist production. This causation concern seems to be an issue for some only when the questioned actions are deemed by them illegitimate and unnecessary.
Read the rest here:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.26914,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
October 3, 2007
Dear Phil:
My apologies for taking so long to reply to your considerate response. I was actually in London talking to British officials about Islamic terrorism and how we deal with it. Among other things, I was probing to see whether our "special relationship" had been damaged by America's tactics and mistakes in the "war on terror." You will be relieved: Despite Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the intelligence and security relationship keeps getting closer. Nor did I detect, by the way, any analytical confidence among the British that the Second Iraq War had produced more holy warriors among its enormous Pakistani immigrant population than had the American invasion and NATO occupation of Afghanistan. It is always striking how critics of the Iraq War--and you have certainly been a more thoughtful critic of this campaign than have many on the American Left--can talk endlessly about the generation of jihadists created by our actions in Iraq and our supposed moral failings in our fight against Al Qaeda ("there are millions if not tens of millions of people out there deciding whether they want to be 'with us, or with the terrorists'..."). But they rarely, if ever, talk about how Afghanistan plays into jihadist production. This causation concern seems to be an issue for some only when the questioned actions are deemed by them illegitimate and unnecessary.
Read the rest here:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.26914,filter.all/pub_detail.asp