Flypaper Strategy


From Donald Sensing:

I wrote again not long ago that Iraq was a compelled battleground for al Qaeda, but repeated a criticism I made long ago, that this outcome was actually not very well foreseen by the administration.

Our failure to foresee the insurgency was real, but not fatal to achieving our objectives. On the other hand, the United States has magnitudes greater staying power than either the Baathist or Islamist insurgents. Simply put, we can outfight them, outthink them, out-resource them and out-maneuver them politically as well as militarily.

Our fear should be not that the Islamist insurgency is continuing, but that it might end too soon.

If al Qaeda wakes up and discerns that Iraq is their graveyard, they may wisely abandon the battle there before they are lethally wounded. We do not want al Qaeda to vacate Iraq substantially intact in order to regroup, reorganize, retrain and re-equip to attack us elsewhere and elsewhen. [Note; al Qaeda’s Iraq commander, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, recently admitted that his ideological advisors had told him to abandon Iraq - DS.]

I certainly do not wish for the insurgency to continue for its own sake - this picture is worth a thousand words why. … Iraq is proving to be al Qaeda’s abbattoir - even some native-Iraqi Baathist terrorists are fighting against them now. There’s no denying that the victory being won over al Qaeda in Iraq is tragically costing many Iraqi lives and the lives and blood of and American troops. Yet for al Qaeda to see the light and give up the fight there would almost certainly ultimately prove more costly to free peoples than for al Qaeda to continue fighting there.

In fact, the London bombings neither confirm nor disprove the efficacy of the “flypaper strategy” concept. The administration didn’t intend such a strategy in the first place and only adopted it late in the game after it became evident that Iraq was indeed proving a magnet for al Qaeda. But no administration member has ever claimed that fighting al Qaeda in Iraq would ironclad guarantee there would be no al Qaeda terrorism in Europe or America. Such a criticism is nought but a straw man Bush’s opponents set up and knock down to serve their own purposes. They have confused outsider analysis by people such as Warren, Bay, Andrew Sullivan and many others including me as enunciations of official administration policy. But it has never been the intentional policy of the administration until very recently, if indeed it it now is at all.

Fascinating ideas here....I think Donald may be on to something. How do you deal with a fighter who will never stop fighting and never give up. What is his/her weakness? You can't negotiate or appease, because there is no appeasing or negotiating - they will continue and continue to fight no matter what. This is a tough situation - this is the Al Queda problem.

But step back and think. At least we KNOW that they will never stop fighting and that negotiation will not work. How can we make that play into our favor....initiate a fight they CANNOT resist - for the same exact same reasons that we fear them - they will never stop fighting. They are designed to fight, fight, fight, so they are unable to miss an opportunity to kill. So we engage a battlefield, arm our soldiers against theirs, where we know we have fighting and technological supremacy and massacre the whole lot of them. Is that the idea? Forgive me for saying it, but it might be goddamn brilliant.