GWOT

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is nonsense.

I won't say we're winning. I won't say we're losing. But I will use a pop cultural reference to create an obscure metaphor:

Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Spoon boy: There is no spoon.

In the televised address Bush gave two weeks ago, he simplistically portrayed terrorists as being part of some monolithic, organized agent of evil, an evil to be fought in Iraq. But terrorism is a tactic, not an opposing army. Organizations that have used this tactic include al-Qaeda, Hamas, Chechen separatists, IRA (UK), and ETA (Spain). One of the worst terrorist incidents to occur on American soil was perpetrated by a small band of anti-government American militants.

Do not try and wage war against a tactic. That's impossible.

As a tactic, terrorism is very real. We could see how real it is when we woke up this morning and turned on the news. But to those who view terrorists as a monolith that can be defeated the way an army can, I say: There is no spoon. That's why the winning/losing dichotomy makes no sense, and that's why people talk about the possibility of a perpetual war.

Who bombed the US embassies in 1998? Who bombed the USS Cole in 2000? WTC in 2001? Bali in 2002? Istanbul in 2003? Madrid in 2004? If we want to bring the organization responsible for these attacks to justice and to prevent them from attacking again, we should be directing our efforts against them -- not against some nebulous, archetypal bogeyman. Here is a news item that was somewhat obscured by this morning's London bombings:

Gunmen have killed the head of Egypt's diplomatic mission in Baghdad, Cairo said on Thursday. The Al Qaeda group said it executed him because he represented a "tyrannical" government allied to Jews and Christians.

The envoy, ambassador Ihab al-Sherif, was abducted near his home in Baghdad last Saturday about one month after taking up his post as one of the highest ranking Arab diplomats in Iraq.

There are things we can do to disrupt the operations of al-Qaeda and keep them from carrying out such acts. We can seize their assets. We can capture and detain their leadership. We can monitor them with intelligence. And we can put pressure on governments that provide sanctuary or sponsor their activities. These ideas were presented in Richard Clarke's memo to C. Rice, dated January 25, 2001. As for more general security precautions, we can look to the findings of the bipartisan Hart-Rudman Commission.

[08 JUL 2005 07:11:00 CDT] Update: It seems the Wikipedia entry for the Hart-Rudman Commission contains some bad links. For now, the commission report can be found at a poorly-maintained University of North Texas site.

[09 JUL 2005 16:44:00 CDT] Update: I think I may have lost my way a bit on this entry... It didn't turn out as good as I had hoped. I was trying to illustrate the distinction between things that are false (grass is orange) and things that are absurd (three-sided squares obey Newton's Fourth Law of Motion).

It also bugs me that al-Qaeda itself is somewhat nebulous. (See "Is al-Qaeda real?" in the Wikipedia entry.) It's possible that the various cells are so independent that there is no real centralized command structure. What we do know is that there are groups that claim to be part of the al-Qaeda network and use their modus operandi.