Opiniatrety

Fighting Terrorism

It may be that it's in bad taste to talk policy today [but]. I'm not entirely happy with this and the last post. But please click on these links tomorrow.

This post by Ivo Daalder I think is absolutely right about what we need to do in fighting terrorism with global reach. This global terrorism is diffused, and we won't be able to get very far by simply invading countries. What we need is, mostly, international cooperation.

But the Yglesias post I pointed to in the last post contains an important aside--nuclear terrorism is another matter. We may never be able to eliminate conventional-weapons terrorism completely, but we should be straining every sinew to make sure that nuclear terrorism never happens. And--I'm completely uninformed here, but this is how it seems to me--nuclear terrorism would require an international organization; Bin Laden rather than Bin Ladenism. Which makes it all the more urgent that we wipe out the remnants of the Al Qaeda core. (Though tipping nuclear-armed Pakistan further against us would be incredibly counterproductive. It's hard work.)

To descend to politics, all this makes the likes of this comment all the more disheartening. Democrats and liberals did (like conservatives) overwhelmingly favor the invasion of Afghanistan. The biggest criticism that, say, John Kerry expressed was that we didn't finish the job--we let Bin Laden get away, and diverted our attention to Iraq instead of stabilizing Afghanistan. (And a lot of liberals were making that latter critique at the time--it's not just hindsight.) The post below Daalder's, on the very site that was accused of not being fond of the Afghanistan invasion, calls for sending 100,000 troops to get Osama. And--to get nasty--I don't remember any major Democratic leader saying he wasn't that concerned about Osama.

We need to fight terrorism effectively; and to get rid of the perception that Democrats and liberals oppose effective terror-fighting measures. How to do the latter is a matter of politics (since we don't oppose them), and I'm even less qualified to advise on that than on the former. But it must be done.

Posted by Matt Weiner at July 7, 2005 08:28 PM