"I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and open for inspection for all"
Of course, we all recognize now that his hope was to forestall or eliminate the trial by fire which arrived by avoiding any chance that some inflammatory remark on principle would end in war.
But of course, war was UNAVOIDABLE.
No matter what he said. Or didn't.
Which makes Robert Wright's "Worse than Vietnam" on Afghanistan a bitter and head shakingly sad example of progressive delusion-think.
Wright lament's our lack of foresight in engaging in this war beginning with this...
"We did the Cole and we wanted the United States to react. And if they reacted, they are going to invade Afghanistan and that's what we want ... . Then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets."
-- Mohammed Atef, military commander of Al Qaeda, in November of 2000
Yes, we're so dumb that continuing to fool us by killing our people OVER AND OVER will trick us into killing you so you can have that wider war.
You know, the one we could avoid if we weren't so blundering.
The centerpiece of his reasoning methods look like this:
Hawks sometimes try to turn this logic to their advantage: It's precisely because our enemies could remain dangerous after the war that we have to deny them a "platform" -- an Afghanistan that's partly or wholly under Taliban control; Communists weren't going to use Vietnam as a base from which to attack America, but we saw on 9/11 that Afghanistan can be used that way.
Actually, we didn't. The staging ground for the 9/11 attacks was Germany -- and some American flight schools -- as much as Afghanistan. The distinctive challenge posed by terrorism is that the enemy doesn't need to occupy much turf to harm us.
While I'm not even sure it's possible to respond in a thinking way to such idiocy, I think we can say that the 'staging ground' for this was in the home of Hassan Al Banna, and given strength and aggressiveness by the life and thought of Sayd Qutb, nurtured after his death by the Al Saud who gave shelter to his brother who taught the entire movement from Abdul Aziz University's School of Islamic Studies, and was born into real war in Afghanistan. THAT IS HISTORY, Mr. Wright. And no safe house in Hamburg used for temporary convenience in a war run from a safe place, in a land where the Taliban and it's Muslim Brotherhood's brothers conceive of how to execute their 1998 Fatwa can change that.
This 'worse than vietnam' war, as Samuel Huntington explained, is UNAVOIDABLE.
We may have administrations that wish they could thread the needle of making war against extremists while not calling them muslims, but to imagine for a SECOND that this can be avoided by allowing our people to be slaughtered, begs the question of why not just pay the jizya and go back to our Sunday tailgating?
I mean, that's all we would have to do to avoid engaging Al Qaeda and it's think alike religious freakazoids and then killing innocents thereby fulfilling their big 'trick' on us and therefore recruiting for them, right?
Besides, those Japs had a real grievance back in 1941, and look what happened by 1980 anyway?
I mean why bother?
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