re: #179 David Simon

Ooh, that’s a lot to chew on. Let’s see if I can break it down:

Hit Saudi Arabia? Yes, we could have done that, but what would we have gained? We’d be in control of 20+% of the world’s proven oil reserves…and the two holiest cities in Islam, guaranteeing a billion or so enemies. (We’d have to control it, because there would be no one to turn it over to. And that’s where the rub comes in: If you read up on Bin Laden, he was more than willing to become a Sudanese farmer before King Fahd begged us to defend KSA against Saddam.)

Hitting Pakistan would have made sense, hindsight being 20/20. Pakistan has been a nominal ally for most of its sixty year history, but Pakistanis - much like Arabs vis a vis Israel - can’t seem to get over having their butts handed to them repeatedly when it comes to armed conflict. It was pretty clear early on that Musharaff/ISI/Frontier Corps/whoever the fuck were playing a duplicitous game (i.e. handing over lower level Al Qaeda while tucking away the Taliban bigwigs for future use). Once again though, who would we turn it over to?

And our muddled message to the region didn’t help. Tommy Franks was no David Patraes (then again, I’m not sure Patraes would have been Patraes back then). In Afghanistan, we wasted our best intelligence searching for Bin Laden instead of figuring out how to win millions of people over to our side, all the while outsourcing security to the tribal butchers who drove the populace into the arms of the Taliban to begin with.

We repeated the same mistake in Iraq. Our best assets were wasted in the futile search for WMD instead of gaining actionable intelligence. And let’s not get started with the CPA, the rush to elections etc.

In any event, Ledeen, Friedman and other “doctrines” don’t matter. It was clear that the ratcheting up of terrorist attacks wasn’t going to cease so long as we treated them as law enforcement matters. Perhaps the goals of trying to bring democracy to the Middle East and making civilized people of its denizens was quixotic. But it’s a damn sight better than what we were doing - which is absolutely nothing.

David: The Friedman quote was a lot to chew on, and you chewed it well. :)

I was with you 100% until the last paragraph. My view is a very different one. But even when I disagree with you, I appreciate your insight(s). Write on!