The effectiveness of a "War" on terror

[Lief Erikson]

Ah .


Our country is too overall pro-Israel to act in an even-handed way. On the Democrat side, there is a very powerful Jewish lobby, and on the Republican side, there is a strong conservative Christian pro-Israel position. It comes from both sides of the Congress and from the Administration, and the general public in our country as well.

To me, as I'm an evangelical Christian too and love much of what our conservatives stand for, it's tragic that we're taking a one-sided, black and white view on the Israeli/Palestinian crisis and the War on Terror in general. That perspective is blinding us and making matters worse in the Middle East as a whole. It's painful to me on a personal level.

I think that the policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists is probably dated. The kind of terrorism that we're now fighting is different from the smaller scale terror groups and tactics that we opposed when we said that we wouldn't negotiate with them. When they were just small groups hoping to push us around on various issues, we could afford to squash those hopes by saying that we wouldn't deal with them. That would protect our civilians more generally, by making it less likely that terrorists would take them hostage.

Now, however, Islamic extremism is widespread and growing very rapidly. It is a deadly menace and a widespread one. Because extremists do not have the technology to fight for a cause in hand-to-hand battles as much nowadays, they resort to terror methods, shadow warfare. So you can have big movements that have clear-cut goals but are not extremely unified and are split up over many places, geographically. They are many movements and groups, sometimes unified by a specific nation or group, but often split up, but all driven by very similar ideologies. Those ideologies are the various forms of modern Islamic extremism.

So we are fighting a war against Islamic extremism, in my view, and some affiliated leftist groups. They have common goals and ideologies. They are a new kind of army, a new kind of invader and major threat. They aren't small-time. Assuming that they're small-time and underestimating the threat they pose is one of the major mistakes the left is making on this issue. Eventually, I'm convinced that there is a very grave risk Islamic extremists will get their hands on WMDs and will use them. The left's refusal to acknowledge and adequately respond to severe threats like Iraq, Iran and North Korea is their major mistake that, if the Democrats win the presidency, will probably have horrendous long-term consequences for the West. Islamic extremists also may continue to take over governments and countries, as they did in Somalia, as the appeal of their ideology expands. Their movement is expanding rapidly, but the left doesn't recognize the threat and refuses to take necessary and appropriate responses to it.

But our country's current refusal to respond to terrorists as people rather than as orcs is undermining our ability to deal with the threat they pose. Defining them as terrorists now is not going to stop them, or encourage them to stop taking hostages. They'll keep killing and capturing our people just because of their ideology, because to them, they're fighting a war against us. So the old ideas of refusing to communicate with them to keep them from having incentive to take hostages is not going to work at all. It's a poor reason, in the modern context.

So we should no longer classify people as terrorists. It's an old-fashioned label that had uses in the past, but now our response to terrorists needs to be changed, because Islamic terrorism is different and refusing to negotiate with them isn't going to stem long-term violence at all. In fact, it may just worsen it, because refusing to negotiate with them might keep us from taking valuable opportunities to establish cease-fires or peace treaties, stem violence and take away the motives that expand Islamic extremism's appeal.