A New War
By Mitch Berg
Richard Fernandez – one of the best foreign-policy writers going, these days – notes what’s really important about Brussels, and most likely Paris, and, let’s be honest, the next massacre, coming soon to a major soft target near (some of) you (emphasis added):
That [Salah Abdeslam, planner of the Paris attacks] was found just a short distance from where police had been looking for him for weeks should have clued Obama in to the possibility that he had a base of sympathizers. Abdeslam’s ability to go to ground right under the noses of the Belgian authorities should have suggested that European counterterrorism was mutating into something more deadly: counterinsurgency.
Counter-terrorism is the police vs a “handful of killers”. Counterinsurgency is the state vs a rival state. The attack on Brussels may mean Trofimov was right: Obama’s handful of killers now had a social base of potential sympathizers legally indistinguishable from the original European inhabitants and from which they could launch attacks at the “very heart of Europe”, as Christopher Dickey described Brussels in the Daily Beast.
The war in Europe today is different only in scale – for now – from the beginnings of the Vietnam War, where a motivated minority with support from a belligerent waged guerrilla war against the South without need of a formal declaration.
And yet President Obama and his Euro-progressive ideological cousins continue to treat the ongoing terror offensive in Europe as nothing more than an outburst of lawlessness.
March 30th, 2016 at 9:17 am
Anyone who thinks Obama and the rest of Europe were not aware that the Paris bombing planner knew very well that there were other people supporting Salah Abdeslam is an uninformed idiot, not some bright foreign policy wonk or terrorist expert.
I suggest you rely on better news sources, notably Reuters, the BBC, and the Belgian news outlets (mostly in French but also some in English). That is how the last few days resulted in multiple arrests, and how they came to search apartments where they found DNA helping to identify those involved.
And no, it is not factual that Obama or Europe is treating current events as an outburst of lawlessness. Sheesh, you have to really go out of your way to avoid those who provide factual information that undermines your cognitive bias, because there is plenty of it readily available… if you pull your head out of right wing media, a notorious bastion of bad information.
And linking Viet Nam to this kind of activity is ridiculous.
You are correct that there may be another terrorist attack somewhere, Europe or here, or Canada etc. And there will also be more right wing nut attacks as well like the South Carolina racist attack in a church. There continue to be more of the latter than the former.
I would point out to you that there have been fewer terrorist attacks in this country under Obama than there were under Bush. That argues Obama is doing a better job at understanding and guarding against terrorism than otherwise.
March 30th, 2016 at 9:33 am
Did Dognabbit’s own blog get suspended? She sure spends an inordinate amount of time sniffing fire hydrants and getting taken to the shed here.
March 30th, 2016 at 9:35 am
DG barked: ” There continue to be more of the latter than the former.”
oh please substantiate that assertion! You can’t of course, but I’d like to see you try.
March 30th, 2016 at 9:57 am
Did FDR promise to accept 10,000 Japanese immigrants during the height of WW II? No, he did not. Why not? Because he feared spies and saboteurs would be among them. Instead, he rounded up all Japanese and interned them, an action the Supreme Court found was Constitutional. Why? Because it was a time of war and in war you can do things that you can’t do in peace. In peace, you must treat infiltrators and saboteurs as a law enforcement matter.
President Obama and European leaders like Angela Merkel think we’re at peace.
They are mistaken.
March 30th, 2016 at 11:20 am
Doggone, please try to remain on topic here. If indeed the Brussels terrorists had a base of supporters that would prevent effective criminal justice, then….the tools of criminal justice are going to be of limited effectiveness in combating that terrorism. Is that so complicated?
The one thing that might have made a difference here is policing a little more along the lines of what they have in the U.S., where a guy who got in a firefight with police after robbing a currency exchange (one of them) would be lucky to survive that day, and if he did, he’d have been imprisoned not for 4-5 years, but for 4-5 decades, and a guy caught carjacking multiple times (one other perp) would have gotten significant prison time instead of probation.
That noted, the left is clamoring not to continue strong sentences, but to weaken them, and even if Brussels had Texas-style justice, that still leaves the likelihood that he would have been able to find other perpetrators.
March 30th, 2016 at 1:34 pm
The worst thing about the Democrats is that they would rather fight American conservatives — their fellow citizens — than Islamist terrorism. If you vote GOP, they would rather see you in a prison camp, or kicked out of the country, than a non-citizen, resident alien Muslim who freely admits that they support Sharia and Jihad against the United States.
Don’t believe me? Try to get a Democrat to agree with you that a resident alien — not a citizen — who admits to supporting sharia and jihad against the US should be deported.
Good luck.
March 30th, 2016 at 1:51 pm
(not holding my breath, but…)
I would point out to you that there have been fewer terrorist attacks in this country under Obama than there were under Bush.
Link/cite, please. SPLC is not a valid source.
March 30th, 2016 at 3:08 pm
There continue to be more of the latter than the former.
Cite source, DG. Your ass does not count.
March 30th, 2016 at 6:25 pm
“The war in Europe today is different only in scale – for now – from the beginnings of the Vietnam War, where a motivated minority with support from a belligerent waged guerrilla war against the South without need of a formal declaration.”
We entered the Vietnam War to save a corrupt, incompetent SVN regime that was unloved by its Vietnamese speaking, Buddhist majority and led by a French speaking Catholic president who was chosen by Jack Kennedy on the advice of Cardinal Spellman. We lost Vietnam because it was a war that could not be won in any robust and enduring manner. It was like Afghanistan Part II, where we fought for a corrupt and incompetent regime led by an Indian educated, English speaking scion of an expatriated narco family who enjoyed almost no support from the citizenry.
This upholds my thesis that even when the lessons are clear, we frequently ignore them. We are (I suppose) lucky to be such a rich nation that we can wage hopeless, unwinnable wars that cost billions upon billions of dollars (to say nothing of American lives). A nation with greater monetary and resource scarcity might be more careful to read the Lesson Book and act upon it from time to time.
Those who lose (wars, battles, elections, games) frequently resort to “if only they/we had done this or that….” It is a song best sung alone at the bar, after midnight, and after a great many drinks. Nobody cares, but perhaps the barman will call you a cab.
March 30th, 2016 at 9:56 pm
In hindsight, I am against every war that we didn’t win!
March 31st, 2016 at 8:30 am
We lost Vietnam because it was a war that could not be won in any robust and enduring manner.
You ignorant, history rewriting twit. Go back to grade school, if you ever graduated from it, and read up on history. The conventional war was won, and then whole country was surrendered to the murderous Vietcong. Not that you care that millions of people had died in the process, to you it is just a price for getting your corrupt, inhuman, amoral ideals implemented. If we had not lost the political will, at worst, Vietnam would be as Korea is today. But of course, you would not be satisfied and would rather see South Koreans in bondage to the Norks, You are indeed a fetid, putrid waste of human flesh, eTASS.
March 31st, 2016 at 10:26 am
Emery, we fought the Vietnam War to prevent the atrocities of Communism from coming to all of south east Asia. We succeeded vis-a-vis Thailand and Malaysia, but failed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and the result of our failure was the deaths of millions, especially in Cambodia. Now Diem was no perfect man, but he was a long time politician from a prominent family. Who else were we to work with?
As JPA notes, a great deal of the “loss” was that our “betters” in journalism decided to portray huge Viet Cong losses like Tet as victories, and decided to ignore atrocities like those at the Hanoi Hilton. We then, chased out by the media and the left, decided not to support those who were left. At one company I worked for, fully 12% of employees were named Nguyen. No kidding. They didn’t come to Minnesota for the weather, but to avoid being killed.
March 31st, 2016 at 4:10 pm
The “lessons learned” are usually not learned, but ignored. But, many things that pose as “lessons learned” are not really lessons at all.
e.g. “We could have won in Vietnam if LBJ had not restricted bombing targets in the North”
April 1st, 2016 at 8:01 am
I think eTASS is getting more obtuse and incoherent by the moment. I did not think it was possible considering the depth of ignorance he has dug for himself, yet here is more proof.
April 2nd, 2016 at 6:03 am
Real world alliances are not built upon nicely matching shared interests among many players. They are built, delicately, upon those tiny bits of the Venn diagram where small aspects of interests among the many players overlap.
The sum of the space in the diagram occupied by non-shared interests is always far larger than the overlap. Add to this the dynamic nature of interests. The Venn diagram is not a set of static overlapping circles, It is a set of ever-changing, ever moving circles where today’s overlap is tomorrows empty space. The worst thing a strategist can do under these circumstances is to conceive of an alliance in terms of “friends” or “the good players”.
“Here today and gone tomorrow” should be the Realist’s watchword in strategic alliance.