Terrorism: The Strategic War

We understood what John Kerry meant when he said terrorism should be returned to its status as a “nuisance.” In the early 1980s, an Israeli general likened terrorism to an automobile accident – tragic for those involved, and you should try to prevent them, but not an existential threat to the state.

We understood what John Kerry meant when he said terrorism should be returned to its status as a “nuisance.” In the early 1980s, an Israeli general likened terrorism to an automobile accident – tragic for those involved, and you should try to prevent them, but not an existential threat to the state.

But that was then and this is now. The terrorist war against Israel certainly was intended to pose an existential threat – the Palestinians are not fighting for a West Bank state, they are fighting for the land that is the State of Israel. Terrorists and rogue states interested in the acquisition of WMD certainly intend to pose an existential threat.

Two thoughts: First, Sen. Kerry must have understood as well as we did what President Bush meant when he said this will be a long war and there will be no “victory” – both would agree there will be no articles of surrender signed on a battleship, no V-T day. This is not an insignificant point of agreement.

But second and more important is how to return terrorists to their former status – certainly the terrorists won’t volunteer to quit. Sen. Kerry takes the tactical view. He has said that he would use the full weight of the U.S. to punish perpetrators and continue the hunt for al-Qaeda, from which, according to Mr. Kerry, the war in Iraq was a diversion. “Wrong war, wrong place, etc.”

We have another view. Individual terrorists have limited capabilities – a grenade, a gun, a car with a tank of gas. They are, as Sen. Kerry says and we agree, a “nuisance.” Terrorists are only able to mount large-scale, worldwide operations with the assistance of states that provide territory for training and refuge, weapons, money, passports, diplomatic cover, etc. So the strategic requirement is to sever the relationship between terrorists and the states that harbor and support them.

In Iraq and in Afghanistan (and Pakistan and Libya) cover and assets that were routinely provided to terrorists are no longer available to them. The inability of terrorists to mount any sort of election violence in Afghanistan is a huge, and hugely underreported victory for civilization. Terrorists are fighting brutally in Iraq today to keep territory that they once took for granted as theirs. And while they do that, they aren’t doing other things.

If Osama wasn’t in a cave somewhere or dead, if al-Zarkawi wasn’t holding hostages and blowing up Iraqi civilians from his hole in Falluja, if Hamas “leaders” in the Palestinian territories (they’ve chosen to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) weren’t in fear of very narrowly focused strikes, they would be directing traffic elsewhere.

Strategically, the point isn’t to plink terrorists. It is to have states decide it is not in their interest to provide state assets to terrorists. Afghanistan and Iraq are fronts against terrorists in their own territory rather than ours, and are object lessons to states that aren’t sure on which side of the civilizational divide they reside.