Ask the Blue States About Terrorism

Here are a few pictures from Copley Square in Boston, where the Boston Marathon ends:

But as you can see, they are not from April's running of the Marathon. They are from a January demonstration against Trump's Muslim Ban.

And yes, that means that Boston held a massive demonstration for Muslim immigrants' rights right next to the site of a shocking terrorist attack by two Muslim immigrants. Just for logistical reasons, a lot of protestors must have had to walk across the Marathon's finish line, and by the sites of the bombs themselves.

A sign that Boston has forgotten the Marathon bombings? Oh hell no. They are still all too fresh in that city's mind. A sign that Bostonians don't care about the victims, or aren't serious about fighting terrorism? Don't be ridiculous.

A small explanation is that Copley Square happens to be Boston's best place for large gatherings like this, so that you have the crowds of protestors in the same public square where you have the crowds of cheering running fans. But the bigger explanation is that Boston, like many so-called blue cities, is both anti-terrorist and pro-immigrant. If that seems not to make sense to you, let me just say: these people are literally standing in a place that they know terrorists have attacked. They are literally putting themselves on the line here, so you maybe you should hear them out.

One of the oddities of American political life today is that our approach to terrorism is being dictated by the people in the least danger of a terrorist attack.


Here are the top US targets for foreign terrorists:
New York City
Washington, DC
Los Angeles
Chicago
San Francisco

Maybe San Francisco makes that top tier, and maybe it belongs in the next one, with places like Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Seattle, etc. etc. etc. But let's be honest: if Al-Qaeda or Daesh aka "ISIS" spends months planning a complicated attack on US soil, it's almost certainly going to be in one of those four or five top targets. Those are the places they care about; those are the places they've heard about. And those are the places that have large symbolic value overseas. International Islamist terrorists dream of destroying LAX and Times Square and the Capitol Dome. They are not interested in the so-called American Heartland. Islamist terrorists from overseas would never attack Oklahoma City, for example, because they don't really know where Oklahoma City is.

Now, that doesn't mean that Oklahoma City isn't a great place to live. It can be wonderful without being internationally famous. I've lived in a bunch of places that overseas terrorists have never heard of, and those places were nice. But the truth is terrorists aren't interested in underrated places that are nice to live. They're interested in attacking famous places. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but national security is more important than your feelings or mine.

Now one of the things animating our red/blue split is a deep division on what to do with terrorism. Everyone agrees that terrorism is a serious problem. The general Red Team approach to terrorism is that this is a deep national emergency that calls for shutting down immigration, increased military strikes overseas, and heavy ethnic profiling of Muslims: in some cases outright demonization of Islam itself. The Blue Team strategy calls for a mix of police and military responses with diplomacy, patience and outreach. The Blue strategy is built around trying to isolate the terrorists and sharpen the divide between them and everyday Muslims. The Red strategy considers that a hopeless cause, and demands that we use the hammer as hard as we can, everywhere. Sometimes it considers Islam itself the problem. Blue voters see making the fight about Islam itself as one of the worst and most self-destructive things to do: basically pushing people into the terrorists' arms.

Now, these strategies work against each other. You can only follow one. Either you're doing outreach to Muslims, or you're denouncing Islam. And both sides feel that the other strategy is dangerous and self-destructive.

Because we're a democracy, we resolve this conflict by voting. And over the last few elections, the Red voters have won, and we're following the Red strategy. But here's the problem:

The places that the terrorists target are overwhelmingly Blue, full of Blue voters. New York, Chicago, LA, DC, San Francisco: all super blue. Almost, like, ultra-violet. A lot of the second tier targets are likewise blue: either the Democratic strongholds of Democratic states, or the Blue island in a Red or Purple State. Boston. Miami. Philly. Seattle. If terrorists ever attack Missouri, God forbid, it will be in Democratic-voting St. Louis. If, God forbid, terrorists attack Georgia, it will be in central Atlanta. That's how the terrorists' strategy works. They want large, busy, and well-known urban areas.Those are the places that are pro-urban, pro-trade, and generally pro-immigrant. They are also the places where the most American immigrants are.

In fact, the Red strategy has one precisely because it's favored in less populated rural areas. More people vote for Blue candidates, both for President and for Congress, but our system builds in an advantage for rural districts so that a smaller number of voters defeat a larger, but more geographically concentrated, group of voters.

So we're following the Red anti-terrorism strategy, but the Blue voters are the targets. They are the ones at risk. If we try the Blue strategy and fail, it's Blue voters whose lives are at risk. But if we follow the Red strategy and it fails, most of the Red voters will still be safe in their rural areas. Their mistakes won't get them killed. Daesh (aka "ISIS") is not going to be launching any attacks on Youngstown, Ohio or rural Wisconsin. Not now, and probably not ever.

So let me suggest that maybe the Blue-state voters, and the urban-blue-pocket voters may know what they're doing. They may have actually thought this through. Don't tell them that they don't take terrorism seriously. A lot of them live in New York City. And even if they are wrong, they deserve to be listened to, because they have skin in the game -- sometimes all of their skin in the game -- in the way most of the rest of us do not. If you find yourself puzzled and frustrated by the politicians and the policies they vote for, the approach to fighting terrorism that they support, let me translate what those urban Blue voters are saying to the rest us:

Publicly hating Islam is not helping. Stereotyping people is not helping. You are making it worse. Please, please don't get us killed. Thanks. 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Terrorism, Elections, and Keeping Faith in America

What I would love, more than nearly any other possible thing, is for the Republican presidential to shut their mouths about how frightening Daesh is. That's exactly what Daesh wants, and it is shameful that Trump, Carson, Christie, Cruz, and the rest give Daesh that satisfaction. It is still more disgraceful still to give terrorists any advantage in the hopes of gaining political advantage oneself. But my biggest question is, where is their national pride? When did the Republican candidates forget they were Americans?

I love America. It has done many things it should not, including some things of which I will always be ashamed. But it has also done things that I will be proud of until the day I die. And America has relegated not just one or two despots, but a long, proud list of despotisms to the ash heap of history. We've been doing it for hundreds of years. Some people will tell you that liberal democracies with civil liberties aren't strong enough to defeat fascists or authoritarians or kings. To those people I say only: SCOREBOARD.

Our generally liberal, fairly democratic system has been reliably kicking the ass of more repressive authoritarian regimes for nearly two hundred and forty years. Monarchists, fascists, Communists, Nazis: you name them, we've beat them, because authoritarian systems are fundamentally weak and stupid. Our system is better. Their systems suck. The Islamists in Daesh are just one more pack of narrow-minded totalitarians headed for history's trash bin. To them, I say: join the line.

(While we're on the topic, those assholes in Iraq and Syria are named "Daesh." They're not "ISIS" or "the Islamic State" or - get real for a minute - the "Caliphate." I mean, seriously, in their dreams. They are not a functioning nation, and let alone a return of the Abbasid Dynasty. They're a gang of fanatics who've taken advantage of a temporary power vacuum to claw their way to minor-local-warlord status. Their name is Daesh. They hate that name, and think it's demeaning. So fuck them. That's their name.)

I'm not making light of their crimes, or saying that they do not enrage me. They are, to use the most precise and well-defined terms I can, murdering scum. I have not lost any friends to Daesh, but some friends of mine have; no one Daesh has murdered deserved to die. But the threat they actually pose to Americans is tiny. The vast majority of people Daesh has killed, obviously, are other Muslims. In this country, even if you credit Daesh for the San Bernardino killings, that means they have only barely managed to become approximately as dangerous to the average American as, say, deranged college students. (That comparison is not a joke, and certainly not to me. Not where I work.) Americans aren't in any more danger from Daesh than Americans who work or study on college campuses are in danger already. The proper response to that threat level is mostly to keep calm and carry on. If we could all kept the same stiff upper lip about Daesh that, say, college librarians these days keep, we would be doing pretty well as a country.

To those who talk about Daesh as an important threat, I have to say: compared to what? The nuclear-armed Soviet Union? The Japanese Navy in 1941? Get real. Drunk drivers kill more Americans than terrorists ever have. Puffing up Daesh into some invincible bogeyman gives them what they want, and talking as if America ought to be intimidated by them disrespects some of America's proudest achievements. Let's stop talking about being afraid of them, and begin remembering the things they should be afraid of. Authoritarian movements are justly terrified of liberty, at home or abroad, because free systems make smarter and more flexible decisions over the long term. Freedom scares them because freedom can beat them.

These Republican candidates speak as if it were the other way around, as if freedom were perpetually weak and tyranny always strong. A few of them are just pandering to voters' fear, cynically and inexcusably. But worse still, some of these candidates, maybe even most of them, believe what they are saying. They think a free America is weaker than an unfree enemy, almost any unfree enemy. They believe this despite the empirical weakness of Daesh's position and resources, because they believe, as an article of faith, that repressive ideologies are more powerful than democracy. They believe this without evidence. They believe this despite the evidence. The historical record shows America beating monarch after dictator after generalissimo after king, and these clowns refuse to believe what America's history has repeatedly proved: dictators are weak.

They do not believe in America. They do not believe in democracy or civil rights. They look at our greatest strengths and see weaknesses, ignoring the scoreboard of history. We don't need to make America great again, because America, for all its flaws, has always been great. Donald Trump cannot begin to fathom that greatness. He does not love America, because he has never understood what America is. He is impressed by Vladimir Putin, and vice versa, because he is a coward and a fool.

This is why the Republican plans for fighting Daesh are simultaneously un-American and useless.
They believe in authoritarianism and repression as goods in themselves. They want to take steps with no real security value, to take steps that actually make things worse, exactly because those steps are repressive and against American values. Being un-American is their goal. Closing borders, discriminating against hundreds of millions on the basis of religion, censoring the internet -- none of these things will work to make us safer. They will each make things much worse. But this sorry collection of Republicans want to do exactly these things, because this collection of Republicans is driven by faith. They have faith in repression and in tyranny, and no amount of evidence can shake that faith. They believe, deep in their hearts, that the American experiment will fail, that its success is just an illusion. They are wrong, and America will prove it. Not for the first time, and not for the last.

I have faith that America's success has never been a fluke. I have faith that America has defeated an assorted list of tyrants and tyrannies for good and clearly explicable reasons. I believe that this time will be no different, because none of the important things have changed. I believe that the Tories who talked about George III being unbeatable and the appeasers who talked about Hitler being unbeatable and the frightened fearmongers who talk about "ISIS" being unbeatable have all drunk the same tainted Kool-Aid, the same dreams about the power of tyrants. I believe such Kool-Aid is bad for one's health. I believe that the fearmongers are wrong: wrong about our past, wrong about our future, and wrong about the day before us. I do not believe that we need to choose between liberty and security, or that such a choice is possible. I believe that liberty is the smartest and most prudent path to our continued security, that only a free society can be safe.

America, now just as before, must keep its faith with our Founders, not because the Founders were divinely inspired but because they were such practical realists. They believed in an open society because they saw it could work, and because they saw it working. How many times have we seen that they were right? How many more times do we need to be shown the wisdom and safety of remaining free?

These are the times that try men's souls, as another American wrote, the week of another Christmas, when America's future looked dark and naysayers were claiming that our experiment could never work, because democracy was not strong enough. That was the Christmas of 1776. Nothing that matters has changed.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Profiles in Cowardice

My thoughts are with Paris today, and with Beirut. We were in the airport, waiting for a delayed flight, when the news broke Friday evening, and so the Paris new broke to us through cable TV and the Beirut news did not reach us at all. There is too much to say about these crimes. For now I can only say that the United States has, at this point, precisely the news media that terrorism wishes us to have.

CNN was on the TV above us. And we added a bunch of French new sources to our twitter feeds. Not so shockingly, the death toll reported in France (and by the other European news outlets on our feeds) was always significantly lower than the numbers being thrown around on CNN. I woke on Saturday in the weird position of being both sickened by how many lives were lost and queasily grateful that the number is lower than American media first said. No matter how bad things seem, Wolf Blitzer can always make them seem worse.

In fact, making things seem even worse is American TV's primary job. Profiting from fear is TV news's main business strategy, from your local station at 11 pm to the 24-hour networks. TV news will literally ask us, in its commercials "Should you be worried?" Listen, and you will hear that phrase coming back over and over again. They want their audience as frightened as possible. For a group dedicated to spreading terror, they are perfect.

Long before anything was clear in the reports from Paris. CNN was asking who else should be worried. Should Germany be worried about an attack, since they have so many refugees? Will there be attacks on the United States? Is New York tightening its security? These questions are not just idle and irresponsible. These questions amplify terrorists' signal. The terrorists spent their resources, probably a healthy share of their resources, trying to terrify the people of Paris, and then CNN deliberately terrifies people thousands of miles away for them, for free.

And, like all fear-mongers, cable news (and some right-wing political figures) turned swiftly to a weak, powerless scapegoat for their fears. Friday night, that meant scapegoating Syrian refugees, refugees from Daesh, for violence committed by Daesh. Before the identity of even one terrorist attacker was confirmed, even before the attacks themselves were over, cable news was proceeding as if it were a confirmed fact that the terrorists were refugees. Of course, the investigation so far is finding French and Belgian nationals. Closing the borders to refugees will not keep out Daesh; Daesh already recruits in Paris itself, and in London, and in Chicago. Instead of going after the funding that allows terrorism to flourish, our native fear-mongers demonize the tired, the hungry, and the poor, the tattered refugees struggling to be free. And that, too, is exactly what Daesh wants. Because Daesh does not want those people to escape them.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

How Obama Talks About Terrorism and Racism

Let's keep this simple. The way Barack Obama talks about Islamic terrorism is exactly the way he talks about white racism. Exactly. The only difference lies not in what Obama actually says, but in how his critics respond.

When Obama talks about racism in America, which he has learned to do only when necessary, he takes pains to separate the terrible and toxic ideology, racism, from the larger white culture. This makes sense. If you tell white people that they are inherently racist and that there's nothing they can do about that, you are telling them not to do anything about that. In fact, you are pushing them to be more racist. If racism is part of who they are, after all, why not embrace it?

Obama has to work against the white racists who are actively claiming that it's all of white culture that's under attack whenever someone protests racism, that complaining about racist practices is an attack on whites themselves. The white racists of the world want nothing better than to erase any difference between being white and being a racist.

Now, when Obama talks about Islamic terrorism, which is also an inevitable part of his job, he takes pains to separate the terrible and toxic ideology, terrorism, from the larger Islamic culture. This makes sense, unless you are completely stupid. If you tell Muslims that being terrorists is an inherent part of their religion, and that only terrorists are real Muslims, you are telling them to actively support terrorism. In fact, you are pushing them to become terrorists. If they can't be a good Muslim any other way, why not embrace it?

Obama has to work against the Islamist terrorists who are actively claiming that it's Islam itself that's under attack whenever the United States fights against terrorism, that fighting terrorism is an attack on their religion itself. The Islamist terrorists of the world want nothing better than to erase any difference between being a Muslim and being a terrorist.

In both cases, Obama is making the sane and sensible rhetorical move. He carves out a way for white people to be against racism, and for Muslims to be against terrorism. Doing it the other way would be incredibly self-defeating.

Let me repeat that: Incredibly. Self. Defeating.

Here's the major difference: when Obama speaks about racism, his critics on the right pretend that he DID NOT distinguish between being racist and being white. They claim he's attacking all white people.

When Obama speaks about terrorism, his critics on the right attack him for distinguishing between being a Muslim and being a terrorist. They claim that he's soft on terrorism because he won't accuse Islam itself of being a terrorist religion.

That's really the whole story. When Obama talks about racism, he is falsely accused of doing something counterproductive that he's not stupid enough to do. When Obama talks about terrorism, he is angrily denounced for not doing something counterproductive that he would be stupid to do. I wish I could still be amazed.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Boston and the End of the War on Terror

cross-posted from Dagblog

Five weeks after a terrorist attack on Boston, President Obama has declared that the War on Terror, "like all wars, must end."  If I had told you a year ago that he would make such a speech a month and a half after a high-profile terrorist attack on a major American city, neither you nor I would have believed me. But the lessons of Boston drive home the wisdom of the President's decision. It showed us that a terrorist attack is meant to be lived through and that Americans are ready to live through one. And it showed us an excellent civilian response to a terrorist attack paired with a decidedly mixed paramilitary response.

The key lesson of the Boston bombings is clear: the best way to prepare for a possible terrorist attack is to build six or eight world-class hospitals in your city. Start in the 19th century if you can.

I'm phrasing that as a joke, but much of Boston's resiliency and quick response was built on the city's superb medical infrastructure. Every victim who was alive when a first responder reached them got to a hospital. Every victim who got to a hospital lived. That is simply remarkable. The city's medical personnel held the death count to the absolute minimum. That does not diminish the senselessness of those three deaths, or the grievous wounds that many survivors suffered. But the city's doctors and nurses prevented a fourth or fifth or sixth senseless death, and I am grateful to them for that.

Some of Boston's success at coping with the attack comes from specific post-September-11 training. Boston's emergency responders had drilled for this scenario, and all of the hospital trauma centers had some doctors who had served in Iraq or Afghanistan and had experience treating the kinds of severely traumatic injuries that they saw on April 15. You can only give the police and EMTs special training after you've built organizations strong enough to carry out the training. First responders did a superb and intelligent job in triaging the wounded, spreading them out between the six nearby trauma centers. But that could only happen because the first responders had the luxury of six top-tier trauma centers within a three-mile radius. There aren't many spots on the planet with that luxury; the attack happened at the heart of a medical epicenter.

And you can't build a Tier One trauma center in any hospital. You need an institution and a staff that can support it. Boston could only dedicate such impressive resources to crisis medicine and emergency response because of the profound depth in the city's overall medical resources. Boston was ready to tend its wounded on that terrible day because Boston works on tending the wounded every day.

Boston's response to the Marathon bombings, its ability to absorb the body blow and respond effectively, was built on its peacetime strengths. It was a victory of the open society. On the other hand, the paramilitary response to the bombing suspects once they were identified, the manhunt and the city-wide lockdown, showed that we've already reached the point of diminishing returns. Getting tougher, giving the police heavier weapons or more military training, is not going to help; we're already at the point where those things are beginning to offset their own benefits.

I certainly can't fault the various police forces engaged in the manhunt for their caution; the bombers had already murdered a police officer, and they'd thrown IEDs at others. They had no choice but to assume that Dzokhar Tsarnaev had a gun and at least one more bomb. But the daylong lockdown, which paralyzed a major urban area and temporarily stopped its economy dead, was at least partly counterproductive. The lockdown itself helped hide Tsarnaev. He was found almost immediately after the lockdown ended, by one of the neighbors who'd been locked down. The militarized search took all the civilian eyes off the street. As soon as those eyes were back, the fugitive was easy to find.

After every attack, there are calls to get "tougher." But there's no tougher to get at this point without undermining ourselves. We're already at the point where the "toughness" is starting to hurt as much as it helps. Sending more cops with more body armor wasn't going to speed up that search. If they'd called in the National Guard, the bomber would probably still be hiding in that boat now.

And that's basically where we are as a country with the larger situation. Bringing more muscle than we've already brought to the War on Terror isn't going to get us better results. In fact, we've hit the point where more muscle and more security restrictions are going to bring us slightly worse results, while continuing to drain our resources.

There have also been calls to "toughen" immigration, because the bombers were immigrants, and there will be a new minor rule change designed to hassle foreign students between terms. That is not going to meaningfully cut back on terrorism, though it will play into the terrorists' argument that we're a country hostile to foreigners.

Of course, the people screaming about tougher immigration rules are ignoring the immigrants who played important positive roles during the Boston events. The terrorists were actually located because the hostage they took in a car-jacking, a Chinese national, was able to escape them and was quick-thinking enough to help the police track the terrorists with his cell phone. I don't see how keeping that guy out of the country would have made things better.

Nor can any reasonable person believe that those world-class hospitals that saved so many victims' lives on the day of the bombing are run by exclusively American-born doctors and medical staff. A world-class research hospital, by its nature, attracts talent from across the world. Some of the people saving lives in those six trauma units were immigrants. I'm pretty glad those people were here.

We're not going to be make our country safer by keeping foreign medical students out of the country. We can only make ourselves a little less safe by doing that, becoming a country with less young medical talent. We're not going to make ourselves safer by making it even more of a hassle to fly; we can only weaken ourselves a little by discouraging foreign talent and foreign business from coming. Closing our society down doesn't make it safer from terrorist attacks. It only weakens our power to weather those attacks.

Terrorism will never go away. It only takes a few disgruntled people willing to murder strangers. And we will always need to invest some resources in stopping terrorism and repairing the damage. But the question is how we allocate those investments. Some anti-terrorism spending goes toward things that have no other use in themselves, such as the x-ray machines in the airport, and that function as a drag on the overall economy, such as making airline travel more difficult and complicated. Frankly, most obvious military and security measures fall into these categories. On the other hand, spending money on things like hospitals improve the country's effective security while improving the general economy. Build excellent hospitals, with some extra money for things like trauma response, and you make the city better while also making it less likely that people in that city are killed by terrorists. Investments that protect us against terrorism and its effects while also strengthening our open society are apure gain. Spending on fortifying the country always involves some dead loss; spending on strengthening the public commons makes us safer while benefiting us in other ways. There will always have to be some straight-up security measures that will function as sheer cost; those costs are hedges against risk. But those measures can never diminish risk to zero, and at a certain point they start to cost far more than they save. On the other hand, money spent on building our country, rather than walling it in, is a secure investment in every sense.

What Pakistan Knows

cross-posted from Dagblog

Since Pakistan's recent double embarrassment in the Osama bin Laden affair, in which they proved unable to detect either bin Ladin living half a mile from their chief military academy or an American helicopter raid deep in the Pakistani interior (i.e. half a mile from their military academy), angry American legislators have been asking What Pakistan Knew about OBL's presence in their country.

Let me try to reframe that question with another one:

Does the President of Pakistan know who had his wife killed?

I'm a long way from being an expert on Pakistan. But I do remember some very basic things. The current President, Asif Ali Zardari, came to power as the widower of his far more charismatic wife, Benazir Bhutto. Zardari is a proxy President for Bhutto's voters, a tender of the slain hero's legacy. He is Mr. Bhutto, basically a corrupt male version of Coretta Scott King. (Zardari's love of graft helped drive Bhutto from power, and even into exile, at various points of her career. His actual nickname is not "Mr. Bhutto" but "Mister Ten Percent," for the kickbacks he demanded while his wife was in power.)

Benazir Bhutto is not President of Pakistan because she was murdered in public. And before she was murdered, she accused the regime at the time, including specific members of the regime, of scheming to have her assassinated. Then they pulled some of her security, and she was murdered while out on campaign. But in the end, the military regime had to accept elections and Bhutto's party, the PPP, which meant that her widower had to keep the flame alive as President.

Does Ali Asif Zardari know exactly which members of the regime colluded in his wife's murder? Does he know which conspirators are still part of Pakistan's security establishment? If he does, he can't do a thing about it.

The military regime had to give way to civilian leadership, but there was no clean-up of the Army or the ISI. The people who'd done Musharraf's dirty work didn't leave, let alone get punished. They're still there. And if the President of Pakistan wants to know who gave the orders that widowed him, he either can't find out or can't do anything about it. Think for a second what that means about how power is distributed in Pakistan, and how much control the official government has over the Army and the ISI.

Pakistan does not seem, from my distant layman's perspective, to be have a fully accountable chain of command. Clearly, there are groups in the military and intelligence apparatus who conspire and freelance and simply don't let the higher-ups into the loop, and those people are wired to enough factional influence that they cannot easily be brought to heel. Some people have sufficient resources to assist al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or to conspire in other ways, and they do. Those people don't let their superiors know, and their superiors either can't find out or are afraid of the consequences if they do. Imagine a situation where Iran-Contra happened and Reagan actually didn't know about it, where some lieutenant colonel felt free to put that together without letting the President or his people know. That's what we're talking about.

The people who hid bin Laden didn't tell Zardari, or anyone near Zardari, for the same reason they don't tell Zardari that they had his wife shot. They don't consider it his business.

Is this appalling? You bet. How do you deal with a country where the military and the spooks aren't accountable to the official leadership? I don't know. But not dealing with Pakistan isn't an option. And putting the hammer down on the official leadership, the people being kept out of the loop by the entrenched military conspirators, is not going to help. All that will do is weaken the civilians and give them even less control over their insubordinate military. The military and intelligence hierarchies have always planned to outwait and outlast their nominal masters in the civilian leadership. There's no reason to speed up We're stuck with the same crappy deal that Zardari is; he became President without having full control over his army, because that was better than having no control over them at all. And now we're in the same boat. We could refuse to deal with Zardari, or his successors, because they don't have the power to hold up their side of their bargains, but all we'd be doing is sacrificing whatever control of the Pakistani military that the civilians do have.

And before we start kicking Pakistan for being all Eastern and barbaric, remember that the West colludes in Pakistan's distribution of power. After the bin Laden raid, I saw one of the players that Bhutto accused of wanting her dead quoted in the New York Times: just another knowledgeable source.

Dear Right Wing: Is This War or Not?

cross-posted at Dagblog

How many times have we heard the phrase War on Terror over the last nine years? How many times have the very people who are now frothing and screaming about the Cordoba House community center (the alleged "Ground Zero Mosque") also screamed the words "War on Terror," and frothed at anyone who they felt was not acting (and I do mean acting) seriously enough about that "War?"

Now many of those very people have turned the serious business of dealing with Islamic terrorism into a clown show. And their hysterical shrieking about Cordoba House proves at least one of two things. Either the right wing doesn't really believe in the War on Terror or they don't care who wins.

The phrase "War on Terror" isn't my favorite, because our previous national Wars on Common Nouns, like the War on Poverty and War on Drugs, proved unwinnable, and because the phrase implies that terrorism can be fought mainly on a conventional battlefield, with tanks perhaps, which is exactly where terrorists cannot be defeated. But all the same, there is a real struggle here ... there is a violent international movement intent on murdering large numbers of Westerners, and they will attack the United States again if permitted. This is not propaganda cooked up to win elections. It is true, and it must be taken seriously. Using the War on Terror to gin up votes but actually setting us back in the War on Terror is an admission of complete moral depravity.

What does it mean to fight a war? Not a lot of shouting and hollering. This isn't a sporting event. Making the loud noises about wanting to win doesn't help us win.

Fighting a war, for real, means destroying the enemy's ability to do us harm. In conventional warfare, that means destroying their weapons, killing or capturing their troops, destroying their manufacturing and transportation infrastructure, and so on. Sometimes it's shooting down their bombers. Sometimes it's bombing their electrical plants so their anti-aircraft radar won't work. Sometimes it's destroying a bridge or a road so that they can't get reinforcements to the front. But it's always the same idea: destroy the enemy's ability to fight.

What al-Qaeda and its affiliates need to fight is money and recruits. Because they don't field conventional armies, they don't need much else. All they need to do their dirty work is the cash to fund operations and a fresh supply of people to keep carrying those operations out. So while we need to keep constant pressure on terrorist organizations as a defensive measure, defeating them will always involve disrupting their funding and recruiting.

Where do they go for donations and volunteers? To other Muslims who sympathize with the cause, but even among the minority of Muslims who do sympathize with them not every sympathizer will do. To keep going, al-Qaeda needs support from a certain slice of the Westernized Muslims, the affluent and educated people who can contribute to their missions and who can operate in the West itself. (You can't just pick a bunch of illiterate kids off the street in Peshawar and mount an international attack; the September 11 attacks required a bunch of German-educated engineering students, all of whom had to be sacrificed in the attack.)

Where bin Laden gets fresh money and fresh blood is from the belief among educated and relatively cosmopolitan Muslims that the West is fundamentally hostile to them. Calling Islam a religion "dedicated to murder" and calling Allah a "monkey God" is a damned good way to achieve Bin Laden's goals. Attacking Cordoba House tells Muslims around the world exactly what Bin Laden tells them: Muslims are unwelcome in the West, and we are out to destroy their faith. Except now Muslims are hearing Bin Laden's propaganda out of our own mouths.

That isn't symbolism. That has real practical effects. It means al-Qaeda will have more money to spend on killing us, and more promising young men to send on terrorist missions. That's a real difference. And if there's anything I learned on September 11, it's how a big a difference there is between a plane with five terrorists on it and a plane with four.

If we're actually trying to win the War on Terror, the question of what to do about Cordoba House is a no-brainer. Build it, dummy! Build it! It's the best move possible! It says "Bin Laden is wrong," in big letters that can be read around the world. And every time Bin Laden is proved wrong, some people will decide not to die for him.

Building Cordoba House is also the right thing to do in terms of preserving our Constitution, honoring the rule of law, and staying Americans. Those are important things. But it also happens to be the right thing to do to fight Islamic terrorism. What can be better than honoring the Founders and reaffirming our values while also giving bin Laden a swift kick in his undisclosed location? I say it's a win/win, baby.

Osama bin Laden wants to kill Westerners because he is afraid of the Muslim world becoming Westernized. Full stop. He doesn't simply "hate us for our freedoms," not enough to give up his whole life to wage terror campaigns against us. Americans exercising their freedom in Iowa and California and New Jersey might strike him as a bunch of loathsome infidels, but wouldn't really be worth bothering about. What frightens and enrages him is the prospect of Muslims getting those freedoms too. That hits him where he lives. That is what he's willing to commit mass murder to stop. He's afraid of an Islamic world where faith coexists with liberal secular values, where the West is a constant ally and partner, and where reason and moderation are not only mainstream Islamic values but become thoroughly unassailable core values of daily life. He is afraid that we will welcome his fellow Muslims into the West and assimilate them.

The thing he fears is the thing that we should do. We will win the War on Terror when the Muslim world is forced to choose between our embrace and bin Laden's raving hatred.

We can win by opening Cordoba House. If Obama goes to the grand opening, that's better. We can win by closing Guantanamo. Tomorrow would be a good day for that. Closing Camp X-Ray will help our cause more than anything else we could do, including capturing or killing Bin Laden. We can win by strengthening Westward-looking Muslims everywhere and by reaching out to them. Stop telling Muslims that we despise their faith. Stop telling them that they can't really assimilate, and stop telling them that their efforts to assimilate have not been enough. And talk about their faith with a little shred of decency and respect, instead of shrieking and frothing like some lunatic hatemonger in the mountains around Peshawar. They've heard plenty from that guy. We should not sound like him.

It's time to get serious. This is war.