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July 23, 2006

Why Aren't we Going After Insert Enemy Here?

QandO has a post that notes: "Interestingly, one of the recent arguments from the left, as some of our liberal commenters here have echoed, is that we should've gone after Iran. they are the real bad guys, and all we're doing in Iraq is simply making the Iranians stronger."

I heard this meme tried out on (Fox, I think; I was listening on the radio, and it could have been one of several channels) today, with regards to Hizb'allah: of course we should have gone after Hizb'allah, because they are the real enemy. Going after Iraq just makes terrorists stronger&tm;.

I don't buy it. The reality is, we cannot go after every enemy, much less every unstable or failed regime, at once. I truly believe that we are at the beginning of a shakeup in international affairs unseen in its scope since the Treaty of Westphalia, and seldom ever seen in history. The whole World of Order Friedman was talking about (hat tip: QandO again) is nothing more than the Westphalian order: states have borders and sovereigns, and cannot be legitimately interfered with within the borders of their territory. The Westphalian order is collapsing. Pretending that borders are always meaningful because some set of people have agreed to them, that we know what a civilian and a combatant are (and that they are necessarily distinct), or that any given issue will have a point of consensus where everyone agrees what should be done and are willing to do it — these were the long-standing games of international order, but they cannot be meaningful any more. The terrorists and their supporters have so blurred the lines that the Westphalian order is fast falling into ruin.

What this means in practical terms is that there are going to be wars and battles and other forms of conflict for the next fifty or even hundred or more years, if we are fortunate enough not to first see a genocide along the way, to determine whether Islam really will be the world's single religion, and after that (and assuming the jihadis do not win), to determine how power can be legitimately exercised short of war, and what the valid reasons are for going to war. We will not likely see the end of this, and our children might not, either.

So to pretend that we have the unlimited resources to attack every enemy and solve every challenge immediately is simply fantasy. Well, more precisely, it is simply a rhetorical gimmick useful for beating on one's political opponents. It does nothing to help us get to a new world order (there is a phrase which the elder President Bush probably regrets, both for its prescience and for its difference from what he thought we were moving to). In fact, if anything, it makes it harder to solve these wicked problems.

This will get worse, far worse, before it gets better.

Posted by jeff at July 23, 2006 9:07 PM

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Comments

Posted by: queuno at July 24, 2006 10:20 AM

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at July 24, 2006 10:38 AM