Iraq and the "War on Terror"

Ben Shapiro argues over at TownHall.com that the war in Iraq is an essential element of the "war on terror." His article is so far the most reasonable argument I've read for such a claim. But I wouldn't be blogging about it if I agreed with him, so here's a run-down of his major points. His column is articulate and persuasive enough that it's worth analyzing in detail.

This [Osama's comments on Iraq] puts liberals in a tight spot. It seems that the war in Iraq is indeed an integral part of the war on terror, since Bin Laden is now expending much of his energy fighting American troops there. The war in Iraq hasn't distracted us from the broader war on terror; it has distracted Bin Laden from his war on American cities. The war in Iraq wasn't a diversion for us; it was a diversion for him.

This is an interesting point. Shapiro is trying to look at the campaign in Iraq from Bin Laden's perspective, but his flaw is the assumption he makes as to what Bin Laden's goal is. Bin Laden's ultimate goal (if you take his audio recordings mostly at face value) has never been to strike at American cities. His ultimate goal is to remove American influence in the Middle East, by making it as painful as possible for us to continue to operate there. Before the war in Iraq, that meant striking at American civilians around the world, and in America as on 9/11. Since Iraq, that has meant striking at us in Iraq, undermining our mission there to whatever extent possible. A failure in Iraq would certainly damage our credibility for decades to come, and severely hamper our ability to influence events in the Middle East. We have not provided Bin Laden with a diversion, so much a different means by which to carry out his ultimate goal. Our ultimate goal however, is the destruction of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and other terrorists who would strike at the United States. Bin Laden is not in Iraq, and we have diverted sources to Iraq away from the hunt for him in Pakistan where he is believed to be. It is true that terrorists are sneaking into Iraq to fight our soldiers, which serves our ultimate goal in the crudest way, as measured by the number of terrorists we've killed. However, Iraq was never a breeding ground for these sorts of terrorists until we made it so. Indeed, many of these terrorists are suspected to be sneaking into Iraq from various parts of the Arabic and Islamic world; parts that we have no ability to touch because of our commitment to Iraq. And this doesn't even begin to address the issue of terrorists we've created by the war in Iraq; debate continues as to whether Iraq is weaker or stronger since the invasion of Afghanistan, but it would be hard to argue that there are not now more potential terrorists in the Islamic world then there were before Iraq because of the hardening of opinion against us.

Diversion through offensive action has long been a part of military strategy. During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee used such strategy, invading Maryland in 1862 and Pennsylvania in 1863 in order to divert Union troops from marching on Richmond, Va. As Lee himself wrote to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, "As long as the army of the enemy are employed on this frontier I have no fears for the safety of Richmond, yet I earnestly recommend that advantage be taken of this period of comparative safety to place its defence, both by land and water, in the most perfect condition." President Bush makes exactly the same point when he says that America must fight terrorists where they live, instead of fighting them on our own soil.

Again, Shapiro makes a reasonable point. Some on the right argue that our soldiers are in Iraq so that the terrorists will be forced to battle us there, and not strike us here in the United States with another terrorist attack against civilians. Despite what he says this was never a justification of the war in Iraq, but that's irrelevant at this point. What is relevant is that this is a flawed analogy. Lee took the war to the North because he wanted to divert and impress upon the North the cost of the invasion they would have to undertake to subdue the Confederacy. He hoped that the North, fearful of the army that moved at will through their countryside, would repel at the cost of the war and settle for allowing secession. It could be argued that in the present day we reprise these roles with the terrorists... but we are in the role of Lincoln, not Lee. We occupy a fixed territory of land, Iraq, that we must defend against terrorists who have invaded it to attack us, who want to make it difficult to attack them where they reside... in Pakistan, in Syria, in Iran, or elsewhere. And he doesn't address the second half of Lee's statement at all, that in the meantime the Confederacy was to build it's defenses to prepare for the inveitable assault. In that our current situation may be analagous, and yet spending the money to prepare our country for another attack or prevent the terrorists from getting in to our country in the first place has not ever been equal to the urgency with which we invaded Iraq.

The war in Iraq has helped solve another problem as well. Islamist terrorism composes a network spanning the globe. The largest question in dealing with such a network is how to draw out the terrorists from the general population. Islamist terrorists are like iron filings in a sandbox; there is no sieve in the world capable of separating the malignant from the benign. The only way to draw the filings from the sandbox is by using a large magnet: You let the filings come to you.

That's the situation in Iraq. Terrorists from all over the Middle East and the world are seeping into Iraq, hot and heavy to do battle with coalition forces. For months, we've heard constant reports of terrorists from Iran and Syria crossing the Iraqi border. According to Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan, Iranian and Syrian intelligence agents, as well as former Saddam Hussein loyalists, are allying with al-Zarqawi in Iraq.

Instead of the "magnet" metaphor, I prefer to think of this as the "honey pot" approach to fighting terrorism. Instead of finding the terrorists in their home countries, you create a large and extremely attractive target for them to come to. Again this is a persuasive argument, so long as your only consideration is the number of terrorists you've killed. But this addresses neither the number of additional terrorists you've created by going in and stirring up a hornet's nest, nor can it ever address reducing the conditions that created the terrorists in the first place. It's entirely possible that we could stay in Iraq killing terrorists for twenty years, and yet never significantly reduce the number of those who would come into Iraq to fight our soldiers.

There are also two issues that Shapiro fails to deal with at all in his column. He fails to discuss at all the home-grown Iraqi insurgents who are fighting our soldiers, who without a doubt make up the largest portion of the insurgents and in Iraq; the infiltrators are in the minority. It is highly unlikely that any of the Iraqis who have taken up arms against our soldiers would have done so had we not invaded their country. So in addition to facing those terrorists who would have taken up arms against our soldiers elsewhere (say in Afghanistan), or plotted to attack American civilians, we now face Iraqis who we would otherwise have not been fighting against at all. It's difficult to see how this squares with our overall "war on terror."

He also make another more fundamental flaw among those on the right, in referring to all of the insurgents who attack our soldiers as terrorists. It is very important for us to remember the difference between an insurgent who attacks American forces, and someone who is attacking American forces or bombing other Iraqis who might be bombing American civilians if he had a chance. An Iraqi or insurgent of another nationality is not a terrorist because he attacks our soldiers; terror is more frequently aimed at the civilian populace. So we cannot say that every infiltator into Iraq is a potential terrorist; some who have gone have gone to fight American soldiers, and would otherwise not have plotted to kill American civilians. Some who have gone would, if given the chance. And some are native Iraqis now bombing other Iraqis, who never would have had we not invaded in the first place. The fact is we simply cannot say, but to refer to all of the insurgents, or even only the foreign inflitrators, as terrorists, is to play word games that obscures the nature of the insurgency against us.

If the war in Iraq is "an integral part of the war on terror" as Shapiro says, it is only because we have made it so. Nonetheless, it remains a diversion from our true goal of capturing or killing Bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda, and the terrorism that we are currently facing in Iraq would never have occurred had we not invaded Iraq in the first place.