Are We Winning the "War on Terror"?

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
 
I think the real question here is how DO you win a war with such nebulous goals and objectives as the war on terror.

i dont think either side (left or right) really has an answer for that, and that, to me at least, is more worrying than anything
 
i don't think it is possible to win. not even sure it is possible to control. it only takes 1 to be successful
 
i don't think it is possible to win. not even sure it is possible to control. it only takes 1 to be successful

This is like 1947-1948 all over again when Cold War was just going to begin. I am sure we're able to beat this radical Islam if we can find people inside the Islamic world who dare to reform their religion.
 
that is going to take a lot of people to convince the masses. Cold War and GWOT are two very different events. GWOT is not defined by borders as the CW was.

And now, with the Russians starting it's Bear patrols again, the cycle of things is starting to come around.
 
that is going to take a lot of people to convince the masses. Cold War and GWOT are two very different events. GWOT is not defined by borders as the CW was.

And now, with the Russians starting it's Bear patrols again, the cycle of things is starting to come around.

true! But I hate to see us going down without a decent fist-fight. :p

no?:smil:
 
The GWOT will never succeed because it will never end. This isn't a war against a people or a country that you can bomb into dust, its a war against an idea. You cannot kill an idea no matter how bad it is. Take Nazism.

Its like declaring a war on evil, a war on drugs, or a war on Crime. You cannot defeat such things through military means, the best you can hope for is to curb its spread. WWII didn't end Nazism, it just curbed its spread. It still lingered on in places like the Balkins and in the minds of disaffected youth.

Thats why the "GWOT" has more to do with amassing political power, than it does about stopping terrorism, and thats precisely why other countries wont join up with us except in spirit.
 
Thats not what I was saying. I was saying people use the GWOT as a smokescreen to cover political ambitions. The "GWOT" is a meaningless concept by itself.
 
ASIDE from politics, if the people want to stop the terror around the world, they have to stand up and do it.
 
ASIDE from politics, if the people want to stop the terror around the world, they have to stand up and do it.

And how do they do that? Invade other countries suspecting of harboring terrorists? That hasn't worked out so well for us in the past. This goes back to something I have said before, if you want to defeat terrorists its MUCH easier to do it on your home turf than on theirs. Specifically by: POLICE WORK. The greatest successes against terrorism have been done by the cops, not the military.

This notion of "fighting them there so they don't come here" is a nice slogan unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well.
 
The United States can not win this war.
I do not even know winning the war in what is the criterion?

Terrorists do not clever, it will be very miserable U.S.
 
ASIDE from politics, if the people want to stop the terror around the world, they have to stand up and do it.

I agree that as a first step the people of these nations are the primary means for stopping terrorism however to be fair in many of the countries plagued by terrorism the people are not exactly in a position to do much about it and do need assistance.
 
war on a feeling. How can we win that?

You can't be winning if you have no definite opponent.

Imagine this: The Texas Longhorns football team announces that they're going to play against the SEC. First off, they didn't say what kind of game (yacht race, bocce ball, etc.). secondly, there are more than one school in the SEC and more than one team sport per school. After playing a couple of groups of students in backyard games, they announce that they are winning against the SEC. How? They have no true recorded contact, because they have no set opponent. How can they say that they're winning?

Plug the USA in for texas. Terror for the SEC. Different terror-harboring countries for Tennessee, Gerogia, Mississippi St., etc. and the students are citizens of that country. Some want to fight, some don't.

To the "war": where is it going, what have we accomplished, who are we fighting, and what side are they on? It's all unclear.
 
I don't feel that we are "winning" as the very fact that we are fighting them, is gaining them more support every day. They dislike us for what we represent.

The only way to "win" using our current strategy is to kill every single one of them, or convince them that as soon as they pop their head up, they're dead, and that would take far more resources than we are willing to expend. It only takes one determined man to commit a monstrous act of terrorism.

Our biggest disadvantage in fighting a war of this type is that we are fighting an idea that transcends continents, borders and nationalities, the only real thing that they have in common is their religion. We have no real singular representative that we can even deal with.

To me TI's policy, "Politics won't end it. People will subdue it." seems about right, but how we are going to bring it about I have no idea.
 
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"Our biggest disadvantage in fighting a war of this type is that we are fighting an idea that transcends continents, borders and nationalities, the only real thing that they have in common is their religion. We have no real singular representative that we can even deal with." unquote


This is precisely what they base their aspirations on, that their world-wide religion base makes them , united, the largest nation on earth. They are preparedfor the long game, time is not limited. They can win by population without confrontation, if host countries are not alert to what is afoot, and have set about this already. Example - Europe. I say - it's about time we looked to recognise this situation and, instead of denial, just started to consider what we are going to do about it. This is the position of our governments now - if they are worth their salt.

I am on no way a prophet of doom, I believe there is always a way to overcome problems - necessity is the mother of invention. But we remain helpless if we are not prepared to be honest with ourselves about the challenge we face.
 
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