XDA

Smart guy Peter Beinart writes a long piece about how President Obama has "outsmarted" al Qaeda--

by pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and close Gitmo, and by eschewing torture—in other words, by not overreacting to the terrorist threat—[he] is cutting al Qaeda’s throat.

Beinart says al Qaeda fails when it starts killing other Muslims because that causes its popular support to erode. He has the Gallup polls to back up that notion. It is standard liberal cant. If we're nice to them, they will fail.

I agree with Peter that al Qaeda has been weakened severely since 2001, but it's not because we've been nice to terrorists, or ignored them (that was the primary Clinton anti-terror policy and al Qaeda prospered then). It seems to me that the primary cause of al Qaeda in Afghanistan's decline, and al Qaeda in Iraq's eradication, was the deadly force we and our allies brought to bear against them. We killed them and drove them into hiding. We showed them to be the weak horse. Of course their poll numbers are falling throughout the Muslim world, we kicked their asses and are kicking them still. Beinart doesn't mention that blatantly obvious fact at all. Successful military action apparently doesn't exist to him. Winning by killing the enemy just doesn't compute to the liberal mind. It is, as Andrew McCarthy first saw, a willful blindness. Do nothing and win--what a convenient belief for the pacifist left, who have not seen a war they liked since 1945.

When any state or organization declares war and then wages it against you, ignoring them is not the preferred response. Here's Beinart's big finish.

The dirty little secret of the “war on terror” is that America is winning. We began winning during George W. Bush’s second term, when al Qaeda’s violence began corroding its support among Muslims, and we’re doing even better under Barack Obama, because the U.S. now presents a less menacing face. The best chance al Qaeda has is another American overreaction of the kind the GOP demands: reckless military attacks by the United States or Israel, mass profiling of Muslims, a return to torture. Perhaps Obama’s Republican critics do take the terrorist threat more seriously than he does. I’d rather take it less seriously, and win.

Thanks for the deserved praise of George Bush. I thought he was the cause of the problem, not the solution. But Beinart then quickly loses his way. Presents a less menacing face? Don't the Obama supporters counter Republican critics of his way of waging the war on terror by pointing to the huge number of Predator/Hellfire attacks he has authorized on al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan? I guess Beinart thinks the Hellfire missiles must have a happy face pasted on their warheads. Ignore terrorism, and win? It really takes a lot of education to get this ignorant of even very recent history.

Labels: Global War Against Muslim Extremists; Peter Beinart; Historical Ignorance