Terror has no boundaries

The Belmont Club:

...

The kidnapping of fifteen British sailors by Iran has inadvertently given the public a glimpse of what it means to "negotiate" with the Ayatollahs. It is also an illustration of how safe it is to stay on "your" side of the border, such as for example within the sovereign territory of a United States embassy, or manning an outpost on the Israeli side of Lebanese border, sleeping in a housing unit in the Khobar towers, visiting a friendly Yemeni port, keeping a watch on smugglers in Iraqi waters while in a British naval vessel and -- in case anyone still remembers -- going to work in Manhattan on an autumn day.

One of the problems with assuming that a withdrawal from Iraq -- to Kurdistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or as Congressman Murtha once suggested -- to Okinawa will end hostilities is it presumes a certain conventionality: that once you have "stopped" fighting by signing some agreement; or that by withdrawing past some map border you will be safe.

The campaign in Afghanistan clearly shows that maps mean nothing to terrorists. The al-Qaeda, driven from one "country" simply moved to the neighboring country. The only ones who respected international boundaries were the Americans. For al-Qaeda the "international" border means security for their side in Waziristan but it certainly provides no safety for Coalition forces in "Afghanistan" from their attacks, except as provided by the Coalition's own defenses. A purely legal border, like the Iran-Iraq demarcation in the Shatt-al-arab is a one way street. It's a geographical "Geneva Convention", entirely asymmetrical....
Yet, we continue the fools errand of trying to negotiate with people of bad faith, and Democrats seem to believe that we don't do it enough. Engagement in meaningless bad faith conversations seems to give them some comfort, but it is an illusory comfort. When their illusions are crushed as they were in the Carter administration the hunker down and get weaker. The British appear to be following their script.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more