I’d like to raise two issues regarding the rhetoric of many who support President Bush’s policies on Iraq. Here’s Part I (Part II will, appropriately, follow).
The President and his supporters frequently state some variant of the following claim:
We’re fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here at home. If we leave Iraq [now; in the future but in an unstable condition; etc.], they’ll follow us home.
It seems to me there’s a basic problem with this contention: if “their” goal is to attack the US on American soil, why wouldn’t “they” do it now? Why would “they” bother to mess around in Iraq?
(Note: I use quotes around the words “they” and “their” because I’m pretty well convinced that there are multiple groups involved in attacking US troops in Iraq–my understanding is that most hostiles are native Iraqis with little interest in “following us home,” with a comparatively much smaller number of foreigners who regard themselves as part of terrorist groups like al Qaeda that seek to attack the US wherever.)
Is the argument that it is somehow more difficult to infiltrate US borders now than it would be if we brought 140,000 troops home instead of posting them overseas? If so, that’s a pretty weak argument. It would make some sense if there was some sort of conventional army lined up against us. In that case, said army would have to actually get here to attack us, and bogging them down in a land war might have such a purpose. But al Qaeda’s (and other) terrorists don’t exactly need to get around us that way–they can take airplanes to the US, for instance. Unless one thinks that it will magically become easier to infiltrate our borders once US troops leave Iraq, this sort of argument has no merit.
So there must be some other argument.
One possibility is the that by having so many troops in Iraq, we provide the insurgents/terrorists/civil-war-participants with plenty of easy targets. In economic terms, this ease makes the marginal cost of attacking us in Iraq lower than the marginal cost of attacking us in the US. Since terrorists can maximize an objective function like anyone else, they choose to attack us where the cost is lower–it’s just less trouble to place an IED on the side of the road than smuggle a nuclear suitcase into the US. Perhaps this is true. But even if it is, it’s an argument for a self-perpetuating occupation: we’ll never leave as long as there’s anyone who wants to attack us, because this way we give them an easy target. Not exactly a compelling strategy for “victory” in my book.
A third possibility is the “they-think-America-is-weak-so-they’ll-attack-us” argument. I’ve heard some Bush supporters suggest that al Qaeda was encouraged by our supposed failure to hit back after attacks like the African embassy bombings (of course, we did actually respond there, when President Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and was accused by many Republicans of wagging the Lewinsky dog). This argument has never made much sense to me, either. Al Qaeda seems to want to attack the US, period. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of fear of the consequences (suicide bombers’ non-fear of counterattacks on their persons seems fairly self-evident, for example). So “being on the offense” for its own sake seems like a pretty poor justification as well. It’s also failed quite mightily in Iraq as an empirical matter–our “success” in responding to al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks by invading Iraq does not exactly seem to have deterred terrorist attacks.
So I’ll ask it again: if following us home would be so easy after US troops leave, why is it so difficult now?
Posted by Jonah Gelbach on May 2, 2007 at 06:07 PM
Comments
This back-end rationale for the war in Iraq has always struck me as particularly odd because it seems so obviously immoral, yet no one ever really challenges Bush about it.
If Hatfield and McCoy want to fight, Hatfield can’t take the innocent Smith family hostage, take over their home, and invite McCoy to hold the fight at the Smiths’ house just because Hatfield doesn’t want his own china broken when the punches start to fly. Yet this Iraq war defense says that because we’d rather not fight al Qaeda here, it was a good and smart idea to pick Iraq, invade it, encourage the terrorists to “bring it on” there, and then subject the innocent bystanders living there to years of unrelenting and brutal violence while we turn their country into a wasteland as our chosen battlefield arena. The same logic would have allowed us to invade England and invite “the terrorists” to come play with us there. “Better England than the US!” I guess the Administration might say, but it wouldn’t quite be fair to the English — or logically consistent, coming from a party so dedicted to the protection of all “innocent human life.”
(I guess it could be part of a consistent policy if the Administration were only interested in protecting innocent *American* human life, but that’s not the approach it adopts when it tries to restrict access to family planning services across the globe.)
In any event, when I first heard Bush make this point — better that the Iraqis suffer than that we suffer! – I was kind of amazed. Something of a step back from “We’re invading Iraq to save innocent Iraqis!”
Posted by: Claire | May 4, 2007 5:40:28 PM
JDJ, I’m not sure that’s right. Terrorists are willing to attack civilians, but they might also be willing to attack uniformed regulars.
Posted by: Chris | May 3, 2007 9:38:28 PM
The only think I’d add is that if “they” are willing to engage our uniformed regulars on the field of battle, then they’re not terrorists under a conventional definition.
Posted by: JDJ | May 3, 2007 4:53:23 PM
I think the idea is that having Iraq as a relatively safe haven for terrorists to plan (like Taliban-run Afghanistan) makes attacks in the US easier, and US troops leaving would make Iraq safer for terrorists.
Posted by: Chris | May 3, 2007 8:25:15 AM