georgeob1 wrote:If I understand you correctly, you suggest it was the greater European (or Spanish) familiarity with such death and destruction in their cities that enables them to hold back and presumably avoid an overreaction to such provocation. Is this correct?. If so, the merit of your argument depends on the assumption that the Islamist challenge will whither on its own. Is that your belief? If this is not the case then you must consider the likely effect of inaction on those who threaten us both.
The alternative to "overreaction" is not "inaction" (and hoping the enemy will "wither away").
(What is this black and white thing going on all the time?)
The alternative, instead, is appropriate action.
That's a new question rather than an answer, I know.
In casu, as you know, I consider appropriate reaction to have been going after Osama and Al Qaeda, hunting them down, killing them, and destroying their primary base.
Obviously, the US has failed in doing so. Osama is still at large. Al Qaeda has succeeded in a whole range of post-9/11 attacks, from Indonesia and Pakistan through Turkey, Saudi-Arabia and Morocco to Spain. And in Osama's primary base, Aghanistan, the intervention has been undermanned and underfunded to such an extent that not just the warlords, but the Taliban, now too, roam around freely again through much of the country, allowing Osama's men to find new refuges.
Overreaction is to use the excuse of 9/11 to implement a full-scale war that had been planned before, a war that takes an enormous toll on the US Army's resources, manpower and attention, and the motivation for which can at best be tied to Al Qaeda in the most indirect of ways.
Overreaction, too, is to now equate every single violent rebel group one newly hears of with Al Qaeda, as if the singular horror Al Qaeda inflicted upon the US means that there is now only the good guys and the Al Qaeda guys. I can understand it, psychologically - if this is the first foreign attack that directly hit you, and overseas conflicts never commanded much public or media attention before, then whatever Americans see out in that world that's bad, they think, 'must be Al-Qaeda'. But no, just because, say, the Chechen terrorists are ruthless and Muslim, doesn't mean they're Al Qaeda. The cross-ties that habitually exist between violent and terrorist groups around the world (and thus also between the Chechens and anyone who's willing to send them money) must be scrutinized vigilantly, but if one starts to instinctively equating every armed Muslim group with the Al Qaeda cause of jihad, one starts understanding ever
less, rather than more, about the world. That, too, is the result of overreaction.
georgeob1 wrote:The historical precedents are generally not favorable to your view.
No? Compare the ruthless (allegedly too ruthless) persecution of the RAF in Germany, that went without any mass-scale hysteria about everything red in general, with the "Red scare" that followed violent incidents early last century in the US. It is sometimes better to zoom in on the actual culprits and stamp them out than to throw the net much wider and risk getting into a cultural us vs. them fight - which in the end chases
more people into the enemy camp instead of isolating it.
georgeob1 wrote:How do you interpret the different behaviors of the United States and the principal European powers to the several civil wars in the former Yugoslavia? Do you believe the European powers should have intervened before the slaughter in Bosnia became widespread?
Yes.
georgeob1 wrote:Was the United States wrong in urging intervention then, and later in Kosovo?
No.
georgeob1 wrote:If you believe the intervention was necessary, then please explain why the European powers were unable to find the resolve to do it themselves.
Because they were too divided to act. And because for a while, as reports about reciprocal horrors multiplied, the original perception of democratic states aiming for independence from a communist, nationalist, centralist state was replaced by the perception of "ancient ethnic hatreds" and "Balkan warrior peoples" who were doomed to fight each other. Better put a fence around it and let them do what they do. This perception influenced US policy for a long time as well - too long a time.
georgeob1 wrote:There are, in all of these events, two decidedly different modes of behavior. They can't both be right. Both could be wrong, but to assert that one must suggest a different alternative. Only one can be right. Which is it?
In case of Yugoslavia? My opinion is that the EU should have intervened militarily right at the beginning, if not in 1992, when the Croat war was raging but the Bosnian war had not erupted yet (and Izetbegovic was practically begging for outside monitors and peacekeeping troops), then in 1993 or 1994, when the Serbs pushed the Muslims back and started murdering those left behind. Instead of trying to force Izetbegovic to accept ever new plans that de facto recognized the Serb conquests (first the Owen/Vance plan, eventually the Dayton plan), we should have acted to stop the politically-motivated ethnic cleansing before it became irreversible.
Now what's your point? Yes, I was for military intervention in Yugoslavia, because there was an attempted genocide going on there. Yes, I was for military intervention in Afghanistan, because Osama was hiding out there with the core of his Al-Qaeda conspiratives, and they'd just plane-bombed the US. So, how does that mean that, by consequence, I must
also be for the war against Iraq - where no genocide was ongoing anymore since the Kurds were safe in their own zone, and where practically the only trace of Osama was the hospitalisation of one of his operatives a year or two before? Or against Syria, or Iran, or whatever "challenge" you find next to showcase your "resolve and endurance"?
Every target, every conflict, every case needs to be judged by their own merits. Underground groups all have some kind of ties with each other - mafia, political terrorists, Jihadists - because the underground market is where they find their weapoons and resources. But that doesn't make them all "Al-Qaeda" (though it sure makes them all crooks). Colouring in the global picture with just the two colours, us and them, those who stand with America for freedom and those who, since they're bad guys (and Muslims) must by definition be Al-Qaeda (and therefore must be attacked in the War on Terror) makes the war against the 9/11 perpetrators spill out like an oil stain. Covering ever more kinds of enemies and allegedly sympathetic states and population groups, and makes what could have been a relatively focused clampdown on those who are guilty for the NY dead into a global, cultural conflict. Thanks for nothing, I'd say.
