By Shoshana Bryen
WASHINGTON, D.C. –President Bush was right. There. We said it and we’ll say it again. President Bush was right that the war in which the West is engaged is the war against terrorists and the states that harbor and support them.
President Bush’s formulation was a sea change from the Clinton Administration’s law-enforcement approach that worked to apprehend people and understand the process after the fact. The Bush formulation was also rejected by President Obama, whose Homeland Security secretary’s first instinct after the Christmas day airline bombing attempt was to say that “after the incident” the system worked vey well. OK, Secretary Janet Napolitano recanted, but still, she is the one who brought you “man caused contingencies” because she couldn’t bring herself to say “terrorism.”
President Obama remains focused on stopping individuals who “break the law.” He has asked for a review of the “terrorism watch list” containing the names and aliases of some half a million persons.
A notably liberal columnist in The Washington Post wrote that, “Our enemy apparently sees its future in places such as Yemen-or perhaps Somalia, a failed state for almost two decades…The enemy’s leadership is believed to be ensconced in remote areas of Pakistan…yet the United States will soon have about 100,000 troops chasing its shadows in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda’s presence is now minimal.”
But the liberal columnist couldn’t connect the dots – a common failure among those who don’t choose to understand. The connection is that states that do not control their territory and states that hate the West are places that terrorists find haven, money, training, passports and airline flights. Iran, Syria and the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza do it on purpose. Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Lebanon don’t control their territory entirely – and maybe don’t want to.
The liberal columnist didn’t say it, maybe didn’t understand it, and surely wasn’t about to give credit where it was due.
Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan before, but it left when the United States toppled the Taliban that gave it sanctuary. Al Qaeda was in Iraq, but it left when the United States deposed Saddam and helped the Iraqis build a governmental structure that controls all the parts of the country – without rape rooms and mass graves. The United States has been helping Yemen dispose of the al Qaeda presence that lives in the areas that are relatively remote and ungoverned. According to American military sources in Iraq, Syria has become a haven for al-Qaeda.
This is not a plea to invade any additional countries, but to understand the sources of the problem and determine which countries can deal with it themselves, which ones we need to help and which are-determinedly-our enemies and need to be dealt with as such.
Stripping airline passengers is the last stage of failing to address the problem. Looking for one individual in the terrorism watch list database and thinking you can stop him (or her) is ridiculous. We are lucky in the extreme that brave and vigilant people sometimes pop up to stop individuals committing or trying to commit acts of terrorism. We are lucky in the extreme that parents are beginning to come forward to express concerns about their own children. But we will never stop all the individuals who seek to do us harm.
That is what the Israelis understood when they went into the West Bank in 2002 to wipe out the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure and reclaim control of the territory from which terrorism came to Israel during the so-called “second intifada.” That is what the security fence and checkpoints do. That is what the Israelis understood when they launched Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza one year ago.
They couldn’t stop all the individuals; they had to control the space.
That is what President Bush understood. And he was right.
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Bryen is senior director of security policy of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Her column is sponsored by Waxie Sanitary Supply in memory of Morris Wax, longtime JINSA supporter and national board member.