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/pubI...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

Originally Posted by Team Infidel

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.

Originally Posted by Team Infidel

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.

no?

that's fine, but the U.S. cannot do it alone. for the GWOT to succeed, it must be a GLOBAL fight.

Originally Posted by Team Infidel

that's fine, but the U.S. cannot do it alone. for the GWOT to succeed, it must be a GLOBAL fight.

Well, I am pretty sure many many many s in this world don't mind seeing the US defeated....

that's why it is up to the other countries to inspire their own people to fight.

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.