Kevin Drum writes the following: "Israel has infinitely better intelligence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip than we do in Iraq, and even so they haven't been able to halt the guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings there in 30 years of trying. Increasingly, it looks like my worst fears are coming true and Iraq is becoming America's version of the West Bank: intractable, deadly, and accomplishing little except acting as a breeding ground for ever more terrorists."
Thoughts? Comments? It strikes me that this is more on target than a lot of Americans would like to think. I don't think there's any question that we're creating more terrorists, and that our presence and actions in Iraq have created ties between a variety of terrorist organizations that did not previously exist. That's pretty well established.
But what I think makes this an interesting comparison is that Israelis have been murdered for decades for holding onto land that their government was firmly committed to keeping. The United States on the other hand is losing soldiers daily to stay in a land that ... we want to leave? John Kerry has said that he wants to pull the US military out of Iraq (though not immediately). George Bush hasn't been nearly as clear on the matter, but I think the perception of most voters is that he is planning to pull (at least most) US troops out eventually too (though exactly when and exactly why remains murky). Given what we know about the way democracies respond to terrorism (see Robert Pape's seminal article in the August 2003 issue of the American Political Science Review) doesn't this suggest we are in a vastly weaker position to fight the fight in Fallujah than the Israelis are in Ramallah, even before we get into issues like who has the better intelligence (and in this comparison it's clearly the Israelis)? It appears to me that we committed to a fight that invites attacks and is doomed to entail high casualties. Posted by armand at September 11, 2004 01:40 PM | TrackBack | Posted to International Affairs