Flypaper
By Callimachus | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, WarAs one who supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein largely for the sake of the Iraqi people, I have never liked the “flypaper effect.” That’s the notion that, by turning Iraq into a magnet for jihadis, we could kill them there because “it’s better than fighting them here.”
Among the many people whose previous statements are biting them in the rear-end today are those who put too much smug confidence in the flypaper effect. If you’re going to talk like that, better be sure you really can prevent them from fighting you “here.” Otherwise, you’re thrown back on saying, “well, it would have been worse ‘here’ if we weren’t also fighting them ‘there.’ ” And that doesn’t go very far.
Robin Cook, in Friday’s “Guardian,” already is sharpening that stick for Blair’s head:
“President Bush is given to justifying the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that by fighting terrorism abroad it protects the west from having to fight terrorists at home. Whatever else can be said in defence of the war in Iraq today, it cannot be claimed that it has protected us from terrorism on our soil.”
Harping on that, however, won’t go very far either. Neither does George Galloway-style rhetoric of “run away from them and they’ll leave us alone.”
We all need the sharper pencils in the set to start writing a good battle plan to put al Qaida and Islamist terrorism out of business altogether, with soft power, hard power, and every kind of power in the book. Kinds of power that haven’t even been invented yet.
For a concise London reaction, I can’t think of better than Tim Worstall, much of whose reaction is hilariously unprintable here, but there’s this:
No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you’ve tried it now bugger off. We’re not scared, no, you won’t change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 8th, 2005 at 8:27 am
Iraqi blogger Riverbend touches on this in her deconstruction of Bush’s June 28 speech on Iraq.
July 19th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
Gosh, I wish Americans had responded to 9/11 with the resolution of our British friends. Instead we acted like a 10 year old who just found out about the boogeyman. In place of a “Go to hell, you will not change us!” We ran to our government, accusing and excusing … and more than anything… crying for “protection” and “safety”.
The terrorists changed us, and in doing so won a small victory.
July 26th, 2005 at 11:06 am
I’ve not cared much for the flypaper theory either, but for a different reason. Applied generally, this theory basically means that America can protect herself from terrorism by inducing would-be terrorists to ply their craft in other countries instead. Even if this theory were perfectly sound and above reproach, it’s not exactly fair to the populations of those “flypaper” countries, who are forced to bear the brunt of casualties and damage of a war between a foreign army and a (mostly) foreign collection of terrorists.