Friday, June 15, 2007
Opinion

06/17/07 LEFT/RIGHT: More is better

More is better By Stephanie Ramage Last week, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, writing about a May 24 Muslim funeral procession in Iraq that was attacked by a suicide bomber, ventured that...

Last week, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, writing about a May 24 Muslim funeral procession in Iraq that was attacked by a suicide bomber, ventured that “bin Ladenism”—anti-American violence fueled by religious idealism—is dead.

“Yes, it will still have adherents,” Friedman wrote, “but it has lost its revolutionary shine, because it has turned out to be nothing more than a death cult.”

The nihilism that has replaced bin-Ladenism reminds me of the chic nihilism that developed in the later decades of the Irish Republican Army’s reign of terror in Northern Ireland. Most of Ireland, to the south, went on about its business steadfastly avoiding the hellhole of Belfast, but the IRA had developed a culture of blowing people up wrapped in the romance of revolution that Hollywood types and other simpleminded do-gooders found irresistible. These outsiders, thinking more of the sexy terrorist gestalt than of the actual gory tragedy of terrorism, fanned the flames, sent money and arms, and gave support to people who continually stymied a real peace process—people who had no belief beyond a belief in destruction, people whose very identities were hopelessly entwined with murder. Peace would destroy them. When the façade burned away, revealing a not-very-sexy pile of corpses and wrecked infrastructure, some Irish-Americans and other idiotic outsiders put their pro-terrorist T-shirts away and shredded their bank statements.

This fashionable, foreign-fed terrorist fetish is also Islamic extremism’s latest, and probably last, incarnation. And as Friedman says, it is fading. What he doesn’t say, but what I believe, is that this bodes well for peace. Nihilist organizations are usually short-lived.

However, peace in Iraq is not what other countries in the region want. Consider this: It is harder for a visitor to move between Arabic countries than between countries in any other region of the world. It requires not only a passport, but a visa—and getting a visa to go from, say, Lebanon to Yemen, is a hassle. Yet terrorists from as far away as Lebanon seem to be waved into Iraq like majorettes catching up with bands in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. It’s not that the American presence in Iraq is a magnet—it’s that Arab countries have a well-established tradition of actively exporting their malcontents to each other. In the 1950s, as France moved toward decolonizing Algeria, Egypt promptly expelled the Muslim Brotherhood, which gravitated to Algeria, where chaos in the country’s interior had pulled security forces from the borders.

They may not be offering Iraqi vacation packages, but when Arab countries’ border personnel are presented with the departure of an extremist, they apparently say, “Don’t let the gate arm hit you.” And because we don’t have enough troops in Iraq to secure the borders, it makes sense that these terrorists end up there—it’s the least secure state in the region. Other countries in the region are happy that there is somewhere for their disruptive citizens to go.

Before the United States invaded Iraq, the RAND Corporation recommended that a force of 400,000 to 500,000 soldiers would be required to minimize American casualties and establish peace. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—burdened with Cold War hubris that dictated that there are worthy opponents (like the Russians) and then there are ruffians (everyone else) against whom we should muster only a small force—set our troop limit at a paltry 150,000, certainly not enough to secure the borders.
Our troops in Iraq function as a police force. Visibility of a police force is key in deterring crime. And more troops or police also mean that more and shorter patrols can be assigned, giving insurgents less opportunity to cause problems.

When presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani was in Atlanta a month ago, he explained the maxim of safety in numbers and the pitfalls of a gradual withdrawal from Iraq like this: “How would you like it if your son or daughter were among the last 25,000 American troops there?” How about one of only 160,000 troops there without secure borders, as is currently the case?

With the withdrawal of British troops eminent as Tony Blair leaves office, our undermanning in Iraq must be fixed. We can secure peace—if we can send substantially more troops, not an insignificant “surge” of 20,000.

As Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, referring to his borders, wrote in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal on June 13, “A fundamental struggle is being fought … between those who believe that Iraqis … can retrieve their dignity and freedom, and others who think that oppression is the order of things and that Iraqis are doomed to a political culture of terror, prisons, and mass graves. Some of our neighbors have made this struggle more lethal still, they have placed their bets on the forces of terror in pursuit of their own interest.” SP

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of the Sunday Paper.