I believe that, if you’re going to go to war, you go to win. You have an attainable goal like “We’re going to conquer this land” or “We’re going to drive those folks out of this country” or “We’re going to commandeer all the natural resources in this place.” and you pour money and manpower into making it happen.
You don’t go to war to fight an idea–like terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism–because wars aren’t effective ways to fight ideas and it’s impossible to understand when we’ve won. Will we have won the war on terror after four years without a terrorist attack? Ten? Will we have vanquished Islamic functionalism if women can take off their burqas? Or when men can talk to women in public? How do we recognize our enemy when today a person might be on our side, but one Britney Spears video or one stray bullet, and suddenly that person is determined to help wipe us off the planet?
And so here we are in Iraq. We’re fighting a war there, but for what? We’ve gotten rid of Saddam. What’s our goal? To bring peace? Or to establish a democratic government? Or what?
Because, really, I think leaving now would be a mistake, even though I think this is the stupidest war we’ve ever fought. But when you start thinking about two soldiers mutilated and boobytrapped with bombs, you just start to think that vague “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here” bullshit just isn’t cutting it any more.
I don’t even know any more who “them” is. Who is our enemy? How do we recognize them in order to fight them? How will we know when we’ve beaten them? Do our troops have enough protection? Do they have the equipment and supplies they need? What will constitute victory?
Seriously, America, help me understand what our objectives are and the criteria we’re using to decide if those objectives are being met. Because right now?
I don’t think we have any. No objectives and no criteria.
And what’s worse is that we seem to be fighting an opponent who is willing to do batshit crazy things. I mean, seriously. Rigging corpses to explode? I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers who found that.
Yes, I know it’s war and that people are going to die. But this war just seems like it’s full of the most pointless deaths ever, kids who might have been better used here at home or rebuilding Afghanistan or whatever. Why are we even fighting in Iraq, again?
I mean, I hate to make absurd suggestions, but the fundamentalist Muslims hate the same things about us that our own fundamentalist Christians do–our decadent culture and the freedoms our women have. Why aren’t we fighting this war primarily as a war of propaganda?
Why aren’t we flooding Iraq with pornography and women’s t-shirts and Hollywood blockbusters and Mapplethorpe photos and A Room of One’s Own and condoms and liquor? Turn them into the very thing they hate and fear? Us.
Tiny Cat Pants 
we’re in Iraq because Dub is 9-yrs-old and has daddy issues, doing everything daddy didn’t as his playbook, and daddy took a lot of heat for not taking the war all the way to Baghdad in the first one, and a lot of other whatever things that go on in the mind of a 9-yr-old, especially in the hands of evildoer puppeteers like Rummy and the Dick
"You don’t go to war to fight an idea–like terrorism or Islamic fundamentalism–because wars aren’t effective ways to fight ideas and it’s impossible to understand when we’ve won."That’s ridiculous. Wars are fought over ideas all the time – ideas like independence, sovereignity, fascicm, Nazism, Communism, tribalism, etc., etc. It’s true that in most wars there’s a country name attached to those ideas, but that’s just one of the differences in the war on terror (which is mostly radical Islamist terror) – terrorists generally don’t have a country, which is why they do and can fight their wars by other means. (When states such as Libya attempt to use similar tactics, they discover that they’re easily punished for them, as when Reagan put a missile in Qaddafi’s kitchen.)What the U.S. is doing is going after state sponsors of terror, state allies of terror, and state harborers of terrorists. And if terrorists gravitate to those states and fight openly, it’s all the easier to kill them.
Mark r. Are you the Mark r I think you are? Because, if not, I totally have this friend you should meet.Les, you know full well that’s a simplistic answer to my question. First of all, to take you from the bottom up, what constitutes "terror"? What is it? Was McVeigh a "terrorist," for example? How do we recognize our enemies? Does lumping all our enemies together under one term–"terrorist"–when they have only the loosest ties to each other (if any) give the false impression that this is a unified and organized opposition to us, with recognizeable leadership?To say that we go after state sponsors, allies, and harborers of terrorists is ridiculous, as you know. Since any country could arguably fit those definitions, it gives us an excuse to go to war with everyone. And don’t think I didn’t notice that you’ve conveniently avoided my most difficult question–if you’re going to war against an ideology, how do you know when you’ve won? How will we know when the war is over?Because, certainly, you must see that their ideology is "We hate America and think the world would be better without it." How many people in the world do you think believe that? How do you plan on fighting them all?How can you not see that conventional warfare is not a tool for ending "terror"–whatever that means–but for emboldening and recruiting new terrorists?But even more specifically than that, what are our goals for Iraq and how will we know when they are achieved?Then is your other bizarro claim: "Wars are fought over ideas all the time – ideas like independence, sovereignity, fascicm, Nazism, Communism, tribalism, etc., etc."Let’s just take this idea that we fought World War II in order to wipe out Nazism. If this were true, why didn’t we get into the war earlier? Why do we then tolerate Nazis in our midst? The same with Communism. Why haven’t we gone to war against all communist countries? There’s one 90 miles from us and Russia’s not going to stop us from taking it now.Oh, that’s right, because in the end, those things are not about fighting "ideologies." It’s about fighting actual countries using discernable plans and goals.We don’t fight Cuba because Cuba’s about as much of a threat as nothing to us. We don’t go after the Neo-Nazis who parade through our streets because their ideology doesn’t actually frighten us that much; we think they’re crackpots, not terrorists.
"First of all, to take you from the bottom up, what constitutes "terror"? What is it? Was McVeigh a "terrorist," for example? How do we recognize our enemies? Does lumping all our enemies together under one term–"terrorist"–when they have only the loosest ties to each other (if any) give the false impression that this is a unified and organized opposition to us, with recognizeable leadership?"What McVeigh did was certainly terrorism, and we took down his whole outfit. It just so happens his whole outfit was himself and that other guy. Al-Qaeda certainly sees themselves as an organization, with a hierarchy, training centers, DVDs training manuals, and the whole nine yards. They also use terrorist tactics. So, yes, they’re a terrorist organization.It’s true that we’re not fighting other terrorist groups (such as the IRA or Hamas), so you can call it "The War Against Al-Qaeda, Mostly" if you like, but it’s a distinction without a difference. A rose by any other name."And don’t think I didn’t notice that you’ve conveniently avoided my most difficult question–if you’re going to war against an ideology, how do you know when you’ve won? How will we know when the war is over?"When most of the enemy is dead or demoralized, same as most wars throughout history.
Yes, but… Ha, sorry Les. I hope you get that I’m not trying to be argumentative, I just really don’t get this and I find it really helpful that someone with clear convictions opposite of mine is willing to fight me.So, here’s my thing. We don’t have proof that Al-Qaeda is very well organized. In Ron Suskind’s new book, he talks about how one of the men we captured and tortured was clearly mentally ill and just making shit up, even before we started torturing him, and yet we passed him off like some big Terrorist Catch.http://functionalambivalent.typepad.com/blog/2006/06/emboldening_the.htmlI’m sorry, but I just don’t buy Al-Qaeda as some kind of Islamicist Crime Syndicate. I think evidence shows and has shown repeatedly that there’s a core organized group and then a shitload of crazy or pissed off people who are willing to act in the name of Al-Qaeda, but don’t actually take orders from them or have any kind of direct contact with them.How will we find them?If we don’t kill them, how will we demoralize them? They’re willing to die. They don’t have a homeland worth losing. And we can’t threaten their families because we often don’t even know who they are until they’re already dead in some kind of suicide bombing.This isn’t like fighting an army that lacks a country. This is like fighting a bunch of gangs that have nothing more in commen than the fact that they don’t like us.And that’s why I think that, for us to achieve the most important goal–for us to exist safely–we have to fight an ideological war, with actual warfare only as a back-up.
"So, here’s my thing. We don’t have proof that Al-Qaeda is very well organized."So your argument is that we should … what, exactly? Wait until they get even more organized than they were when 19 of them took flight lessons, hijacked four 747s, destroyed the World Trade Center, and attacked the Pentagon?"How will we find them?"They’ve made that task a lot easier by congregating in Iraq. "If we don’t kill them, how will we demoralize them? They’re willing to die."They’re only willing to die as long as they think they can win. In Iraq in particular, winning for them means that the nascent constitutional democracy in Iraq has to lose, and the U.S. has to withdraw before Iraq is stabilized. Each election erodes Al Qaeda power. Every school, road, and power line steadies the country’s nerves. Every new Iraqis guardsmen who gets trained makes it clearer that Iraq will remain a constitutional democracy even when the U.S. leaves.
Methinks we doth protest too much about ‘al Qaeda’. I vaguely recall from my voluminous studies of the Cold War era that every time a little nation (especially in Africa or Latin America) refused to bend the knee to a U.S. corporation (and, by extension, U.S. foreign policy), they were inevitably labeled ‘communist’ and lumped in with the vast Soviet conspiracy to take over the world. The U.S. then considered itself justified in visiting any sort of horror (directly or by proxy) upon said nation in the name of ‘defending democracy’ (of course, that usually involved overthrowing a democratically elected gov’t, but let’s not dawdle over minutiae). Now it seems that every time a group of brown people get together to fight against U.S. foreign policy, they get labelled ‘terrorists.’ "Al Qaeda" is just the leading brand on the current propaganda market.I’m not suggesting that there are no ‘terrorist’ organizations in existence. I am simply agreeing with the gist of Aunt B.’s point that ‘terrorism’ is a political label. I believe that it is often invoked by those who prefer to draw attention away from the complexities of certain geopolitical issues.