There is an excellent article in the Washington Post today about retired General Anthony Zinni. Zinni is a centrist Republican, a Vietnam vet (Marines), and former head of CentCom. He is also very critical of the war on Iraq and for all the right reasons. Small excerpt:
Zinni long has worried that there are worse outcomes possible in Iraq than having Saddam Hussein in power — such as eliminating him in such a way that Iraq will become a new haven for terrorism in the Middle East.
“I think a weakened, fragmented, chaotic Iraq, which could happen if this isn’t done carefully, is more dangerous in the long run than a contained Saddam is now,” he told reporters in 1998. “I don’t think these questions have been thought through or answered.” It was a warning for which Iraq hawks such as Paul D. Wolfowitz, then an academic and now the No. 2 official at the Pentagon, attacked him in print at the time.
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The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist “neoconservative” ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn’t understand. “The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground.”
The point Zinni has been making since before Bush came into office is that merely getting rid of Saddam without thinking about the consequences thereof (and having a real, workable post-war plan) is dangerously stupid. Funny, that’s what I’ve been saying since 2002. He also talks about the parallels between the Gulf of Tonkin and Bush’s insistence that Saddam had WMDs.
Now, I know this is several months late, but I just want to say something about the “fly-paper” thesis put forth by such right-wing thinkers as Andrew Sullivan. I’ll show you how this dovetails with the previous link in a minute. First, let Sullivan speak for himself:
And what [“someone close to the inner circles of the Bush administration”] said surprised me. If the terrorists leave us alone in Iraq, fine, he said. But if they come and get us, even better. Far more advantageous to fight terror using trained soldiers in Iraq than trying to defend civilians in New York or London. “Think of it as a flytrap,” he ventured. Iraq would not simply be a test-case for Muslim democracy; it would be the first stage in a real and aggressive war against the terrorists and their sponsors in Ryadh and Damascus and Tehran. Operation Flytrap had been born.
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At some point, I’d argue, the president therefore has to make this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam. Right now he looks defensive, reactive and not in full control. That must end. And articulating the flypaper strategy might just help end it.
At first glance (Sullivan posted this on his blog on September 6th, 2003), I said “that is fucking insane,” out loud and to no one in particular. There’s an obvious flaw with the logic here: the resources of the hundreds of terrorist groups around the world are far wider flung than those of the occupation forces; terrorism is not a zero-sum game. But the fly-paper theory isn’t just desperately insane or mindlessly stupid for this reason. It’s the kind of theory that could only be put forth by people who have no command of regional history or foreign policy. To these people, I will explain as plainly as possible:
It’s not ‘flypaper.’ We’re running a state-of-the-art training camp for terrorists.
Let me go through in incredibly condensed history of Afghanistan’s mujahideen movement and perhaps you’ll see what I’m talking about.
A small primer: there were two main branches of the Afghan Communists in the 1970s – Khalq (the Masses), and Parcham (the Flag). When the Khalq faction wrested control of the country from a coalition government composed of the former royal family and Parchami military figures, the officially secular bent of the government offended the regional clerics, who started organizing armed resistance. Thus, in 1978, the “mujahideen” appear, Islamist guerillas who fought for the establishment of an Islamic state.
After two of his predecessors are graphically executed, newly installed President Babrak Karmal called in the Soviet Army in December 1979 to help him deal with the insurgency, beginning twenty-five years of continuous combat.
During the 80’s, Afghanistan became the top jihadi-tourist locale in the world. One scholar described it as a kind of Woodstock for the Bin Laden generation; if there was one place you could actually fight the advances of the atheistic kaffir (infidel), it was Afghanistan–so many a young Muslim flew to Pakistan, picked up an automatic weapon on the Afghan border, and started firing on the Red Army. Al-Qaeda (“the list”) began when Bin Laden, who was hanging out in Pakistan far from the front, started collecting the contact information of every aspiring mujahid who came through his house in Peshawar.
Now, let us return to the present-day situation in Iraq. We know that internationals have been crossing into Iraq to fight the kaffir U. S. Army, and that Al-Qaeda among other terrorist groups have entered the Iraqi theater. What the White House has done, in its infinite wisdom, is create another Afghanistan, another training ground for tomorrow’s Al-Qaeda. There is no better place in the world for a young Islamist fighter to go and learn about the capabilities and shortcomings of the U. S. armed forces than Iraq–what will the terrorist groups of the near future do with this newly battlefield-tested knowledge?
