The Wall Street Journal has a summary of an article that is not yet on the newsstands.
It says what I say about winning a war against insurgents.
Winning the War on Terror May Mimic Cold War's End
• FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- NOVEMBER/DECEMBER
What would victory in a war against terrorists look like, for both sides?
Philip H. Gordon, who works for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, says in Foreign Affairs that an American victory over terrorists will be similar to the one the U.S. won over the Soviet Union. It won't end with Washington and its allies capturing and killing every terrorist on the planet, he says, just as the U.S. didn't end the Cold War by having NATO troops march into the Kremlin.
Instead, he says, Islamic extremists will lose the way the U.S.S.R. did, with their ideology and tactics discredited and their erstwhile supporters deserting them. Mr. Gordon says this will occur as a result of disgust at Islamic militants' use of violence against other Muslims, the economic failures of extreme Islamic regimes, and a fear in the Islamic world, evidenced in polls, of having al Qaeda-led governments.
In this version of victory, hard-line splinter groups will remain, but they won't affect Americans' daily lives in any significant way. Terrorists will be unable to launch attacks on the scale of 9/11, and when they do strike, they will be imprisoned as murderers, rather than as soldiers of an opposing side.
Focusing on completely eradicating terrorism rather than fostering its slow demise would drag the U.S. into precisely the costly wars abroad that Osama bin Laden wants the U.S. to fight. Mr. bin Laden and his ilk are unlikely to win in the long term in any case, says Mr. Gordon, but the war in Iraq will prolong the conflict as an effective recruiting tool for al Qaeda. The U.S. should instead focus on exploiting extremist Islam's weak points as an ideology, using diplomacy and economic development, and imprisoning terrorist leaders to bring about Islamic terrorism's slow death.
