The Very Serious War On Terror

The current issue of Newsweek has a great cover story called 'Into Thin Air: He's still out there. The hunt for bin Laden.'. It's a long article, filled with lots of interesting details. We all know how we had bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora in late 2001, but let him slip away. But the article also reveals a late 2004 close call as well.

But beyond the details our hunt for the elusive Osama, the article singles out two factors which "made the job harder than necessary." They are, a) the delicacies of our relationship with Pakistani prez Pervez Musharraf, and b) the diversion that was our invasion of Iraq.

On the latter point, the article notes that-

While the terrain required deep local knowledge and small units, career officers in the U.S. military have long been wary of the Special Operations Forces best suited to the task... Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass, Iraq was a much better target. By invading Iraq, the United States would give the Islamists—and the wider world—an unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts—and bombing caves is not something that counts."

I'm sorry, I must've missed the part there about WMDs, rape rooms, and democracy.

You see, actually focusing on the people responsible for the attacks would be boring, less politically advantageous, and not as profitable. Plus it would show the jihadists that they we are deliberate, rational, and competent in our goals. Lame! Better to show them our crazy face and tell them to 'suck on this' instead. A serious foreign policy.

It adds about this that-

By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out.

And-

The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on, the more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're getting re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came through the [Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've logged on [to Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those who have come through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of skill is going to be greater than the skill of the original generation."

This is a very serious war we're in. Serious and smart. You're a traitor to think otherwise.